“The César for best actress goes to… Vicky Krieps for Love me tender!” Ovation from the crowd, which offers the German-Luxembourgish actress a triumph commensurate with her performance in Anna Cazenave Cambet’s film, clearly one of the monuments of the 2025 cinema year. But suddenly, the author of these lines wakes up in a sweat, realizing that all this was just a sweet dream – and that in this sad reality, Love me tender did not in fact receive a single nomination for the 2026 César Awards.
As soon as the nominations in question were announced, we felt that this would not be the winners of the century and that a slightly lukewarm breeze was likely to blow over the ceremony. It was even a horrifying storm of academicism that was brewing, symbolized by the umpteenth nominations of the indestructible Isabelle Huppert and Dominique Blanc – cited this year for roles that were not really memorable – and especially by the presence in six categories of The richest woman in the world (from the always nazebroque Thierry Klifa).
Youth still restrained
It must be said that with a few exceptions, French cinema has not really shone in 2025, lining up “not-bad-yeah-go-see-it-we’re-having-a-good-time” films, where we would have wanted something memorable, something eternal. Besides the shunned Love me tendertherefore, the two peaks of the year were The Little Lastby Hafsia Herzi and Ninoby Pauline Loquès, each of which earned their main performer (Nadia Melliti for the first and Théodore Pellerin for the other) a César for Most Promising Actor.
Should we be satisfied with that? Well above the general melee, Nadia Melliti and Théodore Pellerin could easily have vied for another statuette, that of the best performance of the year, except that the regulations of the César Academy prohibit it.
Since Tahar Rahim was named both Best Newcomer and Best Actor in 2010 for his role in A prophetthis is what article 6 says: “If, at the end of the first round, an actor or actress obtains, for the same film, enough votes to be nominated, in several “interpretation” categories, namely: Best Actor, Best Actor in a Supporting Role, or Best Promising Actor (male or female), he or she will be nominated only in the category for which he or she has obtained the highest percentage of votes (number of votes obtained divided by the number of votes counted for category).”
In other words, if you have been a success in the best prospect category, you can say goodbye to the big leagues. This regulation makes it almost impossible to nominate (and therefore win) the youngest performers. At a time when Télérama is wondering where the new faces are (and Troiscouleurs is fortunately not waiting to answer the question), the Académie des César should also be wondering how to inject new blood instead of becoming a little more like the Grévin museum each year.
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It’s (Jim) Carrey
This had been quite bludgeoned over the course of the numerous advertising spots filmed for the occasion: it was likely that the highlight of the show of this 51e edition lies in the way in which Benjamin Lavernhe, master of ceremonies for one evening, was going to roll out the red carpet for Jim Carrey, present to receive an honorary award. This is indeed what happened: during a (very) (very) long intro, the French actor was able to declaim his love to his (?) Canadian-American counterpart.
Sung numbers, Tex Avery-style special effects, identically reproduced costumes: Benjamin Lavernhe gave everything to pay homage to Jim Carrey, not quite managing to warm up an audience renowned for its overall coldness. We can, however, regret that the career of the North American actor has been more or less summed up in a single film: The Mask. The final plan of the ceremony, taken from the conclusion of The Truman Show (“Good afternoon, good evening and good night”), arrived far too late.
Result: Benjamin Lavernhe had a lot of fun, but above all he gave the impression of se please by acting like a joke in front of your idol. Thank you, however, for having made Emmanuel Curtil, Jim Carrey’s voice actor in front of the eternal, take a bite out of it, for once invited to show his face in order to meet him for the first time, taking the opportunity to award a César and above all to raise a cry of alarm in the face of the irruption of artificial intelligence (AI) in the world of dubbing.
It would also have been more judicious to let the distinguished voice actor give his Canadian-American counterpart (?) the honorary César that he had come to receive. This would have prevented Michel “Eternal Sunshine” Gondry, designated as deliverer, from wallowing in a winded and self-referencing monologue. Jim Carrey gave a speech of thanks entirely in French, which was more cute than intelligible.
Concerns
Emmanuel Curtil is not the only one to have expressed his fear of seeing AI arrive in the world of the seventh art to take bread from the mouths of honest workers. This was also the case for production designer Catherine Cosme, rewarded for The Unknown of the Grande Archeor even Léa Drucker, crowned best actress for the second time after 2019 (To the hilt), who posed as a great defender of“human intelligence” (as opposed to its artificial counterpart).
We felt that this sector of French cinema, in the so-called “technical” categories but not only, had entered a phase in 2025 which will perhaps never end: that of the fight against the irruption of AI in the world of art. At a time when tech giants are making giant progress and budgets allocated to culture are being reduced, there is indeed reason to fear that dehumanization is underway.
