CANNES: HARBINGER OF OSCAR HOPES

Only four films have ever won both the Palme d'Or and the Best Motion Picture Oscar.

- Saibal Chatterjee writes

The Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar ceremony are worlds apart.

The former hosts a competition featuring cherrypicked films that are judged by a jury of movie industry luminaries. The latter hinges on votes cast by nearly 10,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The two radically different processes have usually, and understandably, yielded very dissimilar results. Only four films have ever won both the Palme d'Or and the Best Motion Picture Oscar. In recent years, however, an unusual convergence has begun to emerge between the world's premier film festival and the big annual Hollywood jamboree.

Four of the last five winners of the Palme d'Or, the Cannes Film Festival's top prize, earned Oscar nominations in the Best Motion Picture category. What's more, two of them (Bong Joon Ho's Parasite and Sean Baker's Anora) did not stop there. They went all the way and won the coveted prize. Three titles that figured prominently in the race for Oscar statuettes at the 97th Academy Awards earlier this year - Anora, The Substance and Emilia Perez - also won big at Cannes. Will the story be the same as we get into the next awards season in a few months from now? The films that impressed the Juliette Binoche-led Competition jury at the just-concluded 78th Cannes Film Festival all have Oscar potential but it remains to be seen if there is another Anora in the mix here. Anora scooped up as many five Oscars - Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Mikey Madison), Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing - vindicating the Cannes jury's choice of best film.