Critics and a Cannes-Do Attitude

I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR last night. The program's critic-at-large, John Powers, had just returned from the Cannes Film Festival and had a conversation with the show's TV critic David Bianculli. It was easy to tell that the pair were having a high time, critics getting to talk about being critics in the context of what was supposed to be a report on the festival. Here's something Powers said early on:

I spend every year probably like most people spend at the Oscars, like, I can't believe that thing won, that normally I just can't believe that a jury of nine people can be so wrong. This year, strangely enough, the jury chose almost everything that I liked, but not just that I liked, but almost everybody else liked. It's really an odd thing, because normally there are all these weird agendas going on, you know, where something might be the best film, but in fact the jury has a lot of people from Europe, and they want to make sure Europe wins, so that, in fact, the third or fourth best film wins because it's from Europe.

He went on to admit a story that he admitted showed something about film critics. He said that they were "faintly condescending" because there would four actresses on the jury panel, and the attitude of the critics was, "Actors and actresses, like, they can't be trusted; their judgment is terrible." Then, amazingly enough, their choices were astoundingly good. Not that you'd expect people who actually do something for a living might know more and have better taste than those who professionally pass judgment although they may know little to nothing about the actual process.

All this is the backdrop for what I found really amusing. These educated, somewhat condescending people were both pronouncing the name of the town as KAHN. But the French pronunciation is actually much closer to the English word CAN. So much for sophistication.