Only a couple of years ago, I was beginning to wonder if the Cannes Film Festival had become virtually irrelevant to the Oscar race. While only two Palme d'Or winners, both released over a half-century ago, have ever gone on to win the best picture Oscar -- The Lost Weekend (1945) and Marty (1955) -- the rest of the lineup, in most years since the fest's founding 67 years ago, has included at least a few titles that went on to strong Oscar showings.

But, heading into 2011, even that was no longer a given. Indeed, only two of the previous 30 best picture Oscar winners had even played at Cannes, Chariots of Fire (1981) and No Country for Old Men (2007), and only one of the previous 14 Palme d'Or winners had even been nominated for the best picture Oscar, The Pianist (2002). As a result of its May dates, Cannes seemed to be losing many top contenders to the Telluride and Toronto film fests, which take place in September, closer to the end of the year, when awards voters fill out their ballots.

The Hollywood Reporter here provides an exclusive first look at James Toback's new documentary Seduced and Abandoned, which will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday evening.

I recently sat down with my friend Didier Allouch, the Hollywood correspondent for the French premium pay television channel Canal+ and a veteran of the last 26 editions of the Cannes Film Festival, and asked him to identify the five films slated for the 2013 fest about which he is most excited.

Didier makes his selections -- which include a black-and-white film, a film without dialogue and a Japanese thriller -- and offers detailed explanations for them.

CBS and the Recording Academy have scheduled the 2014 and 2015 Grammy Awards.

The 56th annual Grammys will again be held at Staples Center in Los Angeles on Sunday, Jan. 26, starting at 8 p.m. EST on CBS, with the delayed West Coast broadcast set for 8 p.m. PST. Eligibility for the 2014 ceremony is Oct. 1, 2012-Sept. 30, 2013.

The 57th annual Grammys will be held Sunday, Feb. 8, 2015.

The 2013 Grammys attracted 28.3 million viewers, the second-largest Grammy audience since 1993. 

On Sunday, the last day of the fourth annual TCM Film Festival, I had the great pleasure of spending a bit of time with one of this year's honored guests of the fest, the legendary actress/singer Ann Blyth. The lovely and demure 84-year-old traveled from her home near San Diego to Hollywood for all four days of this year's fest, and many -- including TCM host Robert Osborne -- gushed that it was as special to see her as any of the dozens of Golden Age stars in attendance. Blyth, of course, is best known for her work opposite Joan Crawford in the film noir classic Mildred Pierce (1945), for which she received a best supporting actress Oscar nomination, and in M-G-M musicals of the fifties such as Kismet (1955). She appeared for a special TCM tribute before a screening of the former on Saturday evening and the former on Sunday afternoon before sitting down with me to reflect on her life and career.

(The video at the top of this post contains highlights of our conversation.)

On Sunday afternoon, I met up in Hollywood with the legendary documentarian Albert Maysles, who was in town to introduce his classic film Salesman (1968) at the fourth annual TCM Film Festival later that day, for a wide-ranging interview about his life and career. (Check out the video at the top of this post for highlights of our conversation.)

Maysles, now 86 and living in Harlem with his wife, is anything but retired; in fact, he is still hard at work on numerous prospective films as well as his nonprofit Maysles Institute and Cinema, which teaches and screens examples of documentary films old and new.

Salesman, which Maysles directed with his younger brother and frequent collaborator David Maysles (who died in 1987), was the first documentary feature of the cinema verite variety, which Maysle and other filmmakers who worked at Time-Life in the early 1960s -- including Robert Drew, D.A. Pennebaker and the late Richard Leacock -- helped to develop. Cinema verite, which is also known as "direct cinema," calls for allowing a film's story to unveil itself rather than trying to influence or structure it, and it was this technique that the Maysles brothers employed in subsequent years on many films including Gimme Shelter (1970) and Grey Gardens (1975), both of which appear near the top of virtually every list of the greatest documentaries of all time.