We know the Palme d’Or won’t be going to a woman. And the odds that the lone American in competition will take it home are slim, at best.
So when the Cannes Film Festival stages its awards gala on Sunday night, who’s going to take home the top prize?
Maybe it’ll be “Biutiful,” the grim Spanish/Mexican production that has divided critics. Or “Another Year,” the low-key British film about an elderly couple. Or “The Housemaid,” the sexy Korean film. Or “Certified Copy,” the austere, cerebral Iranian drama.
Or maybe the jury will cross us up, and unveil a winner that nobody was expecting.
The festival hasn’t officially ended – but heading into its closing weekend, almost every one of the 19 films in the main competition has already screened.
(The two that haven’t are “Tender Son: The Frankenstein Project,” and the expensive Russian production “Burnt by the Sun 2,” which was not well-received when it opened in its home country, and does not figure to be a factor in the competition.)
If you take stock in critics, the hard-to-please batch that contribute their verdicts to indieWIRE’s criticWIRE poll rank three films at the top of the class: Mike Leigh’s “Another Year,” Abbas Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy” and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Uncle Boomnee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.”
Or if it’s buzz you follow, then you’ll have to reluctantly bypass the five-and-a-half hour “Carlos,” because it screened out of competition, and go for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s “Biutiful,” or maybe “Another Year.”
But neither of those are very reliable ways to pick a winner at Cannes.
Cannes’ prizes, after all, are not easy to predict. The decisions are made not by the critics, and not by a large electorate with clearly defined tastes. Instead, decisions fall to a group of nine jurors.
This year, director Tim Burton is the jury president; the rest of the panel is Alberto Barbera, Kate Beckinsale, Emmanuel Carrere, Benicio del Toro, Alexandre Desplat, Victor Erice, Shekhar Kapur and Giovanna Mezzogiorno. (Jury photo by Ian Gavan/Getty Images.)
Burton is the only American; the rest of the group includes two jurors each from France and Italy, and one each from England, Puerto Rico, Spain and India.
Three are directors, three are actors, one is a composer, one a cinematographer, and one an author, screenwriter and director.
In the end, Sunday’s prizes will come down more to the likes, dislikes, passions and prejudices of Burton, Beckinsale, del Toro, Kapur, Desplat and their colleagues than to the length of standing ovations or the collected wisdom of the critics.
Still, it’s possible to look at the first 10 days of the festival, and see who emerged with some momentum and who didn’t.
Frontrunners:
Hanging on to top-dog status, if only by a thread, are Alejandro Gonzale Inarritu's “Biutiful,” which divided critics but was largely embraced by festivalgoers, and “Another Year” (right), which Sony Pictures Classics will distribute in the United States.
