Beatty and Penn Win Awards in Venice

Warren Beatty won a lifetime achievement award at this year's Venice Festival, and Sean Penn won the Volpi Cup award for Best Actor for Hurlyburly. Neither star was on hand to receive the awards - Penn because of the death of his father and Beatty because he'd already gone home. Beatty, however, left an acceptance letter which read, "The Venice festival is a spiritual oasis in the increasingly arid commercial film world, and for me it is all the more important to be given so great an honor at a moment when some fear an American cultural hegemony in movies." The Golden Lion award for the best film went to Gianni Amelio's Cosi Ridevano (The Way We Laughed), which is about the trials and tribulations faced by two Sicilian immigrant brothers struggling to find success.