First Predictions: Best Costume Design!

by Nathaniel R

Jacqueline Durran's work on WUTHERING HEIGHTS was the first gauntlet thrown for the 99th Oscars Best Costume Design race. © Warner Bros Pictures

Dearest (im)patient readers. The time has come. Let's dive into our April Foolish first round Oscar predictions of the year. We'll put up one category (or more) per day until it's complete. To kick us off, the sartorial wonders of Best Costume Design. Last season my medals went to the juke joint 30s fashions of Sinners, the colliding cultures of midcentury NYC in Marty Supreme, and the retrofuturism of Fantastic Four: First Steps... but Oscar felt differently giving the statue to the gonzo insectoid / color fetishism of Frankenstein. We can only hope the 2026 film year has as many stellar options. And if you stop to think about it, the year has already started with something of a bang...

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Very Gay Film/Very Straight Guy: “Stranger by the Lake”

For pride month, straight critic Ben Miller takes a look back at a gay film he otherwise would have never seen

When I decided to begin this series, I committed myself to not just dip my toe in. I needed to dive headfirst into the gayest possible film I could think of. It would be disingenuous to talk about something as tame or commercially viable as Brokeback Mountain, Carol, or Moonlight. This was going to be a celebration and discussion of something the straight world does not and will not seek out.

I chose correctly.

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2026 Cannes Winners + Oscar Submission Speculation

by Nathaniel R

FJORD wins the coveted Palme d'Or. Will Oscars nominations follow for Cristian Mungiu, Renate Reinsve, and Sebastian Stan? ?

Will the 2026 Cannes Festival have lasting impact on this cinematic year? With the oft-reported absence of major Hollywood outings at the 79th festival, the best we might hope for (for those of us on the other side of the ocean) is a similar or muted echo to last year when the four non-English features that dominated the Cannes conversation (It Was Just An Accident, Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent, Sirāt) proved to have incredible staying power, wowing audiences from their May 2025 premieres all the way through the culmination of awards season on Oscar night in March of 2026. Not all of the award-winning films from a year ago held strong the whole film year, of course; Sound of Falling, The President's Cake, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, award-winning in May, struggled to make a big impact several months later with quieter distribution and media reactions.  Now that the 2026 edition of the festival has wrapped Fjord, Fatherland, The Black Ball, Minotaur, A Man of His Time, All of a Sudden, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, as well as all of the non-winning films will now face the broader audience endurance test as they make their way through international markets. Will we see any of the 2026 Cannes titles in the mix come Oscar season, still building large devout fanbases? Not every film that wins big at Cannes "plays" elsewhere and some which come up empty-handed on the Croisette become awards players in other contexts (like Oscar or equivalent awards in their home countries).

The winners from the 79th Annual Cannes Film Festival and some commentary after the jump... 

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Cannes: "La Bola Negra (The Black Ball)"

by Elisa Giudici

The cast of LA BOLA NEGRA

By now, the Los Javis hardly need introduction at Cannes. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, who just tied Pawel Pawlikowski to win Best Director at the Cannes closing ceremony, have spent the last decade becoming not just successful filmmakers and showrunners, but cultural architects for a new generation of Spanish storytelling: proudly queer, emotionally maximalist, deeply rooted in national history while fully conversant in pop melodrama and contemporary television language. If Veneno made them unavoidable and La Mesías confirmed their creative ambition, La Bola Negra (The Black Ball) arrives as the film where they attempt to canonize themselves.

The scale alone announces the shift. Produced under the banner of El Deseo (the Almodóvar brothers’ company, also in Competition this year with Pedro’s latest) La Bola Negra carries the unmistakable aura of succession mythology around it. Not a rejection of the Almodóvar lineage so much as a generational mutation of it...

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Cannes 'Jury of One' and Predictions

by Elisa Giudici

LA BOLA NEGRA

There’s a strange atmosphere lingering over Cannes this year: not scandal, not outrage, not even division exactly. More like collective hesitation. A sense that everyone liked several films, respected many more, but truly loved very few. The consensus around the Croisette is unusually blunt: Competition was quite weak, only occasionally excellent, and rarely exhilarating. In a year where Hollywood increasingly seems willing to bypass festivals altogether for its prestige launches (Sinners, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another all cultivated awards ambitions without Cannes or Venice), the festival perhaps needed a genuine cinematic event more than usual. Instead, 2026 mostly offered strong craftsmanship without many discoveries. The real surprises often came outside Competition.

That doesn’t mean the lineup failed. The major auteurs mostly delivered exactly what one expects from them: polished, controlled, intelligent work. Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur are all films of remarkable rigor and seriousness...

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