Hello everybody, and welcome back to our first edition of Poll Position in several weeks. I’ve been working on some bonus goodies for you all, but the last few weeks have been hectic for me.
But it turns out we now have a lot to talk about, especially with the announcement of what we can expect to see at the Cannes Film Festival in a few weeks.
But first, major news in the Best Animated Feature race. Laika Studio’s Wildwood has been shifted to 2026, knocking my frontrunner right out of the race! This creates some real chaos. Could Zootopia 2 really be the new frontrunner? Or is Elio an actual possibility? Time will tell.
And the latest movie to generate major Oscar buzz is Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which hit theaters this week. I’ve seen it and enjoyed it, although I personally struggle to predict it based on my own experience with it. While there are a lot of interesting ideas, nothing ever coalesces for me.
Taking my perspective out of it, there’s a lot of reason to believe this will be the kind of movie that can keep the hype going all the way to Oscar season. It has great critic and audience reviews alike, with tons of people giving it high marks and viewing it as the magnum opus of an auteur director. I may have to predict it for Best Picture for now, just to account for the hype.
The freshest news out of Cannes is that Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson will be in competition, according to a report from World of Reel.
That’s one that dominated early Oscars predictions, and the early word, according to the World of Reel article, is that the Cannes selection committee loved their screening of it.
The movie I’ve really got my eye on though is Sound of Falling, previously titled The Doctor Says I’ll Be Alright, But I’m Feelin’ Blue. The German-language film has been heavily buzzed about for weeks and is in competition. It tells the story of four different girls from four time periods growing up on a German farm over the course of a century as their stories interweave and time seems to dissolve. This could be the main player for international film and could even be in the Best Picture race.
We’re also getting Ari Aster’s neo-western pandemic-driven Eddington in competition. The auteur’s latest project with A24 just got its first trailer last week.
Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme will compete as well, with some hopeful that this could be the acclaimed director’s chance to get back in Oscar graces. I will believe it when I see it.
The folks at SAW will certainly be excited to read reviews for Julia Ducournau’s Alpha, considering the love for her previous work, Titane, which came away with the Palme d’Or. That movie has the unfortunate reputation, however, of being the only recent Palme d’Or winner to not even sniff Oscars contention. Alpha will tell the story of a girl whose parents are affected by the AIDS epidemic, although everybody is expecting the film to have a card up its sleeve that it hasn’t revealed.
The latest Spike Lee joint, Highest 2 Lowest, will debut out of competition at Cannes after some rumors that it wasn’t well-received by the top brass at the festival. This was on my initial Best Picture predictions, so it’s exciting to know that we will soon have some better info to go off of.
Sentimental Value has long been the frontrunner for the Palme d’Or if you ask most people, in part because it is being distributed by Cannes juggernaut Neon and in part because people loved director Joachim von Trier’s Worst Person in the World a few years back. It has an American friendly cast, but for my money the plot is still to simple and vague to put a lot of faith in it.
That’s all for now.
