This year the Cannes jury, which selects the winners of the Palme d’Or and other awards in the competition, will be chaired by Vincent Lindon, whose smooth performance in last year’s Palme-winning Titane was a highlight of this film.
The other judges: Asghar Farhadi, who was here last year to direct A Hero; British actress and director Rebecca Hall; Ladj Ly, who shared the 2019 Jury Prize (a sort of third prize with honorable mention) for directing a film called Les Misérables; the American director Jeff Nichols; Indian actress Deepika Padukone; Noomi Rapace, the star of Sweden’s Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; Joachim Trier, who directed last year’s hit “The Worst Man in the World”; and Italian actress and director Jasmine Trinca.
People love spreading rumors about what’s going on with the jury.
Did David Cronenberg, the 1999 jury president, force his peers to unanimously give a palm tree to “Rosetta,” which was screened so late in the festival that many critics didn’t even see it? (Cronenberg has denied these rumours, and in 2014 he agreed with Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri that the Dardennes’ later career – they won the Palm again for ‘L’Enfant’ in 2005 – had proved that choice a good one.)
Did Pedro Almodóvar, Jury President 2017, actually prefer the French AIDS crisis film “BPM (Beats Per Minute)” to this year’s winner “The Square”? (For the record, I was at the press conference right after that awards ceremony, and nothing Almodóvar said indicated that he had any genuine admiration for either film.)
Part of the problem, as Cronenberg pointed out in this interview, is that journalists create a narrative about horse racing during the festival and predict the winners, often incorrectly. And the festival basically treats the judges like the human equivalent of an armored truck. Good luck getting an interview with them.
Even when the jury is explaining its decisions, as in the final press conference, its members do not usually speak outside of the school. There are exceptions: William Goldman described what happened behind the scenes when he was a jury member in his book Hype & Glory in 1988.
Another peculiarity of the Cannes juries – who are chosen by the festival, not by the jury president – is that nobody seems overly concerned with the occurrence of conflicts of interest. Sean Penn judged Clint Eastwood’s Changeling after Eastwood sent him to an Oscar in Mystic River. Isabelle Huppert awarded the palm to “The White Ribbon” by Michael Haneke, who had worked with her on “The Piano Teacher” and “Time of the Wolf”. And Elle Fanning was a 2019 judge, judging “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” which starred Dakota Fanning, Elle’s sister. (The film failed.)
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