After two weeks of non-stop cinema, the moment of truth has arrived. The winners of the 77th Cannes Film Festival are being announced at a gala ceremony on Saturday night.
The stars of Jacques Audiard’s gender-transitioning Mexican crime musical Emilia Pérez won best actress, with Karla Sofía Gascón becoming the first trans actress to win in Cannes.
Barbie director Greta Gerwig, president of this year’s international jury, will unveil the winners, including the Palme d’Or for best film. You can watch the ceremony live (in French) on France TV or in English on YouTube.
This has been a divisive Cannes and there is no clear frontrunner going into this year’s awards. Only a few movies — including Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, the first Indian film to play in Cannes competition since 1994, and the Iranian political melodrama The Seed of the Sacred Fig from dissident director Mohammad Rasoulof, who fled Iran just weeks before the festival — have been universally embraced by critics.
Most have divided audiences. Francis Ford Coppola‘s $120 million sci-fi epic Megalopolis, starring Adam Driver, was both widely panned and selectively celebrated. Emilia Pérez was hailed by most as a masterpiece but left some critics cold.
Sean Baker’s sex worker comedy Anora was lauded by U.S. critics but dismissed by many in Europe as too mainstream for Cannes competition. Andrea Arnold’s Bird, a working-class melodrama with fantastical elements, similarly drew both praise and pans in almost equal measure. The Substance, from French director Coralie Fargeat and starring Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid, was hailed as a masterpiece and dismissed as an unoriginal update on David Cronenberg-esque body horror. Cronenberg’s new film, The Shrouds, also in competition, didn’t so much divide critics as leave them underwhelmed, with most calling the movie a muted version of familiar themes from the veteran Canadian filmmaker.
Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump movie The Apprentice, which looks at how the former U.S. president was shaped by his tutelage under cutthroat lawyer Roy Cohn (Sebastian Stan plays Trump, Jeremy Strong is Cohn), received the most press attention, particularly after Trump’s lawyers sent a cease and desist order to the filmmakers, trying to prevent the movie from being sold in the U.S. But Abbasi’s somewhat conventional biopic approach, and what some have seen as an overly sympathetic take on Trump’s early years, did not go over well with some critics.
One filmmaker everyone can agree on is George Lucas, who will be receiving an honorary Palme d’Or during tonight’s ceremony, for his contribution to cinema, from his first feature, THX-1138, which premiered in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight section back in 1971, to the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises.
A full list of winners follows (updating live).
Palme d’Or
Grand Prix
Jury Prize
Emilia Pérez
Best Director
Miguel Gomez, Grand Tour
Best Screenplay
Coralie Fargeat, The Substance
Best Actress
Adriana Paz, Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Emilia Pérez
Best Actor
Jesse Plemons, Kinds of Kindness
Honorary Palme d’Or
George Lucas
Special Award
Mohammad Rasoulof, The Seed of the Sacred Fig
