On January 28, 2026, the Academy of Cinema Arts and Techniques unveiled the cesar awards nominations 2026 list. This list is the result of a first round of internal voting held throughout January. Leading the cesar nominations list for 2026, ‘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 be held 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 profession’s breath away. One morning, everything freezes in the late morning, or almost. You find yourself listening to a recitation of titles like credits before a film. The Césars love these moments when the profession, often scattered between shoots, dark screens and post-screening debates, comes together. Indeed, it accepts to order itself around the same page.
The page, this year, tastes of contrast. On the 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 attach themselves to the real and to institutions. Furthermore, they explore the ties that form and unravel at human scale. Between these poles, an obvious thread runs through the selection without slogan or pose. Indeed, several female performances take their place. Moreover, the list pinned names as one pins faces on a wall.
The game of the Césars begins before the evening. It begins here in the alignment of categories and in the logic of the branches. In addition, 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 between them. It is a professional democracy, with its loyalties, blind spots, enthusiasms. And each year, a way of telling a collective story.
This moment has the deceptive sweetness of rankings. It promises rewards, but it already sets a shared narrative.
Richard Linklater And The Vertigo Of “Nouvelle Vague”
The dynamic of Nouvelle Vague stems first from its paradox. Making a film about a movement that blasted the rules entails the risk of freezing its vitality. Indeed, capturing the essence of such a movement can paradoxically reduce its energy. Yet Linklater, a filmmaker of passing time and conversations that branch off, does not treat this story as a monument. He slips into it as one enters a workshop, driven by curiosity. Indeed, he knows 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 in its arms. That this evocation is today carried by an American director is no exoticism. It is even a form of politeness addressed to French history. Indeed, we finally accept that some myths no longer belong to anyone. Consequently, they circulate, are translated and contradicted. Thus, they return enriched by their detours. The Nouvelle Vague, long perceived as a national story, is now a language. Furthermore, this film makes it resonate without caricaturing it.
With 10 nominations, “Nouvelle Vague” positions itself as a locomotive, but it would be reductive to see it as a mere trend. This lead expresses a desire for cinema about cinema. Indeed, there is a need to return to the precise instant when an image takes a risk. Moreover, it is at that place that a shot is invented and where a directorial gesture emerges. Consequently, it tips an era. It also mentions voters’ attraction to a work that stages the act of creating itself. Furthermore, it recalls that cinema history is not an archive. It is a living material, a legacy that still burns in the film stock of those who shoot.
There is finally something quite rare to observe. It is the possibility offered to the public to rediscover, in a contemporary film, the thrill of invention. The Césars, by choosing first to nominate, say they recognize that thrill. It remains to be seen whether the evening will consecrate it.
The Chasers With 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 imposing 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 proceeds with a 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 there is strength there. It is not modesty.
Dossier 137 leans on what procedures try to order. One enters by investigation, one stays for the gray areas. This type of film challenges the temptation of commentary. It must show, let be heard, render complexity without hiding behind it. Its presence at this level of nominations speaks to attention paid to cinema that looks at the mechanisms of the State and society’s tensions with the patience of observation.
L’Inconnu de la Grande Arche changes scale, but does not abandon the same idea. It is that of a France built by choices, plans, compromises and egos. Filming architecture is filming ambition, and sometimes a battle. The Grande Arche, public monument and symbol, calls for this kind of story where stones are never neutral.
These three films, aligned in the same intensity of recognition, offer a plural reading of the year. They remind that a ceremony is not only a contest. It is also a temperature reading.
Marina Foïs, Leïla Bekhti, Nadia Melliti, Three Ways To Occupy The Screen
In this list, attention often falls on actresses. It is not for show. Indeed, several roles marked the year with a clear imprint. It was as if the films were first 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 enlarges. Foïs has the ability to make feel, in the same 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 has never prevented depth.
