You Cannes See Dark Things: Fjord and La Bola Negra, reviewed
In the purest sense, the Cannes Film Festival is similar to the Oscars in that it features voters giving awards to their favorite movies. Beyond that, the two bodies have little in common. The Academy is demographically vast (nearly 10,000 voting members), even as it invariably highlights films made in the U.S. and Britain. (It does create a specific category for non-English pictures—the perplexingly renamed Best International Feature—to ensure a modicum of global representation.) Cannes is both quantitatively smaller, presided over by a jury of just nine artists, and culturally broader, screening titles from around the world and studiously spreading its honors across its various categories. (There are no Everything Everywhere All at Once-style sweeps on the Croisette.) The festival also carries a heightened level of prestige that renders it, depending on your perspective, either admirably grand or performatively snobby.
Yet for (ugly) American cinephiles, the biggest difference between Cannes and the Oscars isn’t temperamental; it’s temporal. The Oscars function as a coronation, crowning a winner at the end of the long, often-insufferable period of discourse known as “awards season.” Assuming you live in a decently populated area (or, increasingly, subscribe to the right streaming services), you can watch most of the nominees well in advance of the ceremony, allowing you to wield an informed opinion in the eternal, infantile debates about who should win Best Supporting Actress. (To be clear, this website devotes a week of coverage each year to exactly those debates.) The Academy fancies itself the arbiter of excellence, but it really just ratifies preexisting consensus. Read More