Hamnet, Chloé Zhao's drama about William Shakespeare's marriage and the death of his 11-year-old son, won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday, putting it on an enviable track to Academy Awards contention.

For those in the know, especially those with an Oscars betting pool, TIFF has quite a desirable feather in its cap. Ostensibly, its top prize is among the most reliable predictors for best picture nominees at the Oscars — so much so that the festival itself prides itself as an "Oscars bellwether" on its own website.

But how earned is that reputation, really? Well, there's a reason studios and audiences should care about TIFF's PCA winner — not to mention the festival itself, whose very future might depend on its continued ability to pick Academy Awards contenders.

For Oscar-obsessives and TIFF tastemakers alike, we crunched the numbers: here's your answer.

Established shortly after the festival came into being in 1976, the PCA wasn't initially thought of as a best-picture prognosticator — though the second winner, Best Boy, did go on to win best documentary at the Oscars.

But it was just two years later that everything changed. That's when British sports film Chariots of Fire caught Toronto audiences' attention; a foreign film and feature debut by a then-unknown director, Chariots of Fire was more or less ignored at Cannes and ineligible for best picture at the Golden Globes.

That made it an Oscars dark horse all through the awards season, going into the 1982 Academy Awards the clear second fiddle to Warren Beatty's political epic frontrunner Reds. Chariots' eventual win there is often pointed to as among the biggest upsets in the ceremony's history — though the populist, tearjerker appeal the movie offered was first discovered and cemented at TIFF, the "people's festival."

1983's PCA winner The Big Chill and 1984's Places in the Heart then helped calcify the "Oscars bellwether" connection: both films went on to earn best picture nominations. 1985's PCA champion The Official Story was awarded best foreign language film the following year, and TIFF's 1986 pick The Decline of the American Empire — according to the festival, one of only four Canadian films to win — was nominated in the same category.

But what followed was decades of close calls and a doubtful connection. Between 1985 and 2005 only a handful of PCA winners were nominated for best picture (Shine, Life is Beautiful, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and 2000's best picture winner American Beauty).

Shortly after is when things truly began to change. A stunning run of success began in 2008, when Slumdog Millionaire was so universally beloved by festival-goers it started annoying critics. Speaking to radio show Chatter that Matters, TIFF head Cameron Bailey explained that that film was initially slated for a straight-to-DVD release — an "orphan" of a movie that its studio believed was far too niche for wide audiences.

"How wrong they were," he said; the movie ended up winning eight Oscars, including best picture. "Everybody wanted to see Slumdog Millionaire. But you only know that when you show it to an audience en masse."

From there to 2023 stretched a near-unbroken string of best picture contenders: including festival standouts like Precious, Room and Green Book. Only one PCA winner (2011's Where Do We Go Now?) broke the streak. The following year, TIFF winner Silver Linings Playbook was nominated for best picture. The year after, 12 Years a Slave became the fifth PCA honouree to win best picture at the Oscars.