Leïla Bekhti appears among the names 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 from generation to generation. Bekhti, an actress of momentum and nerve, also knows how to play interiority without slowing the rhythm. She has that rightness that holds gravity and light together.
And then there is Nadia Melliti, associated with “La Petite Dernière”, and carried by a word that returns insistently as soon as her name is spoken: revelation. One must beware of this term, so often used to hasten destinies. But it describes here an appearance, an evident acting, a way of being there that does not resemble an exercise. Her nomination is part of a broader 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 in strokes.
The Olympia, Camille Cottin, Benjamin Lavernhe, The Ceremony As Stage
The Césars do not merely hand out trophies. They create an evening, and this evening has its set, the Olympia, its red seats, its entrance that is both rite and spectacle. Paris rediscovers each late February a part of its cultural mythology. This mixes the seriousness of the craft and the thrill of live broadcast.
The presidency of Camille Cottin promises steady bearing. She masters the art of cruelty-free irony and presence without overacting. Moreover, she has the ability to keep the room respectful while leaving it room. Opposite her, Benjamin Lavernhe, master of ceremonies, brings another kind of elegance, more theatrical, more playful, capable of embracing the rhythms of an evening scripted but always threatened by the unexpected.
For that is the paradox of the Césars. Everything is scripted, 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 shows up in an embrace that lasts a second longer than expected. It is these accidents of sincerity that make an awaited ceremony still able to move.
The free-to-air broadcast on CANAL+ preserves the event’s dimension as a shared appointment. It brings cinema back to the hour of the living room and live discussion. Moreover, it provokes a smile torn by a line or arouses annoyance at a speech that drags. Above all, it recalls that a ceremony is worth only by its ability to leave the hall, to reach beyond the stalls. Cinema, even when celebrated among professionals, needs that window. It needs an audience that watches, that sometimes objects, that above all remembers.
Jim Carrey, Tribute To A Comic Body Turned Memory
The Honorary César awarded to Jim Carrey gives the evening a particular tone. Indeed, this distinction represents recognition that goes beyond the strict frame of the French year. Carrey belongs to those global actors whose grin we think we know, before remembering that the grin 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 bodily writing. 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, by implication, unease, 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 this energy. The Olympia stage, by opening to him, promises a meeting between two traditions of spectacle, that of French cinema, attached to text and performance, and that of an actor whose body has become a signature.
What The Césars Already Say About A French Year
A list of nominations does not say everything. It does not say the absent films, the angers, the oversights, the debates that slip behind the applause. It does, however, say something solid, a provisional consensus, a map of what mattered.
The Césars, since their creation, function as a double machine, memory and snapshot. They represent both the year’s notebook and its stage. It is 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 draws a landscape. The second freezes it into a winners’ list. Between the two, there is a month when films come back to mind. One rewatchs scenes and compares gestures. One wonders, without admitting it, what will remain.
The 2026 edition seems to hold together two desires. That of returning to the act of cinema, with Nouvelle Vague as standard-bearer. This film looks cinema in the eye. That of staying close to the world, with stories of bonds, investigation and construction. These films do not seek to explain, but to show.
In the middle, the place given to actresses acts as a line of force. It does not solve questions of representation, it does not erase them. It simply signals that several roles were written and played with an intensity beyond debate.
On February 26, 2026, in the evening, the Olympia will host that mix of nervousness and celebration that makes the Césars’ atmosphere. There will be envelopes, silences, smiles that break, speeches too long, speeches too short. Behind the scenography, that fragile thing cinema continues to produce manifests itself. From the community emerges, if only for one night.
For now, the list remains open like credits before the film. It gives everyone the possibility to replay the year, to rethink a role, 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 to life when it is celebrated, and also when it is contested with love.
And, at heart, the Césars are never as fair as when they accept their own fragility. A hall, faces, films that do not resemble each other, a profession that doubts as much as it asserts. On February 26, the Olympia will give a name to a few moments. The others, those taken away on leaving, will continue to work memory.