CANNES -- The Toronto filmfest is great, the Oscars are a director's dream, but the Cannes Film Festival is still the epitome of class in world cinema, according to Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan.

"It's now become a bit of a ritual for me," Egoyan tells The Sun about taking his latest opus, the increasingly controversial, made-in-Toronto drama Ararat, to show in the official selection as an out-of-competition special screening.

"Having now been to the Oscars twice, Cannes is still the most glamorous event to actually physically be at," says Egoyan, who was nominated for two Oscars for The Sweet Hereafter and attended another time too.

"They really do it well," Egoyan says of Cannes. "They really have that sense of how to create an event around the premiere of a movie. Of course, the Oscars aren't about the premiere, so I suppose that's an unfair comparison. But you really feel that all the efforts of everyone who has contributed in the making of a film are being celebrated (at Cannes) at that moment. It's a real sense of having arrived."

The 55th edition of Cannes opens tonight in this ancient resort town on the French Riviera. The opening night gala, also playing out-of-competition, is Woody Allen's new comedy, Hollywood Ending.

For the most part, the movie got stinko reviews in the U.S. and Canada when it opened last Friday. Allen is looking for a fresh start in Europe, where certain U.S. comedies are treated differently from how they are back home. Amazingly, because he has never been here before, Allen will be on hand for his Cannes debut.

"It's completely unusual for me," Allen recently told The Sun's Liz Braun. "I'm doing it because the French have been so supportive and affectionate toward me over the years, and my films have played out of competition for so many years. They've always invited me and I've never gone, and I just wanted to do something reciprocal once. I felt this was the film to do it with, because it had relevance to the event. So I thought I would go, as a nice gesture of friendship to the French, who have been nothing but supportive and friendly."

Keeping his flick out of the awards competition means Allen will not have to convince David Lynch he's funny or that he's still cutting-edge. Lynch, who won the best director prize at Cannes last year for his perplexing Mulholland Drive, is back as the jury president this year. His nine-member jury includes actresses Sharon Stone, Michelle Yeoh and Christine Hakim as well as directors Claude Miller, Raoul Ruiz, Walter Salles, Regis Wargnier and Bille August.

Martin Scorsese heads up the jury for the short films, and will also unveil a 20-minute excerpt of his latest epic, Gangs Of New York.

Another Hollywood special screening teaser, besides Scorsese's Gangs and the DreamWorks presentation of their new animated adventure flick Spirit, is George Lucas' new Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack Of The Clones. It opens in North America tomorrow and the suddenly-public Lucas is positioning the movie for maximum exposure worldwide by his surprise, last-minute attack on Cannes.

Feature length films in the official selection include another Canadian film, Toronto filmmaker David Cronenberg's Spider, one of 21 films in competition, as well as a wide selection from veteran directors around the world.

The fare includes new films by Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Aki Kaurismaki, Paul Thomas Anderson, Amos Gitai, Elia Suleiman, Michael Moore, Michael Winterbottom, Marco Bellocchio, Alexandre Sokurov, Barbet Schroeder and Roman Polanski, Luc Dardenne and Abbas Kiarostami.

Among other celebrities expected to attend are Emily Watson, Adam Sandler, Ralph Fiennes, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Sandra Bullock, Claudia Cardinale, Rosanna and Patricia Arquette, Antonio Banderas, Gabriel Byrne, Matt Damon and Jeremy Irons. (More on Cannes 2002)

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