If you ask Sean Baker which honor he cherishes the most — the four Oscars he won for writing, directing, producing and editing the 2025 best picture winner "Anora" or the Palme d'Or he took at the Cannes film festival 10 months earlier — you'd need to have a considerable amount of patience as you wait out the long pause as he considers the question.

C'mon ... how do you choose?

The Cannes prize started the momentum for Baker's chaotic Cinderella story. I'm describing the movie, though since Baker had never earned a single Oscar nomination during his celebrated career, it could also describe his own journey to the Oscar record books.

"Winning the Palme was surreal and exciting beyond belief," Baker told me. "You look at the films and the filmmakers who have won that prize over the years, and it blows your mind. There's a reason Cannes is considered the most prestigious film festival in the world. It's still hard to process that we actually won."

"Anora" was the second Palme d'Or winner to win the best picture Oscar in a five-year stretch, following Bong Joon Ho's acclaimed 2019 hit "Parasite," the first non-English-language movie to win motion picture academy's top prize.

The Cannes-to-Oscars pipeline continued this year with Joachim Trier's family drama "Sentimental Value" and Kleber Mendonça Filho's political thriller "The Secret Agent" making the best picture cut and "It Was Just an Accident" and "Sirât" each earning two nominations.

Only "Sentimental Value" came away with an Oscar, but Cannes could still boast that it led all festivals with 19 nominations. Movies premiering at Venice picked up 15, while two other fall festivals, Telluride and Toronto, largely programmed the Cannes features, alongside films that didn't land with voters. (Telluride did premiere "Hamnet," which netted eight nominations and a win for lead actress Jessie Buckley.)

Those nominations numbers continued the shift that has been taking place the last several years as Cannes has supplanted the fall film festivals as the event with the most sway at the Academy Awards.

How did this happen?

Cannes didn't change. The Oscars did.

It started with the 2018-19 awards season when Alfonso Cuarón's "Roma" — a Cannes selection before the festival introduced a rule requiring all films in competition to have a theatrical release in France — and Paweł Pawlikowski's "Cold War" became multi-category Oscar contenders. Both were distributed by streamers: Netflix had "Roma," Amazon "Cold War."

With that success, streamers became eager to spend big to chase the prestige that comes with the Academy Awards.

At the same time, the motion picture academy was tweaking its rules for determining the shortlist for the international feature award, opening voting to more members. That coincided with the influx of new voting members living outside the United States as the academy diversified its ranks in the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite social media campaign. (Twenty-four percent of Oscar voters now live outside the U.S.)

So when "Parasite" won the best picture Oscar in 2020, the confluence of these factors turned the world's most important film festival into the best launchpad for a movie with awards aspirations.

Cannes created the Palme d'Or in 1955, replacing the verbosely worded "Grand Prix of the International Film Festival" honor that was given to directors. The first Palme winner, "Marty," a romantic drama starring Ernest Borgnine as a lonely, middle-aged butcher longing for love, won the Oscar for best picture. (Borgnine took lead actor.)

It took another 64 years for that to happen again, when "Parasite" prevailed at the Oscars.

Cannes' late spring date gives movies playing there a head start in gaining the attention of awards voters and film critics. The playbook this decade has been to premiere at the festival in May, make a splash and then return in the fall to Telluride, Toronto and the New York Film Festival for a second wave of publicity.

"Essentially, you're just lengthening the ramp, which with international films really helps put these movies on the radar," says a veteran awards consultant, who, because of potential client conflicts, asked to speak anonymously. "By the time 'Sentimental Value' landed at New York, it had already played at Cannes and Telluride. People were talking about it from May to September."

Awards hopefuls from international auteurs, including Pedro Almodóvar's tragicomedy "Bitter Christmas," Ryusuke Hamaguchi's French-language drama "All of a Sudden" and Pawlikowski's "Fatherland," his long-awaited follow-up to "Cold War" starring Sandra Hüller, will aim to duplicate that success this year.

At last year's Cannes, indie studio Neon, the company behind "Parasite" and "Anora," bought "It Was Just an Accident" (which won the Palme), "The Secret Agent" and "Sirât," all of which went on to be nominated, alongside "Sentimental Value" (another Neon film) and "The Voice of Hind Rajab" (a Venice premiere) for the international feature Oscar. It also purchased the French animated movie "Arco," which earned an Oscar nomination for animated feature.

One awards campaigner believes — and he prefaces this by saying people think he's nuts for saying this — that the advent of text messaging as the predominant way people communicate has led to people being more comfortable with subtitles.

"We're constantly reading our communications," he says. "We're watching English-language movies and shows with the subtitles on. That was never the case a few years ago. Subtitles are part of our lives now."

And, more than ever, so are the movies playing at Cannes.

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