Three Cannes picks which might win Oscars

Tell everyone you’re excited about these upcoming films to seem cool, hot and in the know

Boozing and palm trees. The thinking man’s film festival. The sourdough to the Oscars’ Wonderbread. That’s right – the Cannes Film Festival is back. The world’s most storied convention of cineastes gathers again in approximately three weeks to anoint a new handful of cool directors and films you tell your parents they really ought to watch, knowing they never will.

I always think of Cannes as an alt-prestigious festival, traditionally a rare predictor of the Best Picture winner but vastly more important in the context of the expanded Academy voting body – all those freakish little Euro guys and gorgeous Carla Bruni-esque women now get to cast votes for oddball films where people have sex with cars or dowse their way to Etruscan burial hoards. It’s great!

Since Marty in 1955, only two films have managed to win both the Palme d’Or and Best Picture: Parasite in 2019, and Anora this February. I don’t know if any of the below are necessarily likely to recreate their success – I haven’t seen any of them – but there’s a good chance something here will at least end up on the list of nominees (last year’s breakout was The Substance). For one, American distributor Neon has bought all five of the most recent Palme d’Or winners (the two above, plus Titane, Triangle of Sadness and Anatomy of a Fall), and all of them except Titane made it onto the Best Picture list.

In any case, the increasingly blurred line between Cannes and the Oscars helps me in my crusade to prove European cinema is where all the true film-heads are at. There’s lots more to look out for, and not necessarily featuring actors, filmmakers or movies one would expect: Tom Cruise is making only his third appearance at the festival, courtesy of out-of-competition Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, while upcoming films from more trad auteurs Jim Jarmusch and Park Chan-wook are absent from the line-up at the time of writing.¹ Scarlett Johansson, Kristen Stewart and Harris Dickinson are all showing their directorial debuts.

There are just under three weeks to go before it kicks off on 13 May. From then onwards, if all goes well, reaction, rumour and buzz will abound. Here are three picks to look out for that are screening at the festival, either in or out of competition, to make it seem like you know what you’re talking about.

Eddington (dir. Ari Aster)

Might Eddington represent the first actually-good lockdown film? (Let us collectively banish the atrocity that was Netflix’s The Bubble from our hippocampi, please.) Ari Aster’s modern western follows a small town through the Covid-19 outbreak, with all the pursuant quacks, conspiracists and mask crusaders the pandemic seemed to help metastasize.

Aster has reportedly been trying to make this film since before Hereditary. Initially, Emma Stone and Christopher Abbott were attached to star, and I was prepared to jump two-footed into this film despite what happened last time they acted together; I rate both highly. Abbott later dropped out and was replaced by Elvis Presley Austin Butler, and I suddenly wished I had a third foot.

A teaser dropped a week and a half ago, giving us very brief glimpses of Eddington’s residents as they collectively unravel. A bearded Joaquin Phoenix as the town’s sheriff harps on about guns; Emma Stone as his wife does a bit to camera disavowing something he has said or done; Austin Butler presumably pushes some quackery on a crowd of lockdown sceptics (I’m projecting here, I know); Pedro Pascal, as the mayor, makes some sounds but says nothing, as mayors tend to do. The teaser seems to present Eddington as a horror film which, I dunno, perhaps – do we think it will actually be scary?² – but whatever the case, the whole situation looks suitably stressful and fraught. As indeed much of 2020 was.

Oh – and I love the poster.

Sentimental Value (dir. Joachim Trier)

Norwegian director Joachim Trier returns with Sentimental Value, described per Variety as an “intimate and moving exploration of family, memories, and the reconciliatory power of art.” In more depth:

“Sentimental Value” will follow Nora, an actor, and her sister Agnes, who are grieving the loss of their mother while their father Gustav reappears in their lives after a long absence. Gustav, a once-celebrated filmmaker, has written a script for a comeback movie and offered the main part to his daughter Nora, but she categorically refuses the role. During a career retrospective in France, Gustav meets an adoring Hollywood star and offers her the part intended for Nora. When the film starts shooting back home in Norway, Gustav seizes the opportunity to repair his bond with Nora and her sister.

