What we can learn about the 2026 Oscars from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival
What we can learn about the 2026 Oscars from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival
The 2025 Cannes Film Festival might be far removed from the 2026 Academy Awards... far, far removed.
However, as early as it is to think about what the 2026 Oscars will look like, Cannes has become a pretty vital bellwether for where the eventual Oscar season goes.
The 2024 Palme d'Or winner Anora eventually won Best Picture this past March after such a commanding Cannes debut, and the same went for 2019's Parasite. The only film to win the Palme d'Or since Parasite to miss the Best Picture field was 2021's Titane, with 2022's Triangle of Sadness and 2023's Anatomy of a Fall both making it to the nomination field.
Sure, you could attribute that to the fact that all of those films came from the same distributor in NEON, but you could also underscore the importance of what Cannes means to the more international Academy voting body.
That means 2025 Palme d'Or winner It Was Just an Accident from beloved Iranian New Wave auteur Jafar Panahi should be considered a real contender for Best Picture, as Panahi's incredibly brave, storied career finally culminating in real Oscar attention would be yet another awesome wave of international influence on the Academy's decisions.
Joachim Trier's Grand Prix-winning Sentimental Value also seems like a pretty clear Oscar contender, as Trier's 2021 film The Worst Person in the World made it into the Best Original Screenplay field and his new film perhaps got the strongest cumulative reviews of any Cannes competition title.
A family drama set against the world of filmmaking that stars Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Elle Fanning and Cory Michael Smith sounds right up the new Academy's alley, so expect a lot from that one down the road.
NEON has both, and the distributor has been a real force in the Oscar campaign cycle since 2017's I, Tonya. Both should be considered important topics of discussion going into next year's Academy Awards.
Other Cannes films to watch in 2025 based on the buzz: Lynne Ramsay's Die, My Love, which could launch Jennifer Lawrence into the Best Actress race, Richard Linklater's French New Wave tribute Nouvelle Vague about the making of Breathless, Kleber Mendonça Filho's Brazilian political thriller The Secret Agent (particularly for Cannes Best Actor winner Wagner Moura), Mascha Schilinski's German drama Sound of Falling and Spike Lee's Akira Kurosawa reimagining Highest 2 Lowest with Denzel Washington.
With Ryan Coogler's massive horror hit Sinners the only real Oscar contender to emerge from the 2025 film calendar year so far, look to France to help further fill out the very unfinished puzzle of how the 2026 Oscars might shape up next winter.
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