The Cannes Film Festival Competition and the Screen Daily Jury Grid
The silly games I play with a 42-year-old review metric
The Cannes Film Festival has been the most prestigious film festival in the world since it first started in 1939. The festival was started by France in response to the growing fascist bias of the Venice Film Festival, with Mussolini himself meddling with results of its competition. The festival was halted due to World War II, but returned afterward as The Cannes Film Festival. Outside of the student protests in 1968 and the global pandemic in 2020, Cannes has been a yearly staple in championing international cinema with strong social themes and depictions of life rarely seen in Hollywood filmmaking. Funny enough, due to the ever-growing diversity of the Academy Award voting body after #OscarsSoWhite in 2015, Cannes has now been a surprising launching pad for potential Oscar rewarded films.
The star attraction of the festival (besides its red carpet stairs) is its official competition to be rewarded the Palme D’or for best film. The film is picked between a jury of about nine or so film industry titans, all led by a jury president (recent presidents include Greta Gerwig, Steven Spielberg, and Spike Lee). Anywhere from two to four films from the competition debut every day until the reward ceremony, which has made covering each film in competition a tricky task, especially in a pre-social media world.
Screen International is a British film publication that since 1984 devised a metric to try and replicate the jury experience of ranking the films in competition: the jury grid. Like the nine or so members of the jury, nine or so film critics from all over the world are assigned to watch every film in competition and rate them on a scale of 0-4. Each morning, Screen Internation would publish a daily magazine that would track acquisitions from Cannes, reviews from critics, and a grid of all the ratings of each film that played the previous day to track the reception to a film. From the moment I fell in love with world cinema, the Cannes Film Festival Competition has been a strange obsession of mine, especially the daily updated jury grids on Screen International’s online publication Screen Daily. Below is an example of a completed jury grid from 2019
In this example, the film that rated highest on the jury grid (Parasite) actually ended up winning the Palme D’or. In the history of the grid, it has only been right a little under 40% of the time. The two highest rated films of all time, 2018’s Burning (3.8) and 2016’s Toni Erdmann (3.7) weren’t even given a single reward from their respective juries. The grid is a flawed system, as highly revered yet divisive films do poorly (Titane won the Palme D’or after scoring a measly 1.6) while unanimously agreed upon greats can end up anywhere from 2.4-3.4 depending if a single critic gives a 0/4 (Sorry to Miss You and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood would have fared much better). All of these factors makes predicting not just the Palme D’or winner difficult, but the jury grid even more so.
Films are by all means are not a competitive sport. The fact that any good movie is made is a miracle, considering one department on a set could torpedo an entire production. Despite this, I have an absurd fascination with film festival competitions and award shows. Maybe it’s the former athlete coming out in me, or the young kid who watched every award show growing up so I could inevitably see Elton John perform. Regardless of the cause, my absurd obsession with the Cannes Film Festival Competition in particular led me to devise a game for each and every year.
First off, I predict who would be the award winners of the festival: The 1st place Palme D’or, 2nd place Grand Prix, 3rd place Jury Prize, the best director and screenplay winners as well (I don’t do acting prizes because that’s damn near impossible to do). If I correctly predict the Palme D’or, I win 20 points (I have failed so far every year). All the following correctly predicted award winner, I get 10 points. If any film I predict gets any other prize besides the one I guessed, I get 5 points.
Because somehow this wasn’t enough for me, I found a way to incorporate the Screen International Jury Grid into the festivities. On top of the award predictions, I’d guess the score each film would get and their overall standings in the rankings. Here’s how I tallied the points for predictions:
JURY GRID POINT GAME:
0 Difference: 10 PTS
1-2 Difference: 5 PTS
3-5 Difference: 3 PTS
6-9 Difference: 1 PTS
10+ Difference: 0 PTS
In the ranking game, I would use the difference between the actual rank of the film vs. my predicted ranking. The score would then end up like golf, with the lowest score being the best score. To this day, I only play the game by myself and try to beat my previous scores. The great thing about these silly little games I devised around the Cannes Film Festival is that it forces me to deep dive into each filmmaker in competition and familiarize myself with their work. A good chunk of films each year don’t translate over to American distribution and can take years to come out, leading to films that kind of get lost in the shuffle over time. It could take anywhere from a year to even three for these films to be widely available in the United States. Despite this, these films and filmmakers end up on my radar, and I’ve been exposed to so many greats because of the competition and the jury grid.
I could only track down grids dating back to the 2009 Cannes Film Competition, but have documented the scores of these grids on my Letterboxd account, attached here. More Cannes coverage to come in the future as the festival comes closer and the competition is finalized!