Cannes jury nears Palme d'Or choice with no clear frontrunner

With Hollywood studios largely absent, Cannes ended up looking more like a referendum on prestige cinema itself than on studio power, and the jury reached its closing decision on Saturday with no clear Palme d’Or frontrunner. The 79th festival had turned its focus back to the kind of smaller, director-driven films that have long defined the Croisette, even as the prize still carried the kind of cachet that can lift a film into awards-season contention.

Park Chan-wook chaired the nine-member jury that was to hand out the Palme d’Or at the Grand Théâtre Lumière on Saturday, May 23, 2026. Cannes said his appointment was a first for Korean cinema, a notable turn for a filmmaker who has already won festival prizes for Old Boy, Thirst and Decision to Leave. The closing ceremony was also set to be broadcast live and exclusively on France 2, with the Un Certain Regard awards handed out a day earlier on Friday, May 22.

The competition itself reflected Cannes’s global reach even without a heavy Hollywood presence. The official selection ran from May 12 to May 23 and was announced on April 9, opening with Pierre Salvadori’s La Vénus électrique, also known as The Electric Kiss. In the main competition, 22 films were in the running, including entries from Pedro Almodovar, Asghar Farhadi, Cristian Mungiu, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Pawel Pawlikowski and Na Hong-jin. Only two U.S. directors made the slate, James Gray with Paper Tiger and Ira Sachs with The Man I Love.

That balance has changed what “winning Cannes” means. The Palme no longer belongs to a field shaped by studio campaigns alone; it can still reset a filmmaker’s trajectory and send a title into the Oscar conversation. Recent examples have made that clear. Sentimental Value went on to win best international feature at the Oscars after finishing second at Cannes, while Anora later swept five Oscars after its 2024 Cannes win. The festival had already crowned Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident as the 2025 Palme d’Or, and Park’s jury was choosing the successor from a slate that still carried real prestige stakes.

The final-hour race remained unsettled. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian favored Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, while other reviews and Polymarket activity pointed toward Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s care-home drama All of a Sudden and Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland. Screen Daily’s critics grid also placed Minotaur, All of a Sudden and Fatherland among the highest-rated competition titles. In a year without a dominant Hollywood presence, that spread of opinion was the clearest sign that Cannes had reopened the field, and that the prize itself still mattered most when no one could predict where it would land.