As Cannes Film Festival closes, which are the acclaimed films from this year’s crop that could be heading for Academy Award nominations?
If you want to know which films are going to be nominated for Oscars, it’s worth looking at what premiered at the Cannes Film Festival the previous May. Last year’s Cannes batch included Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent. The year before, there was The Substance, Emilia Pérez and Anora. Now that another Cannes has drawn to a close, it could be said that awards season has already begun. Here are the films most likely to become Oscar contenders.
1. Fjord
Fjord was the winner of Cannes’ top prize, the Palme d’Or, despite receiving what can be politely described as mixed reviews. But even though it wasn’t a critics’ darling, Cristian Mungiu’s enthralling drama revolves around the hottest of hot topics. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve star as an evangelical couple who move from Romania to Norway, and are accused of child abuse because they slap their children to discipline them. The film becomes a debate between Christianity and secularism, conservative tradition and progressive liberalism. It’s certain to get Academy members talking – and voting.
2. Club Kid
There were hardly any American films at Cannes this year, but one of them was a clear festival highlight. Written and directed by its star, Jordan Firstman (I Love LA), Club Kid tells the riotous story of a party animal whose life is upended when he is presented with the 10-year-old son (Reggie Absolom) he never knew he’d fathered. The film has been called this year’s answer to Anora, and with good reason. Not only does it have the same producer, Alex Coco, it’s a rollicking, New York-set indie comedy that bursts with raunchiness and caustic wit, but which is big-hearted, too. It won’t win the best picture Oscar, as Anora did, but it might be in the running.
3. La Bola Negra / The Black Ball
With its sweeping scale and lavish period detail, wrenching emotion and literary cleverness, this Spanish saga ticks numerous Oscar boxes. Directed by Javier Calvi and Javier Ambrossi (aka Los Javis), La Bola Negra cuts between three different narratives, two in the 1930s and one in 2017, as it examines how gay relationships have been erased from history in Spain. The wartime scenes are reminiscent of The English Patient and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and the memorable cameos by Penélope Cruz (as a music-hall bombshell) and Glenn Close (as a pioneering academic) will ensure that Hollywood takes notice.
4. Soudain / All of a Sudden
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021) won the best international feature film Oscar in 2022, and it was nominated for best picture. Hamaguchi’s deeply humane and tender new drama could do almost as well. Most of it is set in Paris, where Virginia Efira, the dedicated director of a nursing home, meets Tao Okamoto, a Japanese playwright who has terminal cancer. All of a Sudden is three-and-a-quarter hours long, including a half-hour lecture on the demographic effects of capitalism, so it’s a challenging prospect. But viewers who will stick with it will be sobbing by the end.
5. The Man I Love
Rami Malek hasn’t given awards voters much to focus on since he won his Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody in 2019, but The Man I Love is a welcome showcase for his talents. In fact, it has a slight resemblance to Bohemian Rhapsody, in that Malek plays a struttingly charismatic gay singer who has Aids, but his character, Jimmy George, is a long way from being a stadium-conquering superstar. In Ira Sachs’ soulful indie drama, Jimmy is part of a group of friends putting on an off-Broadway show in late 1980s New York. Audiences will be choked up by his vulnerability, as his supportive partner (Tom Sturridge) and loving sister (Rebecca Hall) realise that this could be his final moment in the spotlight.
6. Notre Salut / A Man of His Time
Emmanuel Marre’s superbly shrewd drama is a biopic of his own great grandfather, Henri Marre (Swann Arlaut). After German forces conquer France in World War Two, the ambitious Henri keeps knocking on doors until he gets a bureaucratic job in Marshall Pétain’s Vichy regime. He sees himself as a patriot who can rebuild France with his modern management theories. The fact that he is collaborating with the Nazis and helping to send Jewish citizens to their deaths doesn’t seem to interest him. Naturalistic performances, intimate camerawork and bursts of 1980s music all help to make the point that the most abhorrent dictatorships can be propped up by the most ordinary people.
7. El ser querido / The Beloved
The Academy has a soft spot for films about film-making, and The Beloved is one of the finest examples of that particular sub-genre. Javier Bardem is on career-best form as a prestigious director who hires his own daughter (Victoria Luengo) to star in his historical epic, Desert. She is grateful for the opportunity, but once they’re shooting on location, she learns that he is just as short-tempered with her as he is with the rest of the cast. There are echoes of Sentimental Value in the father-daughter dynamic, but Bardem’s fiery, unapologetic director is a unique and Oscar-worthy creation.
8. Moulin
László Nemes is known for Son of Saul, winner of the best foreign language film in 2016. And the Hungarian writer-director’s new film is another gruelling, atmospheric chronicle of World War Two. It’s based on the true story of Jean Moulin (Gille Lelouche), a French Resistance leader who is arrested in Lyon and interrogated by a loathsome Gestapo commander, Klaus Barbie (Lars Eidinger). With two stunning central performances, Moulin is a noirish espionage thriller, a sombre study of pure evil, and a quietly powerful tribute to remarkable heroism. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s an essential one.
9. Minotaur
Two of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s previous films have been Oscar-nominated, but neither of them was as gripping or as accessible as Minotaur. A remake of Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife (1969), which has already been remade in the US as Unfaithful (2002), it’s a Hitchcockian crime thriller about a businessman (Dmitriy Mazurov) who discovers that his wife (Iris Lebedeva) is having an affair. And on that level, it’s a triumph: tense, richly characterised, and deliciously dark. But Zvyagintsev adds a sharp political element by shifting the story to a Russian city. The husband in his film is an oligarch who enjoys a life of luxury, while his employees are sent to fight in Ukraine.
Credit: BBC
