Why Cannes is Still the Best Film Festival in the World

There will, no doubt, be a lot of heated discussions in regards to the Cannes Film Festival, which officially begins on May 14th. These write-ups will come mostly from American media hounds in the film industry, most of which seem to have a very narrow-minded way of looking at cinema. These writers will tell you, with the kind of self-assertive confidence that would make almost any cinephile outside the States roll their eyes at their idiocy, that Cannes isn’t what it used to be, that the festival has lost its luster, that the Netflix debacle has stained the Croisette, and that the much more Hollywood-friendly Venice Film Festival has now toppled it as the best festival in the world. These so-called “experts” are wrong. Very wrong. Because, truth be told, they have to understand that the best movies released ever year are not exclusively just American No, they are universal, and are comprised of different languages, stemming from the far reaches of the world, depicting the vastness and singularity of a medium that keeps evolving over time. To say that the lack of Hollywood movies is a detriment to Cannes would be an insult to the likes of Tarkovski, Fellini, Dreyer, Kurosawa, Truffault, Bergman, Godard, Bunuel, Leone, all of which made an impact on Cannes and have been part of the tradition that makes it such an essential yearly cinematic event.

Today’s importance of zeroing in on Oscar contenders rather than the quality of a film, a trend which seems to have started only recently with the rise of the “Oscar blogger” in the mainstream media, and all this despite the consistent downfall of Oscar ratings ever since the early 2000s, has positioned a problem which we haven’t fully dealt with or even decided to ponder in the States. Media outlets seem obsessed with who and what will be showered with Oscar gold come next February/March instead of, you know, actual artistic quality. For that matter, the powers that be have decided to herald a film festival such as Venice, which has decided to sell its soul to the corporate entities driven by Hollywood marketing, and proclaim that “Cannes, c'est tout dans le passé .” It’s all in the past.

You want to know why the internet exploded into an epic meltdown when “Green Book” won Best Picture last March? Because, for some reason, we made it a widespread belief that the most important honor a film can have, anywhere in the world, is to win the Oscar, that’s why. Despite the fact that many of the year’s very best films, from all around the world, get continuously snubbed for lesser efforts. Just this past year, cinematic achievements such as “Burning,” “First Reformed,” “Leave No Trace,” “Sorry to Bother You,” “You Were Never Really Here,” “Shoplifters,” “Zama,” “The Rider” “Cold War,” “Hereditary,” “Eighth Grade” and “A Quiet Place” were substituted in the Best Picture category for the likes “A Star Is Born,” “Black Panther,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Green Book” and “Vice.” And yet, you had people yelling at their TV screens because the Academy picked the wrong movie to win. Is this what we’ve come down to? Has America decided that a festival, such as Venice, which world premieres “A Star Is Born,” is superior to Cannes just because its lineup is stacked with supposed Oscar contenders?

Sure, Venice took advantage of the Cannes/Netflix debacle by snatching Alfonso Cuaron’s masterful “Roma,” a film which, by the way, Cuaron vehemently wanted in Cannes as it was always a dream of his to be part of the competition there. No, the Netflix problem will not be the end of Cannes, because the festival damn well knows that it is still the best showcase for the best filmmakers in the world. No other festival compares. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Cannes boss Thierry Fremaux admitted that the festival will “gets less attention from the American press when we have less American films,” however, he added “not in the rest of the world.” Because, as he quite eloquently puts it “Cannes is about universal artists and about the world, not about only French or American cinema. Of course last year the American press decided to criticize Cannes, and we don't care.”

Fremaux even acknowledged that the “other film festival in the fall [Venice] only focused on American cinema” and that “it was a big mistake” because “the duty of a film festival is to not only to pick up films from all over the world, but to pay attention to them in the same way.”

Fact of the matter is this: Most of the “great” big-studio movies that actually do get released in the States, and I’ll be generous by saying that we get, oh what, about a dozen or so a year these days, if we’re lucky, tend to premiere either in January at Sundance or in the fall at Telluride/Venice/Toronto. And so, it's easier for a fall festival like Venice to become an American platform for these fall movies, Fremaux even admits it himself that “It's not in Venice's tradition” to accept such movies, but it is what it is, they took the bait, they want to be that kind of festival.

This leaves Cannes with the slim-pickings of the dreadful summer movie season, most of which is filled with the kind of big-budgeted mainstream schlock that they, justifiably, prides themselves in avoiding. However, when there is a movie by a renowned auteur that, for some reason, is released between the months of May-August then Cannes does try to pounce on it. Just look at Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood,” a June release, and one of the two most anticipated movies of the entire year (alongside Scorsese’s “The Irishman”). Another June release is Jim Jarmusch’s “The Dead Don’t Die,” for which Cannes has selected as part of its official competition this year, ditto Dexter Fletcher’s Elton John biopic “Rocketman” which will screen out-of-competition. The other Summer movies that could have made it this year but didn’t included James Gray’s still-unfinished “Ad Astra,” and Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse,” which seems to have polarized the selection committee but still stands a chance to be mentioned by the Cannes sidebars next week (rumor has it the Quinzaine has selected it as part of its slate). After that, what can we posibly expect to show up at the festival? “Avengers: Endgame”? “The Lion King”? “John Wick 3”? Cannes was never that kind of shindig and even if a studio seriously wants an already-finished October/November/December release to premiere at the Croisette in May, where critics can sometimes be very harsh, to only have their film bashed by the snobby film critics that attend the fest, then it’s just not worth it either. You need to have some real cajones to premiere your Oscar contender at Cannes, and you need whatever moment you’ve built to be carried along and expanded upon for the next six months of the year.

As Fremaux told THR in that same interview “We want to keep on and go ahead with world cinema. And for the filmmakers and the industry and the press still thinking it's important to be in Cannes because it's still "the place to be," with a certain taste in cinema. We have some mainstream films, and also some which are quite radical. That's also why you are in Cannes, to discover what is new.” This year’s lineup seems to prove his point; The likes of Malick, Jarmusch, Almodovar, Dardenne, Joon-ho and, quite possibly, Tarantino. Its enough to salivate and whet any hardcore cinephile’s appetite, Hollywood be damned.