Benicio Wins Cannes!

Posted on Mon May 26th, 2008 8:15am PDT By X17 Staff

photo courtesy Abaca USA

Benicio del Toro was the unanimous choice for the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival today for his role as "Che" Guevara in Steven Soderbergh's four-hour film about the Latin American revolutionary. Congrats!!!!

Benicio and Soderbergh teamed up together back in 2001 for Traffic, for which the actor and director both won Oscars.

French film The Class took the Palme d'Or, Cannes' top prize, from the jury led by Sean Penn. It's based on the best-selling memoir of a French junior high school teacher, shot in documentary style, with many real students cast in the film.

Benecio del Toro class.jpg

photo courtesy Abaca USA

Clint Eastwood won the lifetime achievement award -- but his film with Angelina Jolie, The Changeling, won nothing -- Poor Angie! I'm sure she was hoping for an award just ahead of her impending birth.

More winners inside ...

Brazilian actor Sandra Corveloni won the best actress prize for her role in Line of Passage, a movie about a working-class cleaning woman whose son tries to avoid slipping into a life of crime.

The best director award went to Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan for Three Monkeys.

Runner-up Grand Prize went to Gomorrah, an Italian film based on the international best-selling book. And another Italian film, Il Divo, won the Jury Prize.

Get thee to the movies, y'all!