The official Cannes Film festival selections have been announced, and I deeply regret the non-inclusion of Darren Aronofsky‘s The Fountain…I’ve been told since last November or thereabouts that Aronofsksy wanted to show it there, but apparently the Cannes chiefs wouldn’t offer him a competition slot and that’s what he was insisting upon so that was that. The upside surprise is that Richard Linklater‘s A Scanner Darkly will be shown under Un Certain Regard. Otherwise, the big four U.S. films in competition are Linklater’s Fast Food Nation, Sofia Coppola‘s Marie-Antoinette (gotta remember that hyphen), Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu‘s Babel and — as my French journo tipster Matthieu Carratier predicted yesterday — Richard Kelly‘s Southland Tales. (This is a major boost for Kelly, whom I interviewed for the defunct Razor magazine this time last year and have since gotten to know a bit.) The other big titles are Pedro Almodovar ‘s Volver, Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labrynth, Nani Moretti‘s The Cayman, Andrea Arnold’s Red Road and…anyone have any tips on any choice non-U.S. films? The special screening highlights are Davis Guggenhiem‘s An Inconvenient Truth and Bill Couturie‘s Boffo: Tinseltown’s Bombs and Blockbusters. The big U.S. films that are basically using the festival for hooplah’s sake are Ron Howard‘s The DaVinci Code, Paul Greengrass ‘s United 93, Brett Ratner‘s X-Men: The Last Stand and Tim Johnson‘s Over the Hedge. There will, of course, also be that 20-minute preview of the Paramount-funded Oliver Stone melodrama World Trade Center. That John Ford doc by Sam Pollard called John Ford/John Wayne: The Filmmaker and the Legend, which will be offered as part of a big John Ford collection that Warner Home Video is putting out on June 6th, is also, I think, slated to be shown at some point during the festival.