Credits: Georges Biard / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 3.0.
On January 28, 2026, the Académie des arts et techniques du cinéma unveiled the cesar awards nominations 2026. This list is the result of a first round of internal voting held throughout January. At the top of the cesar nominations list, ‘Nouvelle Vague’ by Richard Linklater accumulates 10 nominations, ahead of L’Attachement, Dossier 137 and “L’Inconnu de la Grande Arche,” each with 8. The cesar awards ceremony 2026 (51st edition), chaired by Camille Cottin and hosted by Benjamin Lavernhe, will take place at the Olympia in Paris, broadcast free-to-air on CANAL+, with an Honorary César presented to Jim Carrey.
A List That Falls Like A Winter Clapboard
There is, in the announcement of the cesar awards nominations, a way of taking the breath of the profession. One morning, everything freezes late in the morning, or almost. You find yourself listening to a roll call of titles like a cast list before a film. The Césars love those moments when the profession, often scattered between shoots, dark rooms and post-screening debates, gathers. Indeed, it agrees to order itself around the same page.
The page, this year, tastes of contrast. On one hand, a film watches cinema being born. Moreover, it presents itself as an event of making as much as of storytelling. On the other hand, works cling to the real and to institutions. Furthermore, they explore the bonds that form and unravel at human scale. Between these poles, an obvious thread crosses the selection without slogan or posture. Indeed, several female performances take their place. In addition, the list pinned names like faces on a wall.
The game of the Césars starts before the evening. It begins here in the alignment of categories and in the logic of the branches. Besides, it is in the arithmetic of nominations that the impression of momentum or inertia is born. Behind this rite, a simple mechanism: a first round to bring names forward, a second to decide. It’s a craft democracy, with its loyalties, blind spots, enthusiasms. And it is each year a way of telling the story collectively.
This moment has the deceptive gentleness of rankings. It promises rewards, but it already sets up a common narrative.
Richard Linklater And The Vertigo Of “Nouvelle Vague”
The momentum of Nouvelle Vague lies first in its paradox. Making a film about a movement that blasted the rules risks freezing its vitality. Indeed, capturing the essence of such a movement can paradoxically reduce its energy. Yet Linklater, a filmmaker of passing time and branching conversations, does not treat this story like a monument. He slips into it as one enters a workshop, driven by curiosity. Indeed, he knows that the essential is played out in gestures.
The title alone carries a promise of air. It evokes that moment when French cinema embraced the outdoors, speed and the unexpected. Moreover, the camera, leaving studios, took the world by the scruff of the neck. That this evocation is now carried by an American director is no kind of exoticism. It is even a form of politeness addressed to French history. Indeed, one finally accepts that certain myths no longer belong to anyone. Consequently, they circulate, are translated and contradicted. Thus, they return enriched by their detours. The Nouvelle Vague, long seen as a national narrative, is now a language. Furthermore, this film makes it resonate without caricature.
With 10 nominations, “Nouvelle Vague” stands as the locomotive, but it would be reductive to see it as a mere fad. This lead expresses a desire for cinema about cinema. Indeed, there is a need to return to the precise moment when an image takes a risk. Moreover, it is at that spot that a shot is invented and where a directing gesture emerges. Consequently, it tips an era. It also signals voters’ attraction to a work that stages the very act of creating. Furthermore, it reminds that cinema history is not an archive. It is a living matter, a legacy that still burns in the celluloid of those who film.
There is finally something rather rare to observe. It is the possibility offered to the public to find, in a contemporary film, the thrill of invention. By choosing first to nominate, the Césars say they recognize that thrill. It remains to be seen whether the evening will consecrate it.
The Chasers At Eight Nominations, Three Films And Three Ways Of Inhabiting The Real
Behind the favorite, three films advance together, each with 8 nominations, like three different answers to the same question: how to film a country without forcing it. The selection draws here a triangle linking the intimate, the institution and the city.
L’Attachement stands on the side of bond, that fragile matter that makes or unmakes family. The film moves with sensitive precision, attentive to the small decisions that, quietly, shift a life. French cinema has often excelled in these stories of proximity. Moreover, the year seems to recall that there is strength there. It is not modesty.
Dossier 137 relies on what procedures try to order. You enter by the investigation, you stay for the gray areas. This kind of film challenges the temptation of commentary. It must show, imply, render complexity without sheltering behind it. Its presence at this level of nominations signals attention to a cinema that looks at state mechanisms and a society’s tensions with the patience of observation.
L’Inconnu de la Grande Arche changes scale, but does not leave the same idea. It’s that of a France built by choices, plans, compromises and egos. Filming architecture is filming an ambition, and sometimes a battle. The Grande Arche, a public monument and symbol, calls for narratives where stones are never neutral.
These three films, aligned in the same intensity of recognition, offer a plural reading of the year. They recall that a ceremony is not only a contest. It is also a temperature check.
Marina Foïs, Leïla Bekhti, Nadia Melliti, Three Ways To Own The Screen
In this list, the gaze often lands on actresses. It is not for show. Indeed, several roles left a clear imprint on the year. It was as if films had first been written on faces.
Marina Foïs is nominated for “La Femme la plus riche du monde.” The title evokes the dazzle of wealth, but the film is interested in the impact of money on relationships. It also explores the entourage and the solitudes it widens. Foïs has the ability to make felt, in a single movement, control and fragility. She does not play power as a pose. She makes it an intimate material, a tension. Her nomination continues a career where comedy never prevented depth.
