CANNES, France — This 12 months, the Cannes jury — which selects the winners of the Palme d’Or and the competitors’s different awards — is headed by Vincent Lindon, whose limber efficiency in final 12 months’s Palme winner, “Titane,” was a spotlight of that film.
The opposite jurors: Asghar Farhadi, who was right here final 12 months because the director of “A Hero”; the British actress and director Rebecca Corridor; Ladj Ly, who shared the jury prize (sort of a third-place, honorable-mention award) in 2019 for guiding a movie known as “Les Misérables”; the American director Jeff Nichols; the Indian actress Deepika Padukone; Noomi Rapace, the star of the Swedish “Lady With the Dragon Tattoo”; Joachim Trier, who directed final 12 months’s crowd-pleaser “The Worst Individual within the World”; and the Italian actress and director Jasmine Trinca.
Individuals like to unfold rumors about what goes on with the jury.
Did David Cronenberg, the jury president in 1999, drive his colleagues to bestow a unanimous Palme on “Rosetta,” which had screened so late within the competition that many critics didn’t even see it? (Cronenberg has denied these rumors, and in 2014, he agreed with Bilge Ebiri of Vulture that the Dardennes’ subsequent profession — they went on to win the Palme once more in 2005 for “L’Enfant” — had shown that choice to a good one.)
Did Pedro Almodóvar, the jury president in 2017, really favor the French AIDS disaster movie “BPM (Beats Per Minute)” to that 12 months’s winner, “The Sq.”? (For the document, I used to be on the information convention proper after that awards ceremony, and nothing Almodóvar stated recommended he had something however honest admiration for each movies.)
A part of the issue, as Cronenberg identified in that interview, is that journalists create a horse race narrative because the competition unfolds, predicting the winners, typically wrongly. And the competition principally treats the jury members because the human equal of an armored truck. Good luck getting an interview with them.
Even when the jury explains its decisions, as within the closing information convention, its members don’t often converse out of college. There are exceptions: William Goldman, in his e-book “Hype & Glory,” described what went on behind the scenes when he served on the 1988 jury.
One other peculiar side of Cannes juries — that are chosen by the competition, not the jury president — is that no one appears to care an excessive amount of concerning the look of conflicts of curiosity.
Sean Penn judged Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” after Eastwood had directed him to an Oscar in “Mystic River.” Isabelle Huppert gave the Palme to “The White Ribbon,” directed by Michael Haneke, who had labored along with her on “The Piano Trainer” and “Time of the Wolf.” And Elle Fanning was a juror in 2019, judging “As soon as Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” wherein Dakota Fanning, Elle’s sister, has a supporting position. (The film left empty-handed.)
