Which Cannes 2024 Breakouts Are Oscar-Bound?

Last year’s Cannes Film Festival fielded 3 of the 10 eventual Oscar nominees for best picture, more than any other festival: Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, and Killers of the Flower Moon. The year before that, it was the exact same story: Elvis, Top Gun: Maverick, and Triangle of Sadness all made the cut. So naturally, as we move past our own opinions of Cannes’s best and worst, a big question remains: Which films and creatives are Oscar-bound this time around? David Canfield and Richard Lawson get into all of it on this week’s Little Gold Men roundtable, starting with Palme d’Or champ Anora. One of the best-received and most crowd-pleasing premieres at the festival, the Sean Bakertragicomedy may find a lane for a strong Academy embrace thanks to its savvy North American distributor, Neon (the company behind those successful Anatomy and Triangle campaigns), and breakout lead performance from Mikey Madison. As Lawson notes, though, Baker himself has yet to receive any Academy recognition despite acclaim for films like Tangerine and The Florida Project. It’s safe to say Anora represents his best shot at a breakthrough.

Cannes’s best-actor prize went to Jesse Plemons, who plays three roles in Kinds of Kindness, the latest from director Yorgos Lanthimos—whose last two movies, The Favourite and Poor Things, won lead-acting Oscars for Olivia Colman and Emma Stone, respectively. Kindness is definitely less accessible than those aforementioned films, however, and Plemons straddles an interesting lead-supporting line given the movie’s triptych structure. The character actor has had a red-hot first half of the year between this and Civil War (in which he steals the movie in one scene), and as a recent nominee for The Power of the Dog, he is certainly on the Academy’s radar. There are many more possibilities—Cannes best-actress winners Karla Sofía Gascón and Zoe Saldaña for the likely Netflix pickup Emilia Perez; a never-better Demi Moore in the gonzo body-horror spectacle The Substance; the brave Iranian epic The Seed of the Sacred Fig—and only time will tell how far they can go. Based on their splashy starts on the Croisette, however, there’s reason to be optimistic.

The Best and Worst Movies of Cannes 2024, and the Likeliest Oscar Contenders Among Them

From Megalopolis to Emilia Perez to The Apprentice, this was a festival of big swings. Some really worked, some really didn’t—and only a few will likely make it to the Oscars. We break it all down.

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