11 Oscar contenders with the most to gain at this year's Cannes Film Festival

Yahoo

12-05-2025

Oscar season is ready to start.
The 2025 Cannes Film Festival kicks off on Tuesday with a lineup that includes new movies from Wes Anderson, Ari Aster, Richard Linklater, Spike Lee, Lynne Ramsay, and more of the world's top auteurs.
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In many ways, the Cannes Film Festival is more important than ever for the awards race. Over the last five years, multiple movies that premiered on the French Riviera have gone on to receive Best Picture nominations at the Academy Awards, including Oscar winners Parasite and Anora, and nominees Top Gun: Maverick, Triangle of Sadness, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Substance, and Emilia Pérez. With the 2025 lineup loaded with some highly anticipated titles, it would be considered an upset if at least one or two of the following movies failed to secure eventual Oscar bids in the top categories.
Ahead of the Cannes Film Festival, here are the 11 projects with the most to gain during the festival this year.
Categories to watch: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor
Wes Anderson is back — and back at Cannes. The now Oscar-winning filmmaker returns to the French Riviera with The Phoenician Scheme, his fourth Cannes in-competition premiere following Moonrise Kingdom, The French Dispatch, and Asteroid City. Set for release later this month following its Cannes bow, The Phoenician Scheme focuses on one of the wealthiest men in the world (Benicio del Toro), his estranged daughter (Mia Threapleton, daughter of Kate Winslet), and her tutor (Michael Cera). It features a murderer's row of talent in the cast, including several Anderson vets like Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Bryan Cranston, and Benedict Cumberbatch. The early buzz on the new movie is strong, with at least one suggestion that it might be Anderson's best live-action feature since The Grand Budapest Hotel, notably the only Anderson movie to receive Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director.
Categories to watch: Best Director, Best Actor
The Academy has never nominated Ari Aster, but the buzzy new movie Eddington might be his ticket to the Dolby Theatre. The A24 release will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival before hitting theaters in July. It has the kind of all-star cast and buzzy premise that could ingratiate itself with award voters. Billed as a contemporary Western, Eddington is set in May 2020, and focuses on a 'standoff between a small-town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and mayor (Pedro Pascal) that sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor in Eddington, New Mexico.' Austin Butler and Emma Stone are co-stars in the movie.
Category to watch: Best Director
In 2021, Julia Ducournau won the Palme d'Or with her body-horror feature Titane. So, based on history alone, consider her follow-up Alpha as a top contender for the top prize. Alpha focuses on a troubled teen girl who is ostracized at school because her classmates suspect she's been infected with a new disease. The Hollywood Reporter described Alpha as a 'shocker,' so don't expect Ducournau to suddenly become an Academy favorite, especially after the polarized response to Titane. However, as proven last year with The Substance, Oscar voters have become more comfortable with outre genre pictures, so Ducournau could compete for a Best Director bid if the movie hits with critics and Cannes attendees..
Categories to watch: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor
Expectations are high for The History of Sound, the new movie from Living filmmaker Oliver Hermanus. The project, which Mubi will distribute to theaters later this year, pairs rising stars Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor as two folk singers in the early 1900s who fall in love with each other. 'The thing that I'm most proud about,' Mescal told Vanity Fair about the project, 'is that the feeling I had when I read the script for the first time is what I got when I saw the film for the first time.'
Category to watch: Best Actress
Scarlett Johansson's directorial debut is about a 90-year-old Florida woman (June Squibb) who begins an unlikely friendship with a New York teenager. Sony Pictures Classics will release the movie in theaters following it's Cannes premiere in the Un Certain Regard section of the festival, and the studio's track record with landing Oscar nominations for its actors (including recent nominees like Fernanda Torres, Bill Nighy, Penélope Cruz, and Antonio Banderas) can't be ignored. That Johansson and Squibb have already soft-launched Squibb's Oscar campaign as presenters during the Oscars this year probably only adds to this film's potential awards bona fides.
Categories to watch: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor
Spike Lee has a history with the Cannes Film Festival that dates back to his debut movie She's Gotta Have It, and he made history in 2021 as the first Black jury head at the prestigious event. The Oscar-winning filmmaker returns to screens this year with Highest 2 Lowest, his first movie since Da 5 Bloods in 2020 and his long-awaited reunion with Denzel Washington. Akira Kurosawa's High and Low inspires the film, which is the first collaboration between Lee and Washington since 2006's Inside Man and their fifth overall (Mo' Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game, and Inside Man). Expectations are high(est) for this one, and Lee's movie already has one fan according to the filmmaker. He showed Scorsese Highest 2 Lowest in January and posted on Instagram that the legendary director 'gushed' about the work.
Categories to watch: Best Director, Best Cinematography
Richard Linklater hasn't had much luck with the Academy since Boyhood. However, Nouvelle Vague could be his return ticket. The new film is based on the making of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, with Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg. It has no distribution yet, but Hollywood's documented fascination with projects about itself, not to mention a fondness for black-and-white movies in the Best Cinematography category, has it well-positioned to become a contender if it ends up on the 2025 calendar.
Category to watch: Best Picture
The last time Tom Cruise debuted one of his summer blockbusters at the Cannes Film Festival was Top Gun: Maverick, a future six-time Oscar nominee, including Best Picture. So while the Mission: Impossible franchise has not historically been an Academy favorite (the series has only received two bids through seven films, both for 2023's Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning), strong reviews out of Cannes may help legitimize the popcorn movie for those more discerning Academy members.
Categories to watch: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress
Acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Ramsay has premiered every single one of her feature films at the Cannes Film Festival, and that trend continues this year with Die, My Love. Even without distribution, this is one of 2025's buzziest potential awards contenders, with Ramsay adapting the 2017 novel of the same name by Ariana Harwicz. Often described as a horror-comedy, Die, My Love stars Best Actress winner Jennifer Lawrence (who also produced) as a new mother in the countryside who becomes engulfed in postpartum depression. Robert Pattinson stars as her husband with Lakeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek, and Nick Nolte also in the cast. Martin Scorsese is one of the producers alongside Lawrence. Comparisons have already been made to Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby, and while horror-adjacent projects have historically not been the Academy's speed, that has changed. This year, The Substance, which premiered at Cannes and used horror tropes to interrogate how culture views women, received five nominations, including Best Picture.
Categories to watch: Best Director, Best Actor
Kelly Reichardt isn't necessarily associated with crime movies, but that's the general genre of The Mastermind, which focuses on an art heist – but one likely filtered through Reichardt's extremely indie and minimalist sensibilities. For her latest project, the acclaimed veteran has assembled a cast that will make Film Twitter lose its collective mind: Josh O'Connor, Alana Haim, and John Magaro. The Mastermind does not yet have distribution, but a strong response at Cannes will likely quickly change that.
Categories to watch: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor
If any movie on this list has the chance to become the next Anora, look no further than Sentimental Value. The Neon release is 'a portrait of a family in Oslo, the house they've lived in for generations, and of how the past has a way of resurfacing in unexpected ways,' and comes from filmmaker Joachim Trier. The Norwegian writer-director was last at the Cannes Film Festival with 2021's The Worst Person in the World, which won star Renate Reinsve Best Actress honors from the Cannes jury and eventually landed nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature. Reinsve stars in this new project alongside Stellan Skarsgård, Elle Fanning, and Cory Michael Smith.
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