Artificial intelligence was not singled out as the only enemy to be taken into consideration: here and there, speeches emerged against the planned end of biodiversity, the threats weighing on intermittent status, and the violence committed against certain peoples. But actress Golshifteh Farahani’s powerful words about the Iranian people (“The living remain standing, but something within them descends into darkness, of no return”), to which Pierre Lottin (best supporting actor for The Stranger) also addressed his thoughts, were they enough? Not sure.
Perhaps this is due to its broadcast on Canal+ (with live broadcast on Europe 1), but on the political level, most of the speakers expressed a relative reluctance, as if they had been muzzled at all. Many speeches seeming very (too) prepared gave the impression of having gone through the box of quality control (or self-censorship) and therefore depoliticizing smoothing.
Long, long, long…
Every year, it’s the same thing: around twelve minutes to midnight, we wonder why we aren’t already in the arms of Morpheus instead of listening to boring speeches. This year was particularly marked by some verbose tunnels, uttered by icons to whom no one obviously had the guts to tell that their texts needed a few cuts. With all due respect, David Cronenberg and Isabelle Adjani particularly excelled in the soporific blabla category.
The latter was not content to be long, very long; she also caused a terribly awkward moment, urging all the men in the audience to stand up and make some noise for the abused women of the world. The male audience briefly complied, their finger on the seam of their pants, with an absence of spontaneity and vigor that made Isabelle Adjani no doubt already imagine entering the pantheon of the Caesars go pschitt at this moment.
“I ask all men to stand up.”
Isabelle Adjani asks men to show their support for women’s rights. pic.twitter.com/kDIclzNWoN— CANAL+ (@canalplus) February 26, 2026
What can we hope in any case from an assembly which applauded wildly following the tribute in images paid to Brigitte Bardot, far-right actress who died on December 28, 2025. You had to have your ear canals well cleaned to be able to discern rare boos in the middle (and at the bottom) of this soft and meaningful consensus.
Joys nonetheless
To try not to drown in this world increasingly corrupted by fascism and fear, we must not forget to rejoice, including in the little things – thank you personal development coaches and fortune cookies for this valuable advice. So let’s not forget to find cool (or funny):
- That Vimala Pons receives an award for her supporting role (sorry, her role as “secondary woman”) in Attachmentby Carine Tardieu;
- That Carine Tardieu, precisely, receives the prizes for best film and best adapted screenplay (with Agnès Feuvre and Raphaële Moussafir) for her lovely feature film (even if the queen of the evening should have been Hafsia Herzi, the author and director of The Little Last);
- That Pauline Clément exists: her presentation, with Marina Hands, of the César for best costumes triggered a rare and deserved hilarity within the assembly;
Slight costume problem 😂
Marina Hands and Pauline Clément come to present the César for best costumes. pic.twitter.com/0esX8N021f— CANAL+ (@canalplus) February 26, 2026
- That the so beautiful but little known Nino is preparing to live a new life thanks to his double César (in addition to Théodore Pellerin, best hope, he was also named best first film), just like the animated film Arco Besides;
- That we live in an unpredictable world where sentences like “Franck Dubosc beat Jafar Panahi for best original screenplay” Or “Michèle Laroque came with Ben Harper because they are going to shoot a film together” –it is less the stated facts that delight us than the “exquisite corpse” side of these statements.
The complete list
Best film: Attachmentby Carine Tardieu
Best achievement: Richard Linklater (New wave)
Best Actress: Léa Drucker (File 137)
Best Actor: Laurent Lafitte (The richest woman in the world)
Best Supporting Actress: Vimala Pons (Attachment)
Best Supporting Actor: Pierre Lottin (The Stranger)
Best female revelation: Nadia Melliti (The Little Last)
Best male reveal: Théodore Pellerin (Nino)
Best Original Screenplay: Franck Dubosc and Sarah Kamisnky (A bear in the Jura)
Best adaptation: Carine Tardieu, Agnès Feuvre and Raphaële Moussafir (Attachmentbased on the novel Privacyby Alice Ferney)
Best costumes: Pascaline Chavanne (New wave)
Best Photography: David Chambille (New wave)
Best Decors: Catherine Cosme (The Unknown of the Grande Arche)
Best edit: Catherine Schwartz (New wave)
Best sound: Romain Cadilhac, Marc Namblard, Olivier Touche and Olivier Goinard (The Song of the Forests)
Best visual effects: Lisa Fischer (The Unknown of the Grande Arche)
Best Original Music: Arnaud Toulon (Arco)
Best first film: Ninoby Pauline Loquès
Best Animated Film: Arcoby Ugo Bienvenu
Best documentary film: The Song of the Forestsby Vincent Munier
Best foreign film: One battle after anotherby Paul Thomas Anderson
Best short fiction film: Death of an actorby Ambroise Rateau
Best Documentary Short Film: In the ladies’ bathby Margaux Fournier
Best Animated Short Film: Water Girlby Sandra Desmazières
Honorary Caesar: Jim Carrey
