Though most Oscar contenders don't debut until the later this year, last year's Cannes Film Festival launched several films that became awards-season players, including Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman and Pawel Pawlikowski's Cold War. With this year's edition of Cannes all sewn up last weekend, which films should Oscar-watchers look out for?
The biggest contender from the festival has got to be Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt as faded showbiz figures navigating 1960s Hollywood. For its spot-on re-creation of that era, Oscar nominations in production and costume design are almost assured, and the film has a good shot in cinematography as well. The biggest question is how Sony will handle DiCaprio and Pitt, who are two of the biggest stars in the industry and just about evenly split in terms of screen time.
Studios rarely run two lead performances in the same category, so Sony may try to classify Pitt as supporting. DiCaprio's washed-up actor has the biggest emotional arc, and Pitt's stuntman character is in his employ and thus technically subordinate to him. It would be bunk, but after Mahershala Ali won a supporting-actor trophy just months ago for what was essentially a co-lead performance, the gambit would at least give Pitt a strong shot at his first acting trophy.
In the supporting-actress category, Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate has an affecting second-act scene in which she sneaks into a theatre to watch herself on the big screen. But the character is more of a symbolic presence than a really fleshed-out role and Robbie doesn't speak her first line until at least an hour into the movie. She'll need to hope that Oscar voters respond so strongly to Tarantino's film that it cracks the picture, director and screenplay categories, a show of force that would help sweep her in.
Actors from other Cannes films with a shot at being nominated include Willem Dafoe, who chews scenery with aplomb as an old-timey seaman in The Lighthouse, and Taron Egerton, who delivers a spirited turn as Elton John in Rocketman but may be hamstrung by Rami Malek's recent, too-similar Oscar win for playing Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody.