Two-time Oscar-winning director Alexander Payne (The Holdovers, Sideways, Nebraska) will head up this year’s Venice Film Festival international jury, Venice unveiled on Monday.

Payne will oversee the jury of film professionals that picks the Golden Lion for best film at the 82nd Venice festival, which runs Aug. 27-Sept. 6.

“It’s an enormous honor and joy to serve on the jury at Venice,” Payne said in a statement. “Although I share a filmmaker’s ambivalence about comparing films against one another, I revere the Venice Film Festival’s nearly 100-year history of loudly celebrating film as an art form. I couldn’t be more excited.”

Venice Festival director Alberto Barbera said Payne “belongs to the small circle of filmmakers-cinephiles whose passion for cinema is fueled by knowledge of films of the past and curiosity about contemporary cinema, without boundaries or barriers of any kind. These qualities – along with his experience...