Cannes Winner Realities

As I believe I indicated before proceeding into a massive list of errors, I am awesome at forecasting the prize winners at Cannes. You're probably reeling from my uncanny knack for prognostication. Granted, if you lop off my two top predictions for the Palme, neither of which scored a single thing, nor did the one film that I predicted to cop two awards, I cited most of the right movies but in the wrong contexts: my "this is too obvious" canards about The White Ribbon and A Prophet translated into denials of the obvious, and the jury got excited about Wild Grass, Fish Tank, and Kinatay. I always wish the Technical Grand Prize were compulsory, and I haven't heard anything about the Ecumenical Jury's pick, which is usually interesting—all the more so since I just yesterday saw Adoration, their '08 selection—but all in all, this slate of prize winners (indexed in greater depth here) promises some provocative nights at the movies in the next, oh, 18 months or so that it will take American distributors to get them all into theaters, if even then. Hold out hope.

(Note: The awards don't do much to change my relative enthusiasm for the Competition titles, though I do have to credit Isabelle Huppert with even more chutzpah than I thought she might have. Not for her, to go out of her way to avoid giving top prizes to famed collaborators or to French countrymen. Screw how it "looks"—and one must admit, the two best-reviewed Competition movies scored the two top prizes, even though lots of the other awards defied critical consensus in various ways.)