There are hurdles to clear. In the race for the 96th Oscars, which will be presented on Sunday, March 10, in Los Angeles, Justine Triet's Anatomie d'une Chute (Anatomy of a Fall) is one of the few feature films to receive five nominations – including Best Picture – along with Cord Jefferson's American Fiction, Alexander Payne's The Holdovers and Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest. However, the French hopeful will also be up against heavyweights of a different caliber, such as Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan, produced and distributed by Universal and nominated 13 times; Poor Things by Yorgos Lanthimos (Fox Searchlight, a Disney subsidiary), 11 times; Killers of the Flower Moon by Martin Scorsese (Apple), 10 times; Barbie by Greta Gerwig (Warner Bros), eight times; and Maestro by Bradley Cooper (Netflix), nominated seven times.
Backed by extremely wealthy groups, these competitors enjoy an abundance of resources in this Oscars race to secure the maximum number of votes among the 9,797 voters. At the Cannes Film Festival in May 2023, the French film team signed up with the independent American distributor Neon to champion its cause. This was anything but a random choice since its CEO, Tom Quinn, succeeded in bringing Bong Joon-ho's South Korean film Parasite to Hollywood's zenith, winning four statuettes at the 92nd Oscars in 2020. A fan of French films, Quinn has also boosted, across the Atlantic, the trajectories of Titane by Julia Ducournau, and Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) by Céline Sciamma. "Virtually every American distributor made us an offer at Cannes. We chose Neon before we got the Palme," explained David Thion, associate co-producer of Les Films Pelléas.
Preparing for the Oscars "meant six months of handshakes, dinners, screenings, newspaper articles and media campaigns. Exactly the life of a politician on the campaign trail," said Manuel Chiche, Parasite's French distributor. There was an enormous amount at stake, he explained. "Thanks to the Oscars, Bong Joon-ho's film went from $5 million [€4.6 million] in box-office receipts in the US to over $53 million and reached $209 million in other countries." This was a minor miracle for a film that had a budget of $11.4 million.
This is the destiny that fills Triet's wildest dreams. The whole team has been on the front line of the Oscars race since October 2023. The director has bent over backward to promote her film among voters, responding to their questions for an hour after each screening – often several times a day. But the groundwork had already begun, explained co-producer Marie-Ange Luciani, head of Les Films de Pierre.
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