The increased connection between the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Awards is a hot topic as the 78th festival arrives. You’ll find plenty about it elsewhere in TheWrap’s latest magazine issue, and with good reason: Last year’s festival premiered seven films that received a total of 30 nominations and won nine Oscars, including five for Palme d’Or and Best Picture winner “Anora.”
But let’s back up for a little history. The festival’s top prize was renamed the Palme d’Or in 1955, and its first winner under the new name was Delbert Mann’s romantic drama “Marty,” which went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture. That one-two punch wouldn’t happen again for another 64 years, until 2019’s “Parasite” did it, followed five years later by “Anora.”
Still, there’s always been some overlap between the two bodies, even though these are very different groups of voters. Cannes awards are chosen by a jury of (usually) nine professionals — largely French, largely male (at least in the past) and largely more concerned with artistry than profitability. Oscars are voted on by almost 10,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who are more than 70% American despite a campaign that brought in more international members over the past decade.
Until recently, it was tempting to think of Cannes as the place that rewards art-house fare over commercial films: Mikhail Kalatozov’s “The Cranes Are Flying” won the Palme the year that “Gigi” won Best Picture, Marcel Camus’ “Black Orpheus” the year of “Ben-Hur,” Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s “Padre Padrone” the year of “Annie Hall,” and a tie between Shōhei Imamura’s “The Eel” and Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry” the year the Academy flipped for “Titanic.”
That’s not to imply that “Titanic” or “Ben-Hur” or “Annie Hall” screened in Cannes those years, but it does suggest that the two groups’ priorities are starkly different. And yet there is synchronicity at times, too. There was the delicious symmetry of 1964, when both groups of voters went for musicals: The Cannes jury headed by Fritz Lang picked Jacques Demy’s sung-through romance “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” a gloriously French choice, while Oscar voters selected George Cukor’s “My Fair Lady,” the grand Hollywood adaptation of Lerner and Loewe’s stage musical.
A decade later, in 1974, Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” won the Palme d’Or and his “The Godfather Part II” won Best Picture; two decades after that, “Pulp Fiction” and “Forrest Gump” were inextricably linked as 1994’s biggest awards movies, with the former winning in Cannes and the latter winning in Hollywood.
This story first ran in the Cannes issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from that issue here.