It’s hardly unfamiliar territory for Trier, and I mean that in a good way. The arthouse director, of The Worst Person in the World, Reprise and Oslo, August 31^st, has enlisted two long-time collaborators: as with TWPITW, Eskil Vogt co-wrote the film, while Renata Reinsve stars as Nora. Added to the mix, though, we have Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning, playing Gustav and the “adoring Hollywood star” respectively.

A barrel of laughs!

So what to expect? Trier’s films tend to be a little offbeat, a little earnest, simple in premise but emotionally complex on screen. Over the course of his career, he’s become good at striking a balance between the absurd and the moving, and in Sentimental Value I’m hoping for that rare triumphant father-daughter film – something halfway between Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere and Toni Erdmann, perhaps? Like I say, I haven’t seen it – there isn’t even a trailer to go on yet.

The film’s UK rights have already been bought pre-Cannes by Mubi, who distributed The Worst Person in the World, and who have a good track record here, having nabbed The Substance at the same stage last year before powering it to a Best Picture nom. North America has gone to Neon who, as mentioned above, have grabbed all five previous Palme d’Or winners in a row. It’s hardly a bad position to be in heading into the festival.

The Mastermind (dir. Kelly Reichardt) / The History of Sound (dir. Oliver Hermanus)

Is it Josh O’Connor’s year? I’ve been holding O’Connor stock since I saw him with Laia Costa in Only You at a screening at London’s Bulgari Hotel back in 2018 – diamond hands! – and since then it’s been a bull market. I loved Challengers as much as the next person with an iota of taste, and fully agreed that essentially everyone who worked on that film was robbed at the Oscars (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross most of all). And long-time readers know I think that Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera is the ninth best film of the 2020s so far. So, yeah, it’s cheating to name two films at once on my list of “three” picks for Cannes, but that’s because O’Connor is in both.

First up is Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind. I am aware that I have readers who would name Reichardt as the most significant living American filmmaker, and she has history with Cannes, competing in Un Certain Regard and for the Palme d’Or once each, though she hasn’t won either. She was also on the jury for the 2019 festival.

Info on The Mastermind is somewhat hard to come by, though. A cast led by O’Connor, John Magaro of Past Lives fame³ and Alana Haim is pretty much it, plus a very brief premise: that the film centres on an audacious art heist in New England in 1970, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. You’re not getting any more than that, I’m afraid, but you can put money on Reichardt to deliver something masterful.

The History of Sound, by comparison, seems fêted already, perhaps not least because it’s the perfect formula for Letterboxd stans: a queer period romance starring O’Connor and Paul Mescal based on a short story by Ben Shattuck (you can read it here).

The two play two David and Lionel, music students who travel through New England following World War One to collect and compile the folk songs of the region, a bit like if Francis James Child had been two people, who then became lovers. Two of the internet’s boyfriends, Mason-and-Dixon-ing it across rural America as a secret couple? A supercomputer couldn’t come up with a better premise for a 2025 Zillennial crowdpleaser if it tried.

For my part, I think this film has the best shot at a Best Picture nomination out of all my picks, but I also don’t think it would win. The obvious comparison to draw is with Brokeback Mountain, which was likewise based on a short story with similar-ish themes, in that case by Annie Proulx. Brokeback Mountain was unlucky not to land Best Picture, famously losing to the ridiculous Crash, and my gut says the same would happen in 2026, although The History of Sound would now lose to a better film. I reckon Mubi will take this one and push it in the States, and I think it will have a good run. Then I think it will go the same way as Brokeback and The Power of the Dog, and just miss out.

But then I’m just an enthusiastic amateur on Substack, so what do I know?

Okay – what have I missed, apart from everything? Let me know what you’re looking forward to, and what I should be watchlisting on Letterboxd. I’m ready to storm the cinema the moment these films hit British soil.

1. I was initially going to mention Lynn Ramsey’s omission here, but her film Die, My Love was announced on Wednesday, thank goodness.

2. Aster’s horror films rarely are.

3. He played the extremely understanding husband of Greta Lee’s main character Nora as she worked through her Korean-American identity crisis.