Awards Seasoning: Yes We Cannes Cannes Cannes for 2026!

The 79^th Cannes Film Festival kicks off this week! Alas, I am not fancy or rich enough to get to the Cannes Film Festival, but I can watch and speculate from afar, in a far less stunning locale, but with the same amount of booze.

Cannes is the prettiest girl at the party in terms of the film festival scene. It’s historic, prides itself on its mixture of high-class prestige and paparazzi-laden star power, and has helped to launch countless incredible careers. Over the past decade or so, it’s become a more prominent player in the American awards race. For a long time, Cannes was considered almost too high-brow for the Oscars, an exception or two aside. Maybe an acting winner would sneak onto the shortlist, but the Best Picture race wasn’t likely to be disrupted by films like The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, or Winter Sleep.

Things shifted with 2019's Parasite, which won the Palme d'Or and then swept the season in legendary fashion. That movie was picked up by Neon, and since then, they have acquired every Palme d'Or winner. Since 2019, five of those six Palme winners were Best Picture winners or nominees. Last year, four of the five Best International Feature nominees were Cannes competition titles (and yes, Neon bought them all.) There’s a case to be made that Neon’s ceaseless hunger for the Palme is bad for the overall season, given that it requires them to dump certain movies when the momentum leaves them, and that definitely seemed to impact It Was Just an Accident this year. They've already bought the distribution rights for Cristian Mungiu's Fjord, a drama starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a family whose lives are thrown into chaos when they move to a remote Norwegian village. Also on their slate: Paper Tiger, James Gray’s crime drama with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson; Sheep in the Box from Palme winner Hirokazu Kore-eda; and The Unknown from Arthur Harari, the co-writer of Anatomy of a Fall.

A lot of the films in competition have already been bought up by major distributors. Mubi's got the rights to a ton of titles: Fatherland, a biopic of Thomas and Erika Mann by Paweł Pawlikowski; Lucas Dhont’s war drama Coward; the South Korean sci-fi drama Hope, which features Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander; and Minotaur, the return of Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev. Pedro Almodovar's Amarga Navidad has been acquired by Sony Pictures Classics for North America (and it's also already been released in Spain, where reviews have been positive but not rapturous.)

Really, it does feel like there’s a push from those indie distributors to get ahead of the race and bet on possible Palme winners. It makes sense on paper. Winning the Palme is a big deal and helps to elevate an independent title well beyond the typical confines of the field. There’s a greater understanding now that the Palme can carry a film beyond Europe and to the Oscars. It’s worked wonders for Neon, which got its name on Anora, Parasite, Anatomy of a Fall, The Substance, The Secret Agent, and Triangle of Sadness. They’re not quite at A24 levels of being treated like gods of the scene, but they’re getting there.

On the surface, none of these movies feels like attention-grabbing For Your Oscars Consideration offerings, which I always prefer. I’m an Almodovar nerd, so I’m excited for Amarga Navidad, but the Academy runs pretty hot and cold on his work. James Gray is immensely talented but has never broken through with the Oscars (the French, however, love him.) Parallel Tales, the newest movie from Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, is intriguing, especially since it's apparently a loose reimagining of Dekalog: Six and stars Isabelle Huppert, but I've also heard some not-great rumblings.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff happening outside of the main competition. Her Private Hell, the new futuristic horror from Nicolas Winding Refn, could be amazing or terrible but it certainly won't be dull. Jane Schoenbrun's subversive slasher Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma will serve as the opening film of the Un Certain Regard section. Kokurojo: The Samurai and the Prisoner is a new historical drama from Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Directors' Fortnight, which tends to be more avant-garde than the main competition, has no movies from Kantemir Balagov, Radu Jude, Clio Barnard, and Bruno Dumont.

And the weirdest movie of Cannes 2026? Propeller One-Way Night Coach, a family adventure about a young airplane nerd and his mother who go on a cross-country flight to Hollywood that takes a magical turn. It's directed by John Travolta, based on a kids' book he wrote in the '90s and inspired by his love of aviation, and it stars his daughter Ella Bleu Travolta. Also, it's only 61 minutes long and it looks bad. Why is it here? Well, Travolta is such a big deal at Cannes, for some reason, that he got Gotti to premiere there, albeit out of competition. I wonder if he offered Cannes head honcho Thierry Fremaux use of his private jet in exchange for a premiere. It's so weird and star-f*ckery, but also deeply Cannes.

The festival will have Park Chan-wook heading the jury of the main competition, and reining in a jury that includes Demi Moore, Chloé Zhao, and Stellan Skarsgård. It remains to be seen if Park will be a democratic president or a dictatorial one. Frankly, it’s always funnier when the jury hates one another.