The Evolution of Cannes vs. Oscar Winners: From Hollywood Mainstream to Global Avant-Garde

When Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winning, small-budget, indie-darling-that-could, Anora, scooped the best-picture Oscar, many awards-season prognosticators pointed to Parasite, Bong Joon Ho’s 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, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was always the way—of course the film garlanded at the world’s most prestigious film festival would go on to collect the most golden statuettes, right? Well, that certainly seems to be the case now—but it wasn’t for much of the 20th century.

Most of the earliest best-picture Oscars, across the ’20s, ’30s and early ’40s, were handed to grand, sprawling American productions—Gone with the Wind, Casablanca—while 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 Wilder’s agonizing The Lost Weekend, did, in fact, go on to win the Academy Award for best picture—but that feat wouldn’t 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 Oscars—and although those first three all screened at Cannes, the festival’s top prizes went to other, often non-English language releases. That changed with Delbert Mann’s Marty in 1955, the first film to officially win the newly renamed Palme d’Or and then snag four Oscars including best picture, but after that, this one-two punch wouldn’t be achieved by another film for—wait for it—more than six decades.

In a way, it made perfect sense: the Academy’s taste skewed more mainstream and, at times, conservative, while Cannes’s 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 Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up.