There was time!

I can confirm this was also the case in my screening.

Sadly, this is the most beautiful poetry I've read this year.

That's all fine from a prescriptivist standpoint, but it's still worth pointing out that, in practice, "towards" slips by a substantial fraction of American editors.

Yes, though primarily a feature of British English. According to Google Ngrams, it was used with roughly 2.5 times the frequency of "toward" in British literature from 2008, while "toward" is used with roughly 2.5 times the frequency of "towards" in the same time period. It's unusual for American writers, but arguably…