The curtain has come down on the Croisette for another year. The venerable Cannes Film Festival wrapped its 79th edition on Saturday with a closing ceremony that bestowed the coveted Palme d’Or on one of its returning champions. Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu’s latest film, Fjord, won the festival’s top prize nearly two decades after he scored that same honor for his acclaimed 2007 drama, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
Other previous winners whose latest films picked up fresh hardware included Japanese auteur Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who scored the Best Screenplay prize at the 2021 festival for Drive My Car. Hamaguchi’s newest film, All of a Sudden, picked up the Best Actress prize for its two leads, Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto. Meanwhile, Polish writer-director Paweł Pawlikowski tied for Best Director honors with the duo behind The Black Ball, Javier Calva and Javier Ambrossi. Pawlikowski won that same prize in 2018 for his Oscar-nominated drama, Cold War.
Notably, neither of the American films in competition — James Gray’s Paper Tiger and Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love — was recognized by the competition jury, which was headed up by South Korean filmmaker, Park Chan-wook. In fact, the only significant Cannes prize awarded to an American production was Jane Schoenbaum’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which scored the Queer Palm. Otherwise, the major Hollywood studios sat out this year’s festival, leaving a patchwork of indie or indie-adjacent directors to represent the U.S.
Here are three takeaways for how this year’s Cannes winners could impact the 2027 Oscar race.
Neon burns brightly
When it comes to the Palme d’Or, it’s Neon’s world and we just live in it. With Fjord‘s victory, the New York-based distribution label is on an unprecedented seven-Palme winning streak that stretches back to Parasite in 2019. And that’s not all: Four of those seven winners — Parasite, Triangle of Sadness, Anatomy of a Fall, and Anora — went on to pick up Best Picture nominations. And two out of those four — Parasite and Anora — took home that statuette.
With that kind of track record, Fjord has to be taken seriously as an early Best Picture contender, especially since it stars a pair of Oscar-nominated actors, Sentimental Value‘s Renate Reinsve and The Apprentice‘s Sebastian Stan, and finds Mungiu venturing beyond Romania’s borders for the first time. (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days famously went overlooked at the Oscars, along with many acclaimed titles from the Romanian New Wave that swept through the film festival scene in the early 2000s and 2010s.)
But Neon strategists have also demonstrated that they can navigate more than one of their Cannes titles into Oscar contention. Last year, both Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent received Best Picture wins, and the company occupied four of the five slots for Best International Feature with the Palme-winning It Was Just an Accident and Sirāt joining the aforementioned duo. Besides Fjord, Neon’s 2026 slate of Cannes premieres includes All of a Sudden, Paper Tiger, the South Korean monster movie Hope, and the Japanese sci-fi drama Sheep in a Box. Even if some of those titles met with muted reactions, they’ve got a long runway to change the narrative.
Project hail Hüller
Three years ago, the back-to-back Cannes premieres of Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest made Sandra Hüller the toast of the Croisette. And even though the German actress missed out on the festival’s Best Actress prize, she did land a spot among the final five candidates for the corresponding Oscar.
Based on the early reviews out of the 2026 festival, Pawlikowski’s road-trip drama Fatherland hands Hüller another awards-friendly vehicle playing the daughter of celebrated author Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler). It’s one of four movies that could drive her back into Oscar contention this cycle along with another star turn in the Austrian period picture Rose and supporting roles in a pair of Hollywood star vehicles: Ryan Gosling’s Project Hail Mary and Tom Cruise’s Digger. And speaking of returning nominees, Fjord could bring Reinsve a second consecutive Best Actress nomination after her freshman bid for Sentimental Value.
But with the influence of the Academy’s increasingly global voting body reflected in nominations like Wagner Moura’s Best Actor nod for The Secret Agent, other international actors could use Cannes acclaim as a first-time trip to Oscars. That list has to start with the aforementioned stars of All of a Sudden, with Efira playing the director of a Parisian nursing home where Okamoto’s Japanese playwright comes to spend her final months of life. Meanwhile, Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne shared Best Actor honors for Lukas Dhont’s Coward, which Mubi acquired with an eye towards awards season. And occasional Hollywood moonlighter Léa Seydoux was front and center in two Cannes films — Gentle Monster and The Unknown — as she looks for that elusive Oscar breakthrough.
Tattered Paper
Arriving in Cannes as the most high-profile American film at the festival, Paper Tiger had to carry an unenviable weight on its shoulders in terms of expectations. And while the film was largely embraced by the Gray-heads in the press and industry ranks, it quickly became clear that it wasn’t going to be the king of that particular jungle as critics took aim at the overly familiar crime drama elements and outsized performances like Scarlett Johansson’s broad turn as a Long Island wife and mother.
Gray and his devotees have been waiting a long time for Oscar recognition. The director’s previous Cannes premieres like The Immigrant and Armageddon Time hoped to ride the wave from the Croisette to the Academy Awards, only to vanish into the fall festival ether. But the presence of Adam Driver, Johansson and Miles Teller does give Paper Tiger an elevated profile that could aid a relaunch and reevaluation at either Venice, Toronto or — more likely — New York.
Since Sachs is another NYFF favorite, The Man I Love will almost certainly join Paper Tiger at Lincoln Center in October. The ’80s-set drama has a key selling point in featuring Rami Malek’s most awards-friendly role since his Best Actor win for Bohemian Rhapsody, as well as resonant subject matter in revisiting an era of New York beset by the AIDS crisis. And just to complete the set, Jordan Firstman’s out of competition Club Kid — by far the buzziest film at Cannes — could also take Manhattan’s premiere film festival with an eye towards getting its claws in the Academy youth vote. Maybe Timothée Chalamet can host the afterparty.
