France Boosts Oscar Campaign Support as Industry Sounds Alarm Over Declining Exports — SkimNews
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- CNC doubled financial aid for Oscar campaigns and created a new "Academy Awards" liaison role, appointing Sébastien Cauchon to spearhead the campaign for Andrey Zvyagintsev's "Minotaur" at this year's ceremony
- France hasn't won the international feature Oscar since Régis Wargnier's "Indochine" in 1993, and Cauchon said the new strategy aims to expand beyond that category into directing, acting, screenplay and craft races
- Cauchon, who founded consultancy Cinema Collectors, previously worked on Oscar-winning campaigns for "Two People Exchanging Saliva," Coralie Fargeat's "The Substance," and Florian Zeller's "The Father"
- French audiovisual exports dropped 21.6% to €164.3 million ($190.8 million) — the lowest level in a decade — with the sector still roughly 26% below pre-pandemic levels despite a projected 42.5 million international admissions and €272 million box office in 2025
- CNC president Gaëtan Bruel said France has lost the streaming battle, noting French Netflix subscribers watch American series first, then Spanish and Korean series — countries whose industries "had to think internationally from the outset" because domestic markets couldn't sustain production alone
- UniFrance president Gilles Pélisson called for revamped export support schemes and warned that streamers' reluctance to share viewing data is "the underlying key to the value of works" — a direct consequence of tech giants' growing power as publishers
Why it matters: France's robust domestic financing model insulated its industry for decades, but the CNC's own data now shows French viewers prefer American, Spanish, and Korean series — and exports have cratered 21.6% to a decade low. The first-ever dedicated awards strategist role signals Paris is treating both the prestige gap (no international feature win since 1993) and the structural streaming failure as problems requiring government intervention rather than market forces.
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