the truly embarrassing press conference from Vlade Divac, the leaks of Vivek Ranadive's lust for Buddy Hield, and the failure to sell off a host of spare veteran roster parts that theoretically could have been turned into picks.
It was billed as the year in which female film-makers and women's issues would be in the spotlight. The festival opened with a film by a female director for the first time in 28 years, Isabella Rossellini chaired the Un Certain Regard jury and Salma Hayek convened a high-profile panel to discuss the role of women in cinema. There was plenty to talk about – but had anything really changed? The numbers seemed to speak for themselves: of the 19 films in competition, only two were directed by women. And then came 'Heelgate' – of which, more later… Faced with suggestions that the festival is sexist, artistic director Thierry Frémaux was having none of it. Cannes was being held to an unfairly high standard, he claimed, one not applied to other festivals like Venice or Berlin. His suggestion? Instead, people should “attack the Oscars”.
“It is exceptionally unlikely that we would be witnessing a record year of warmth, during a record-warm decade, during a several decades-long period of warmth that appears to be unrivaled for more than a thousand years, were it not for the rising levels of planet-warming gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels,” Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at the Pennsylvania State University, said in an email.