Helen Mirren and Ben Affleck Winners

What a difference a role can make. Ben Affleck, long the butt of jokes in a post-Gigli world may be on the verge of a creative and critical comeback with his stellar performance in Hollywoodland, which just earned him the first of what could be several awards (and not the Razzies that the actor may be used to receiving). In the film, Affleck plays George Reeves, another actor used and abused by the Hollywood system and the role has started generating Oscar buzz for the actor, a sound which became deafening this week when Affleck won the Best Actor title at The Venice Film Festival. Affleck was joined by quite an impressive caliber of actor, Helen Mirren, who took home the Best Actress award for another real-life character, her turn as Elizabeth II in The Queen (ironically, Helen Mirren just won the Emmy award for playing Elizabeth I in the HBO mini-series of the same name). The Queen, by legendary director Stephen Frears, has received almost universal acclaim and is about Queen Elizabeth's reaction the death of Princess Diana. Many Oscar pundits are already claiming that the Best Actress Academy Award is Helen Mirren's to lose.

The coveted Golden Lion award at The Venice Film Festival, the prize for best picture, went to a shocker, China's Still Life, a film that most critics hadn't even seen, as it was a last minute entry in the competition, and the ones who had weren't exactly universal in their praise. Catherine Deneuve, head of jury voting, commented on the win for Still Life to Reuters, "We were told there would be a surprise film at the end of this festival, and we didn't have a lot of discussion. The beauty of the cinematography and the quality of the story, without getting political, the characters, we were very touched and we were moved. We know it's a very special film."

Still Life, by director Jia Zhang-ke, is about the old village of Fengjie, a victim of China's Three Gorges Dam Project and the people who go back there to see what they left behind. In China, more than 1.3 million people have been relocated to make way for a damn and the film details the bleak prospects in their new lives in other parts of China.

Still Life wasn't the only film to get a major push from The Venice Film Festival as the aforementioned The Queen and Hollywoodland received high critical acclaim, as did Emilio Estevez's highly antiquated look at the life and death of Bobby Kennedy, Bobby. Other awards at the festival went to Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (which, sadly, won't be eligible for the Academy Award for documentary, as it aired on HBO, not in theaters stateside). The Best Director equivalent - the Silver Lion - went to Alain Resnais for Private Fears in Public Places. Resnais had won the award before for the classic Last Year at Marienbad, thirty-four years ago. Resnais' newest film is based on Alan Ayckbourn's play of the same name and tells six overlapping stories. The jury prize at Venice went to Daratt, an African film about a man's journey for revenge in Chad. Nuovomondo won the Silver Lion for revelation. The film is about a Sicilian family moving to America in the early '90s.

[Sources: E Online, Reuters]