Cannes Film Festival 2017 Palme d’Or Betting Odds
–The first Cannes Film Festival was held in 1946.
–The festival is a big opportunity for European films to get exposure.
–The Palme d’Or (‘Golden Palm’) is awarded to the best film exhibited at the festival.
The 70th Cannes Film Festival (Festival de Cannes in French) will take place in Cannes, France from May 17 through 28. The invitation only festival is a gathering of ‘A List’ actors, directors and producers from all over the world. The Festival was founded in 1939 but got off to a slow start due to budgetary issues and World War 2. The first Cannes Film Festival was held in 1946, the second in 1949 and the third in 1951. It’s been held annually since then. The fundamental premise behind the creation of the Festival was to celebrate excellence in film making from around the world without regard to commercial factors. The founders took great care to keep the judging process equal with only one representative per country allowed on the jury that evaluates the films and awards the Palme d’Or.
Initially, the top prize at the Festival was known as the Grand Prix du Festival. In 1955, the Palme d’Or was created to replace the ‘Grand Prix’. Or at least that was the idea–in 1964 there was a controversy over copyright issues involving the Palme d’Or which resulted in the Grand Prix du Festival being re-introduced. It would be over a decade until the Palme d’Or returned. The Palme was restored to its spot as top prize at the festival in 1975 and continues to this day. The Palme d’Or is just one of over twenty awards given out at the Festival running the gamut from awards for acting, directing, writing and technical excellence to awards for student films, documentaries and the critics’ choice. There’s even an award for the ‘best canine performance’ called the ‘Palm Dog’ and the ‘Queer Palm’ for the best LGBT related film.
THE 2017 PALME D’OR NOMINEES AND JURY
Nineteen films are nominated for the Palme d’Or this year. The jury has done a decent job of ‘spreading the award around’ to a variety of countries over the past decade with one exception–the French have three Palme d’Or’s in the past ten years. Go figure. Austria is the only other country to win more than once in the past decade with other winners coming from the USA, UK, Turkey, Tunisia, Thailand, Romania and Ireland (2013 winner Blue Is The Warmest Colour is credited as a co-production of France and Tunisia). The 2016 Palme d’Or went to British film I, Daniel Blake. Director Ken Loach also won the Palme in 2006 for the Irish film The Wind That Shakes the Barley putting him in a very exclusive fraternity of multiple award winners (Alf Sjoberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Bille August, Emir Kusturica, Shohei Imamura, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Michael Haneke are the others).
If you want to get the background on all 19 nominated films:
2017 CANNES PALME D’OR NOMINEES
You can also read about *every* Palme d’Or nominee from 1946 to the present:
CANNES PALME D’OR NOMINEES 1946-2017
The 2017 Cannes Film Festival Jury is a very eclectic nine member panel led by a jury president (aka bossman or chairperson). The 2017 Jury President is the excellent Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar (Tie Me Up Tie Me Down, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Law of Desire). Maren Ade, Jessica Chastain, Fan Bingbing, Agnès Jaoui, Park Chan-wook, Will Smith, Paolo Sorrentino and Gabriel Yared are the jury members.
The favorite to win the 2017 Palme D’Or is Happy End, a French language film with production linage that includes Germany, France and Austria. Happy End stars Isabelle Huppert and is directed by Michael Haneke. Haneke would make history with a victory as it would give him an unprecedented three Palme d’Or awards (The White Ribbon in 2009 and Amour in 2012). An intriguing choice at a price is The Beguiled at +2750. The Beguiled is a remake of a 1971 film starring Clint Eastwood and Geraldine Page. Both are adaptations of a 1966 book by the same name written by Thomas Cullinan. While the original mandate is to evaluate these films without regard to commercial elements The Beguiled features a star studded cast including Collin Farrell, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman. It was directed by Sophia Coppola, a former Cannes jurist and the daughter of a legit giant of the film industry, Francis Ford Coppola. A win by The Beguiled would make Sophia and Francis Coppola the only father/daughter pair (or father/son for that matter) to win the Palme d’Or. There have been three pairs of siblings to win the Palme d’Or–two time winners Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani and the Coen Brothers who won for Barton Fink in 1991.
Here’s the SPORTS BETTING EXPERTS betting odds for the film to win the Palme d’Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.
2017 CANNES FILM FESTIVAL BETTING ODDS
TO WIN PALME D’OR
Happy End: +350
Wonderstuck: +750
Loveless: +750
The Square: +950
The Killing of a Sacred Deer: +950
A Gentle Creature: +1250
The Day After: +1250
Jupiter’s Moon: +1450
120 Heartbeats Per Minute: +1450
Radiance: +1750
Okja: +1750
You Were Never Really Here: +2450
In The Fade: +2450
Rodin: +2750
The Meyerowitz Stories: +2750
The Beguiled: +2750
Good Time: +3750
Double Lover: +7750
Redoubtable: +10000