How Cannes Became the Ultimate Oscars Incubator

When Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winning, small-budget, indie-darling-that-could, Anora, scooped the best-picture Oscar, many awards-season prognosticators pointed to Parasite, Bong Joon Ho’s razor-sharp South Korean satire, which had also ridden the wave from Cannes to the Academy Awards some five years prior. With these two examples in mind, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was always the way—of course the film garlanded at the world’s most prestigious film festival would go on to collect the most golden statuettes, right? Well, that certainly seems to be the case now—but it wasn’t for much of the 20th century.

Most of the earliest best-picture Oscars, across the ’20s, ’30s and early ’40s, were handed to grand, sprawling American productions—Gone with the Wind, Casablanca—while the first Cannes Film Festival, held in 1946, had a distinctly international flavor, with French, Italian, Indian, Mexican, Swiss, Swedish, and Danish productions presented alongside British and American ones. Of the 11 films jointly selected to win the Grand Prix, the precursor to the Palme, that year, one, Billy Wilder’s agonizing The Lost Weekend, did, in fact, go on to win the Academy Award for best picture—but that feat wouldn’t be repeated for another decade.

In the ensuing years, a Hollywood golden age, the likes of All About Eve, An American in Paris, From Here to Eternity, and On the Waterfront secured best-picture Oscars—and although those first three all screened at Cannes, the festival’s top prizes went to other, often non-English language releases. That changed with Delbert Mann’s Marty in 1955, the first film to officially win the newly renamed Palme d’Or and then snag four Oscars including best picture, but after that, this one-two punch wouldn’t be achieved by another film for—wait for it—more than six decades.

In a way, it made perfect sense: the Academy’s taste skewed more mainstream and, at times, conservative, while Cannes’s purview was global and its vision for the future of cinema more radical and boundary-pushing. While best-picture Oscars were being handed out to West Side Story, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Oliver!, the Palme went to Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up.

And Cannes was embracing American cinema, too—just a different side of it from the one the Academy found most palatable. The festival gave Martin Scorsese its top prize for Taxi Driver, but he lost best picture to Rocky; Francis Ford Coppola famously snagged the Palme for Apocalypse Now but the best-picture award that year went to Kramer vs. Kramer; Quentin Tarantino was handed the Palme for Pulp Fiction but Forrest Gump ultimately won best picture that time around; and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life won the Palme while The Artist dominated at the Oscars.

It was around this time that the Academy was beginning to shift—in 2015, #OscarsSoWhite and the fury it prompted inspired a great deal of soul-searching, and led to the organisation taking steps to diversify its membership and make it significantly more international. Soon, the films that were winning best picture—Barry Jenkins’s hallucinatory Moonlight, Guillermo del Toro’s surreal The Shape of Water—though they’d premiered at Telluride and Venice, respectively, began to feel more like Cannes films: experimental, artful and in defiance of convention.

Then came Parasite. It wasn’t so much a shock that Alejandro González Iñárritu’s jury named it the festival’s top film—it’s exactly the sort of ingenious release which usually wins this prize—but it was remarkable that it was able to carry that early momentum all the way to the Oscars, and defeat Scorsese’s The Irishman, Todd Phillips’s Joker, Sam Mendes’s 1917, and Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to become the first non-English language best-picture winner in history.

It sparked a new era and appetite for international fare across the US and UK, as well as at the Oscars, and Cannes, the home of the world’s best international cinema, would, naturally, have a significant part to play in this new world order. The 2021 festival, the first post-pandemic edition to go ahead after Parasite’s victory, featured future best-international-film Oscar winner and best-picture nominee Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s intimate epic, plus Joachim Trier’s glorious The Worst Person in the World, which received two Academy Award nominations.

In 2022, Lukas Dhont’s Close, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick, and Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness all went from Cannes premieres to Oscar nominations, including best-picture nods for those last three. And in 2023, Palme recipient Justine Triet took Anatomy of a Fall from the Croisette to the Dolby Theatre, which she left with a best original screenplay Oscar and five nominations, including best picture and best director. Meanwhile, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which took the second-place Grand Prix, also received best picture and best director nods, and won best international film, and Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Todd Haynes’s May December, Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, and Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters were all nominated, too.

It all seemed to come to a head this past year: alongside Anora’s triumph, its fellow Cannes hits, Coralie Fargeat’s best-screenplay-prize-winning The Substance and Jacques Audiard’s third-place Jury Prize-winning Emilia Pérez, secured best-picture nominations and took home other statuettes, too; Gints Zilbalodis’s Latvian crowdpleaser, Flow, was named best animated feature; and Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle, and Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice were also in contention for Oscars.

It should, in all likelihood, be no different this year. Among the releases heading to the Riviera this time around are past Palme winner Julia Ducournau’s thriller Alpha; Lynne Ramsay’s Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson-led Die My Love; Ari Aster’s pandemic-set Eddington with Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, and Austin Butler; Oliver Hermanus’s period romance The History of Sound, centered on Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor; Wes Anderson’s predictably star-packed The Phoenician Scheme; Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World follow-up Sentimental Value; and Spike Lee’s reunion with Denzel Washington, Highest 2 Lowest. Expect to see many, if not all of them, ruling the awards circuit come autumn.

This state of affairs is all the more staggering because it’s not Cannes which has bent over backwards to court Hollywood or establish itself as an Oscars-generating machine—in truth, it has always made space for glitz and glamour, but without compromising on its commitment to great, challenging, bonkers, and wonderfully divisive cinema. Even its position in the film calendar—in the spring, long before the trifecta of Venice, Telluride, and Toronto, and more than nine months before the next Oscars ceremony—is inconvenient for awards campaigners looking to keep their releases at the top of voters’ minds as they fill out their ballots. But still, with its eye for burgeoning new global talent and fearless forward-thinking, this festival has prompted the Academy itself, which is constantly expanding and becoming increasingly international, to edge ever closer to it.

History tells us that the Academy’s tastes are changeable, just as the votership is—blockbusters like Titanic, Gladiator, and The Lord of the Rings franchise dominated the late ’90s and early noughties, while quieter indie fare is more likely to succeed now—so, who knows how long Cannes and the Oscars might remain in this fortuitous alignment. While it does though, we’re all in for a treat.

This article was originally published on Vogue.com.