The Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Awards don’t often agree. Cannes has a reputation for rewarding bold, sometimes divisive art cinema, while the Oscars tend to favor crowd-pleasers with broad appeal.
Every so often, though, a film manages to satisfy both. Four titles stand out as having launched on the French Riviera before taking the top prize in Hollywood.
Marty (1955)
Marty was directed by Delbert Mann from a script by Paddy Chayefsky, who adapted his own television play. It follows a lonely Bronx butcher played by Ernest Borgnine, and it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1955. It was a small, quiet story about an ordinary man looking for companionship.
At the Academy Awards held in 1956, it won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Borgnine and Best Adapted Screenplay. It remains the earliest film to have won both the Palme d’Or and the Oscar for Best Picture. For decades it was also the only one to do so, which says plenty about how rarely the two honors align.
The Artist (2011)
Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist premiered in competition at Cannes in May 2011. It’s a mostly silent, black and white French production about a movie star whose career falters as sound arrives. Jean Dujardin won the festival’s Best Actor prize, and Uggie the dog took the Palm Dog award.
The film then swept the 84th Academy Awards in early 2012, winning five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. It also took awards for costume design and original score. It was widely noted as the first silent feature to win Best Picture since the very first ceremony honored Wings.
Parasite (2019)
Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2019, the first for a South Korean film. The jury was headed by director Alejandro González Iñárritu, and the award was decided unanimously. The story of two families on opposite sides of a class divide had already drawn strong attention on the Croisette.
At the Oscars in February 2020, it won four awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature. It became the first non-English language film to win Best Picture. That result marked a real shift in how the Academy treated international cinema.
Anora (2024)
Sean Baker’s Anora won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2024, in a year when Greta Gerwig presided over the jury. The film follows a young Brooklyn sex worker, played by Mikey Madison, whose impulsive marriage to the son of a Russian oligarch unravels quickly. Baker had long been known for low budget, independent work, so the win felt like a milestone for that kind of filmmaking.
At the Oscars in March 2025, Anora won five awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress for Madison, Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing. Baker personally won four Oscars in a single night for producing, directing, writing and editing the film. That tied a record for the most won by one person in a single ceremony.
