Beautiful day in the Oscarhood: Academy Award hopes of TIFF

The Toronto film festival features several movies that could be in the discussion for this year's top movie awards, Jay Stone writes By Jay Stone   TORONTO — The Toronto film festival is known as a launching pad for Oscar movies. Here are a few of the early contenders.   A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The re-evaluation of Fred Rogers — from figure of fun in a thousand parodies of his children’s program to American hero in a famous Esquire magazine article to secular sainthood in the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? — continues in this movie that’s actually based on that Esquire article. Tom Junod, an investigative journalist, was assigned in 1998 to do a short profile of Rogers (Tom Hanks) and emerged with a 10,000-word cover story that painted him as an unexpected wise man, a life coach whose simple wisdom could heal fractures of the heart. It was as if Being There had come to life as a puppet show for children.   In this ...