Leïla Bekhti is among the names selected for Ma mère, Dieu et Sylvie Vartan, a title both family novel and refrain. It carries a popular memory. This includes the songs that cross kitchens and brave idols. Moreover, it encompasses confidences passed down through generations. Bekhti, an actress of momentum and nerve, also knows how to play interiority without slowing the pace. She has that accuracy that holds gravity and light together.
And then there is Nadia Melliti, associated with “La Petite Dernière,” and carried by a word that comes back insistently whenever her name is spoken: revelation. One must be wary of this term, so often used to accelerate careers. But it describes here an emergence, an acting evident, a way of being present that does not feel like an exercise. Her nomination fits into a larger movement. This concerns French cinema which, when it allows itself, knows how to open its doors to new faces.
These three trajectories do not overlap. They tell, on the contrary, three ages of the craft, three tones, three relationships to the screen. They give this selection a particular relief, that of a national casting reinventing itself by touches.
The Olympia, Camille Cottin, Benjamin Lavernhe, The Ceremony As Stage
The Césars do not just hand out trophies. They make an evening, and that evening has its set, the Olympia, its red seats, its entrance that is part ritual and part show. Paris rediscovers each late February a piece of its cultural mythology. This mixes the seriousness of the trades and the excitement of live broadcast.
The presidency of Camille Cottin promises steadiness. She masters the art of cruelty-free irony and presence without overacting. Moreover, she has the capacity to hold the room respectfully while leaving it space. Opposite her, Benjamin Lavernhe, master of ceremonies, brings another kind of elegance, more theatrical, more playful, able to embrace the rhythms of an evening scripted but always threatened by the unexpected.
For that is the paradox of the Césars. Everything is staged, timed, edited like a show. And yet the essential escapes the plans. It appears in a hesitation or in a thank-you that is too true. Furthermore, it manifests during an embrace that lasts a second longer than expected. These accidents of sincerity are what allow a ceremony, even an anticipated one, to remain capable of touching.
The free-to-air broadcast on CANAL+ keeps the event as a shared appointment. It brings cinema back to the hour of the living room and live discussion. Moreover, it provokes a smile pulled by a line or sparks annoyance at a speech that drags. Above all, it recalls that a ceremony is only worth its ability to leave the room, to reach beyond the stalls. Cinema, even when it celebrates itself among professionals, needs this window. It needs an audience that watches, that sometimes objects, that mostly remembers.
Jim Carrey, The Tribute To A Comic Body That Became Memory
The Honorary César awarded to Jim Carrey gives the evening a particular hue. Indeed, this distinction represents recognition beyond the strict frame of the French year. Carrey belongs to those global actors whose grimace one thinks one knows, before remembering that the grimace is a mask, and that the mask can take you far.
His slapstick has long been read as pure excess. It is also a discipline and a writing of the body. This art of excess reveals the era by pushing it to the crack. By honoring him, the ceremony recalls a too-often-forgotten truth: comedy is not a minor genre. It can contain, implicitly, anxiety, melancholy, lucidity.
The tribute also has something cinephile in the simplest sense, that of recognizing a familiar presence in collective memory. Many grew up with these films, with that energy. The Olympia stage, by opening to him, promises a meeting between two entertainment traditions: that of French cinema, attached to text and acting, and that of an actor whose body has become a signature.
What The Césars Already Tell About A French Year
A list of nominations does not say everything. It does not name absent films, angers, omissions, debates that slip behind the applause. It says, however, something solid, a provisional consensus, a map of what mattered.
The Césars, since their creation, operate like a double machine: memory and snapshot. They represent both the year’s notebook and its stage. It’s the place where one records, one evening, what one loved. What one could not forget is also noted. Finally, it is also what one wants to defend. The two-round vote plays the role of a filter. It organizes subjectivity without ever making it disappear. The first round of voting sketches a landscape. The second fixes it into a winners list. Between the two, there is a month when films return to mind. We rewatch scenes and compare gestures. We wonder, without admitting it, what will remain.
The 2026 edition seems to hold together two desires. One to return to the act of cinema, with Nouvelle Vague at the forefront. This film looks its art in the eye. The other to stay close to the world, with stories of bonds, investigation and construction. These films do not seek to explain, but to show.
In between, the place given to actresses acts as a backbone. It does not solve representation questions, it does not erase them. It simply signals that several roles were written and played with an intensity that is indisputable.
On February 26, 2026, in the evening, the Olympia will host the mix of nervousness and celebration that makes the Césars’ atmosphere. There will be envelopes, silences, smiles that crack, speeches too long, speeches too short. Behind the scenography, that fragile thing cinema continues to produce makes itself manifest. From the community emerges, if only for one night.
For now, the list remains open like a cast list before the film. It gives everyone the chance to replay the year, to rethink a part, to rewatch a scene. Above all, it reminds that cinema does not exist only when it is released. It exists when it is shared and discussed. It comes alive when celebrated, and also when contested with love.
And, deep down, the Césars are never more fair than when they accept their own fragility. A hall, faces, films that do not resemble one another, a profession that doubts as much as it asserts. On February 26, the Olympia will give a name to a few moments. The others, the ones you take away on the way out, will keep working on memory.
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