Cannes and the Kodak – A World Apart

Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir wonders why the Palme d’Or and Oscar’s Best Picture are so far apart in terms of films they choose to win. In this case, he looks at The King’s Speech and Uncle Boonmee:

“The King’s Speech” is a well-crafted, old-fashioned entertainment, a nostalgic costume drama aimed at middle-class adult filmgoers all around the world. It was constructed to win Academy Awards, and it delivered. “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” on the other hand, is a highly personal art film made with nonprofessional actors, aimed at the tiny audience of global cinephiles who are willing to take this strange and original work on its own terms. It won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival precisely because it makes no compromise with mainstream filmmaking conventions and ignores commercial considerations. If foreign-language art cinema attracts a tiny audience in the United States these days, Asian art cinema attracts nearly none. It goes without saying that “Uncle Boonmee” won’t duplicate the $100 million-plus box-office returns of “The King’s Speech”; it probably won’t reach one-half of 1 percent of that number.

The sense that Oscar’s best-picture award and the Palme d’Or are handed out in alternate and only faintly connected universes — and represent radically different notions of what movies are and do — is nothing new, even if it seems particularly exaggerated this year. But before we move to that level, let me grab a moment to try and un-scare you about “Uncle Boonmee.” No, it’s not for everybody and it isn’t trying to be. But there’s absolutely no reason you can’t enjoy the sentimental, comic-inspirational history lesson of “The King’s Speech” and enjoy Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s gorgeous, loopy modern-day fairy tale about a dying man visited by ghosts and (apparently) figments and fragments of previous existences. After the Cannes premiere last year, a friend of mine described “Uncle Boonmee” as a “Buddhist tone-poem about death,” and although he was being half-derisive, that’s not a bad summary.

“The King’s Speech” is, of course, exactly that kind of movie, almost too much so. Although wonderfully played by its cast and loaded with historical charm, the film is carefully paced and calibrated to deliver precisely the emotional beats the audience almost unconsciously expects. The internal life of “The King’s Speech” derives entirely from the interplay of Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter; as cinema, it’s strictly an efficient machine, which is what makes the best-director Oscar given to Tom Hooper seem so insulting in a field that included Darren Aronofsky, the Coens, David Fincher and David O. Russell. This is not “a movie that makes you dream,” in David Lynch’s famous phrase. (Even among this year’s largely excellent list of Oscar-nominated films, only Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” possesses that quality.)

If the yawning cultural and aesthetic chasm between “The King’s Speech” and “Uncle Boonmee” represents the long-standing transatlantic divide that separates the Oscars from Cannes, it hasn’t always been as dramatic as it looks today. As recently as 2002, a Palme d’Or-winning film — Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” — was a major contender in the Oscar race, winning awards for its star and director (although not for best picture). Only two movies have ever won both the Palme d’Or and the best-picture Oscar, and those may surprise you as much as they did me: Billy Wilder’s 1945 “Lost Weekend,” a soap opera of drunken madness starring Ray Milland, and Delbert Mann’s awkward romance “Marty,” with Ernest Borgnine, 10 years later. But quite a few Palme d’Or winners have gone on to significant critical and popular success and multiple Oscar nominations, including “M*A*S*H,” “Taxi Driver,” “Apocalypse Now,” “All That Jazz,” “The Piano” and “Pulp Fiction.” (Quite a few more have won foreign-language Oscars, but nobody, frankly, cares about that.)

Worth reading the whole thing.

The first and most important reason is that the Palme is not chosen by as large a consensus. The Academy voters are around 6,000. Since they feed from the other guild awards – you’re looking at 120,000 in the SAG, 9000 in the DGA and 4,000 in the PGA. Whatever they choose it will have to be popular across all demographics. Cannes, by contrast, is chosen by a very small jury who get in a room and discuss the films they saw. There’s that practicality. Essentially, the people who choose the winners at these festivals aren’t all that different from industry voters — they aren’t critics so much as they are professional artists. There just aren’t as many of them.

If you spend any time at Cannes you’ll see that the vibe there is very different from Oscar season. There is no such thing as an “Oscars movie” over there; they don’t care about the Oscars and the Oscars don’t care about them. Vive la difference.

Worth noting: the difference between what won at Cannes last year and what won the Oscar this year is wider than I think I’ve ever seen it.