A Brief History of Oscar and the Cannes Film Festival and Who Might Win This Year

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The 70th Cannes Film Festival kicks off this week (Thursday, to be exact) but did you know that only Cannes Palme d’Or winner has ever won the Best Picture Oscar? 1955’s Marty is still the only Best Picture Oscar winner to first strike gold at Cannes. Incidentally, 1955 was the first year of the designation of the Palme d’Or as the festival’s highest prize.

Although the Palme d’Or name wasn’t officially introduced until 1955, the Cannes Film Festival has always given out a top honor, they simply just used a different name. From 1939-1954 it was called the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film (Grand Prize of the International Film Festival), was changed to the Palme d’Dor (Golden Palm) from 1955-1963, then back to Grand Prix du Festival International du Film from 1964-1974 and then back yet again to the Palme d’Or in 1975 where it has remained ever since. The festival also a Grand Prize and a Jury Prize (you can sometimes read into that as 2nd and 3rd place) as well as acting and screenplay awards. A single film is not allowed to be awarded more than two prizes and if you win the Palme it can be a film’s only win. This change happened after 1991’s Barton Fink (from the Coen Brothers) won the Palme, Director and Actor prizes.

2012’s Amour is the most recent Palme winner to be Best Picture nominated at the Oscars and interestingly enough its director, Michael Haneke, is one of only eight multiple Palme winners (well, nine since the Dardenne brothers are two people). Haneke could break that record if Happy End wins this year. You’d have to jump back 10 years to 2002’s The Pianist for the last Best Picture nominee and that film got close, winning the Best Director, Actor and Adapted Screenplay Oscars. Going back once more, 1994’s Pulp Fiction landed a Palme win and Best Picture nomination, winning the Original Screenplay Oscar. The 90s actually saw a big cross-section of Palme winners and Best Picture nominees that also included 1996’s Secrets & Lies and 1993’s The Piano.

So, knowing that, is it ‘good’ to root for a film to win the Palme or should you hold out for a lesser prize and put your chips in for it at the Oscars?

This year’s list of In Competition films does seem to have a few that I think could be in the running for Oscar nominations. The biggest is Wonderstruck from Todd Haynes and starring Julianne Moore, Millicent Simmonds, Michelle Williams and Oakes Fegley. At the moment, the Gold Rush Gang has the film #1 in their Best Picture predictions and Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions are planning a major awards campaign for the film, including a very awards-friendly October 20th release date. Two Haynes films have been up for the Palme in the past; Carol in 2015 (which was Best Picture snubbed) and Velvet Goldmine in 1998. Each of those films did win prizes at the festival, just not the big one. Rooney Mara tied for Best Actress, which meant the film couldn’t win the Palme. There could be a sense of ‘this is the time’ to reward Haynes.

As mentioned above, Michael Haneke returns to the Cannes Film Festival with Happy End, his seventh In Competition film. He won in 2012 for Amour and in 2009 for The White Ribbon. The film stars Oscar nominee Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant and is a drama about a family set in Calais with the European refugee crisis as the backdrop. It’s set for release this fall from Sony Pictures Classics. A win for Haneke is not out of the question unless we see a third Best Actress win for Huppert or a second for Trintignant (he won back in 1969 for Z).

Yorgos Lanthimos, who was just Oscar-nominated this year in Original Screenplay for The Lobster, returns to the festival with The Killing of a Sacred Deer. His last two efforts, The Lobster and Dogtooth, both came away with Cannes wins so all eyes will be on this Colin Farrell/Nicole Kidman thriller about a teenager’s attempts to bring a brilliant surgeon into his dysfunctional family. While it seems that Lanthimos’s films are probably too dark for Oscar’s top prize, he certainly has more visibility now with the Academy. The film is being distributed by A24 (this year’s Best Picture winning studio for Moonlight) and they’ve given it is killer November release date so it could be a major contender.

Nicole Kidman’s other film in competition, Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, could be a player. It’s her second in competition film, the first being her take on Marie Antoinette. While that film won the Cinema Prize of the French National Education System, it was controversial and booed by many French critics during the press screening. This could mark a big comeback for the Oscar winner. The film comes out on June 23rd from Focus Features. For more on my Oscar thoughts for the film go here.

Netflix has caused quite a stir this year, finding itself with two in competition films but also in hot water with French movie theaters about the streaming company’s 36-month release window. So controversial was this that the festival recently announced no film would be considered for competition without an official French release. So what does that mean for Bong Joon-ho’s Okja and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories? Although it’s a jury (led by Pedro Almodovar and featuring Jessica Chastain, Maren Ade and Park Chan-wook) I can only imagine the uproar if one of these films were to win the Palme. From my perspective, only Baumbach’s film seems to have any possible Oscar traction but it’s early so far only his The Squid and the Whale have earned him any Oscar attention (a nomination for Original Screenplay).

What other films in this year’s competition do you think have a chance to be only the second film ever to win both Cannes and Oscar’s top prize?

Here’s the full list of Cannes Film Festival top prize winners from 1939-2016 (via Wikipedia) plus multiple Palme winners.

Grand Prix du Festival International du Film (1939–54)

• Note: The Palme d’Or for Union Pacific was awarded in retrospect at the 2002 festival. The festival’s debut was to take place in 1939, but it was cancelled due to World War II. The organisers of the 2002 festival presented part of the original 1939 selection to a professional jury of six members. The films were: Goodbye Mr. Chips, La Piste du Nord, Lenin in 1918, The Four Feathers, The Wizard of Oz, Union Pacific, and Boefje.

Palme d’Or (1955–63)

Grand Prix du Festival International du Film (1964–74)

Palme d’Or (1975–present)

* _{denotes first win}
§ _{denotes unanimous win}

Multiple award winners

• Alf Sjöberg (1946, 1951)
• Francis Ford Coppola (1974, 1979)
• Bille August (1988, 1992)
• Emir Kusturica (1985, 1995)
• Shohei Imamura (1983, 1997)
• Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (1999, 2005)
• Michael Haneke (2009, 2012)
• Ken Loach (2006, 2016)