The morning of the final day of the Cannes Film Festival is when the rumors start: fast-spreading whispers about which directors and stars have been invited back to attend that evening’s Palmarès awards ceremony. There, the Competition jury — this year presided over by South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook, with Demi Moore, Stellan Skarsgård and Chloé Zhao among his jurors — will soon present their picks for the best of the fest, culminating in the coveted Palme d’Or.
As for the names and films alleged to be in the mix, they largely coincide with the established critical favorites. (See our own critics’ picks here.) They include Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland,” Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur,” Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden,” and a late-breaking wild card: Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s sprawling queer melodrama “The Black Ball,” which wasn’t much buzzed-about at the start of the festival, but premiered two days ago to ecstatic audience reactions, a 16-minute standing ovation and a heated bidding war that Netflix is winning. But hearsay can be misleading, and which prizes will go to which films is still anyone’s guess.
The ceremony will also see the presentation of the short film awards, the Camera d’Or for best first feature (a highly competitive prize this year, with 29 debuts in the running), and an Honorary Palme d’Or for showbiz legend Barbra Streisand, though she’s unable to attend in person due to injury. We’ll be updating this article live as the awards are announced, with full commentary to follow.
