
When Sean Bakerâs Palme dâOr winning, small-budget, indie-darling-that-could, Anora, scooped the best-picture Oscar, many awards-season prognosticators pointed to Parasite, Bong Joon Hoâs razor-sharp South Korean satire, which had also ridden the wave from Cannes to the Academy Awards some five years prior. With these two examples in mind, youâd be forgiven for thinking this was always the wayâof course the film garlanded at the worldâs most prestigious film festival would go on to collect the most golden statuettes, right? Well, that certainly seems to be the case nowâbut it wasnât for much of the 20th century.
Most of the earliest best-picture Oscars, across the â20s, â30s and early â40s, were handed to grand, sprawling American productionsâGone with the Wind, Casablancaâwhile the first Cannes Film Festival, held in 1946, had a distinctly international flavor, with French, Italian, Indian, Mexican, Swiss, Swedish, and Danish productions presented alongside British and American ones. Of the 11 films jointly selected to win the Grand Prix, the precursor to the Palme, that year, one, Billy Wilderâs agonizing The Lost Weekend, did, in fact, go on to win the Academy Award for best pictureâbut that feat wouldnât be repeated for another decade.
In the ensuing years, a Hollywood golden age, the likes of All About Eve, An American in Paris, From Here to Eternity, and On the Waterfront secured best-picture Oscarsâand although those first three all screened at Cannes, the festivalâs top prizes went to other, often non-English language releases. That changed with Delbert Mannâs Marty in 1955, the first film to officially win the newly renamed Palme dâOr and then snag four Oscars including best picture, but after that, this one-two punch wouldnât be achieved by another film forâwait for itâmore than six decades.
In a way, it made perfect sense: the Academyâs taste skewed more mainstream and, at times, conservative, while Cannesâs purview was global and its vision for the future of cinema more radical and boundary-pushing. While best-picture Oscars were being handed out to West Side Story, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Oliver!, the Palme went to Federico Felliniâs La Dolce Vita, Luchino Viscontiâs The Leopard, Jacques Demyâs The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and Michelangelo Antonioniâs Blow-Up.
#Cannes #Ultimate #Oscars #Incubator