Mikey Madison in a scene from Sean Baker’s Anora. She plays a sex worker who marries a Russian oligarch.
Mikey Madison in a scene from Sean Baker’s Anora. She plays a sex worker who marries a Russian oligarch.
Films backed by the studio Neon have won Cannes and gone on to Oscar nominations regularly in the last few years. That’s one reason to keep an eye on Anora.
Last year’s Cannes Film Festival was practically a one-stop shop for Oscar voters, premiering three major films — Anatomy ofa Fall, The Zone of Interest and Killers of the Flower Moon — that would go on to be nominated for best picture.
Does this year’s crop of Cannes movies have the same juice?
At the 77th edition of the festival, which concluded Saturday, Sean Baker’s Anora was named the winner of the prestigious Palme d’Or. Three of the last four Palme winners went on to receive a best-picture nomination — Anatomy of a Fall, Triangle of Sadness and Parasite — and all of them, like Anora, were distributed by the studio Neon. That’s an astonishing streak that positions Anora in the best way possible, lending a veneer of prestige to Baker’s raucous comedy about a Brooklyn stripper who marries into Russian wealth.
In 2018, Baker’s The Florida Project came awfully close to a best-picture nomination. If voters are more amenable to his indie sensibility this time around, expect robust campaigns for lead Mikey Madison and for Baker’s script and direction. More of a long shot but equally worthy is supporting actor Mark Eydelshteyn as the live-wire heir our title character weds: Although Oscar voters rarely reward young men, this kid’s a total find, like a Russian Timothée Chalamet.
Zoe Saldaña shared the best actress award at Cannes with three other female co-stars of Emilia Pérez, which is so much more than a musical.
In a surprise move, the Cannes jury split the best actress award four ways, honouring the main female cast of the talked-about musical Emilia Pérez. That means ensemble member Selena Gomez now has a Cannes trophy that has eluded the likes of Marion Cotillard, though I suspect more fruitful Oscar campaigns would be waged on behalf of leading lady Zoe Saldaña, who’s never had a more robust role, and especially Karla Sofía Gascón, who could become the first trans actress to be nominated for an Oscar. (The fourth winner was Adriana Paz.)
Netflix has picked up Emilia Pérez and will certainly give it a significant awards push, though the streamer’s stewardship could have drawbacks. It’s true that this is a hard-to-classify film — equal parts crime drama, trans empowerment narrative and full-blown movie musical — which would have made it a difficult theatrical sell. But some of its more outrageous moments are certain to be memed and mocked as soon as it makes its streaming debut, which could hobble the film’s reputation.
The best actor award at Cannes went to Jesse Plemons in Kinds of Kindness, who adds invaluable humanity to the cracked Yorgos Lanthimos film, though its anthology nature — Plemons plays different roles in each of the movie’s three stories — makes Kinds of Kindness an unlikely Oscar prospect. And though the talked-about horror film The Substance won a screenplay trophy at Cannes, it’s a lot more likely to score awards attention for Demi Moore’s lead performance as an actress driven to extreme lengths as she ages.
Jesse Plemons (centre), who won the best actor award for the Yorgos Lanthimos anthology Kinds of Kindness.
Two films that failed to win a prize or a distributor at Cannes are nevertheless hoping to mount a comeback bid this awards season. The Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice features Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn in a juicy supporting performance that a studio could push if it were willing to deal with the former president’s legal threats against the film. And though there will be critics and Oscar voters who admire the big swing of Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed Megalopolis, I don’t expect much traction for it outside of categories like costumes and production design.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which debuted out of competition in Cannes and opened weakly in theatres, is another likely tech player: It ought to score many of the same below-the-line nominations that its predecessor, Mad Max: Fury Road, got in 2016, though picture and director nods aren’t going to happen this time.
Cannes often premieres many of the eventual international-film nominees, but this year’s biggest contender comes with a few caveats. There is no way Iran would select Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig as its official submission for the Oscar, since Rasoulof fled Iran to avoid an eight-year prison sentence for making movies that criticize that country’s authoritarian government.
Neon knows how to navigate an Oscar bid for a film that won’t be submitted for best international feature — when France snubbed Anatomy of a Fall last year, Neon was undeterred — though it would have helped if Sacred Fig had taken the Palme. But this is still a very accessible film for voters who will be moved by Rasoulof’s own story.
