As this year’s Cannes Film Festival comes to a close, many have called it an underwhelming edition. Whether it was the lack of A-list stars or the divisive slate of competition films, there wasn’t much to get pulses racing, and even some of the most acclaimed auteurs turned in work that felt a little too familiar.
Still, this slate may look stronger in retrospect, once awards season gets underway. In recent years, Cannes has produced two to three best picture nominees each season, and even this subdued lineup has its fair share of major contenders.
Foremost among them is “The Black Ball,” which premiered on the penultimate day of competition and gave the festival a long-overdue jolt. From the Spanish directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, this is a sweeping and romantic triptych of gay stories that flits fluidly from the modern day to the Spanish Civil War. And though the ensemble is primarily composed of beautiful young faces that will be largely unknown to American audiences, the Oscar favorites Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close pop in for a handful of juicy scenes.
“The Black Ball” came into Cannes with no American distributor, but I’d expect that to change soon: This is an unabashedly emotional (and expensive-looking) epic that feels like an across-the-board Oscar contender.
The biggest sale of the fest came early when A24 snapped up “Club Kid” for a reported $17 million, the kind of figure that presages a significant awards campaign. You might not expect this comedy from the American director-star Jordan Firstman (“I Love L.A.”) to be a major Oscar vehicle, since it’s a little story about a gay club promoter who meets the son he never knew he had. But Firstman pulls things off in crowd-pleasing fashion, and the “Anora” producer Alex Coco knows how to steer a scruffy little film like this through the choppy waters of awards season.
Could the third time be the charm for Scarlett Johansson? Previously nominated for two Oscars, she has a strong awards play with “Paper Tiger,” which casts her as a brassy New Yawk mom dealing with a health crisis. Léa Seydoux has never been Oscar-nominated, but she had a strong Cannes with “The Unknown” and “Gentle Monster,” and the latter could score with the right awards push.
Two Oscar winners came to Cannes with showy performances that could contend for the festival’s best actor prize. In “The Man I Love,” Rami Malek plays another artist dying of AIDS, but this film from the American director Ira Sachs is played in a different key than “Bohemian Rhapsody”: It’s an intimate love triangle about inspiration and a lust for life. And while the plot of “The Beloved” may recall last year’s “Sentimental Value” — a director offers his estranged daughter a role in his new film — Javier Bardem’s lead performance is volcanic enough for Oscar voters to double-dip.
The Romanian director Cristian Mungiu has a shelf full of Cannes prizes for films like “Beyond the Hills” and “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” but his movies have never broken through with Oscar voters. That could change with his new film, “Fjord,” about religious intolerance, especially since it stars recent the Oscar nominees Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve.
Four filmmakers who are already Oscar-vetted could be poised to repeat.
The Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, whose previous films “Leviathan” (2014) and “Loveless” (2017) were nominated for the foreign-language Academy Award, earned great reviews for his infidelity thriller “Minotaur,” while Belgium’s Lukas Dhont (“Close”) offered the affecting “Coward,” about a wartime romance. The Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, known for “Drive My Car,” has another talky, three-hour film, “All of a Sudden,” about the budding friendship between two women.
And the Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski (“Cold War”) delivers another black-and-white postwar drama, “Fatherland,” featuring a standout turn from Sandra Hüller. The “Anatomy of a Fall” actress is having a strong year, co-starring in “Project Hail Mary” and the forthcoming Tom Cruise movie “Digger,” from Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Fortunately, she doesn’t have to worry about any of these performances cannibalizing one another: A longtime Oscar rule was reversed this year that will allow an actor to be nominated twice in one category, and “Fatherland” suggests that Hüller could become the first beneficiary.
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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