LOS ANGELES - Martin Scorsese, after being shunned by Academy Award voters seven times, finally won his first best director Academy Award early Monday for the violent crime drama ?The Departed.?
The belated victory proved even sweeter as doubled when ?The Departed? subsequently won the Oscar for best picture. ?The Departed,? was the biggest winner of the evening, taking four of the five awards for which it was nominated. Writer William Monahan. won for adapting the screenplay from the Hong Kong thriller, ?Infernal Affairs," while Scorsese's long-time colleague Thelma Schoonmaker won for best editing.
?Could you double-check the envelope?? Scorsese joked after being presented the prize by his fellow 1970s' ?film brats? Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Coppola.
As widely expected, the major acting awards were something of a coronation, with Helen Mirren winning best actress for her portrayal of a conflicted Queen Elizabeth II in the days following the death of Princess Diana in ?The Queen,? while Forrest Whitaker took best actor for playing the murderous dictator Idi Amin in ?The Last King of Scotland.? Both were British productions.
Except for a Hollywood declaration that global warning is real, reflected by the best documentary win of Al Gore's documentary ?An Inconvenient Truth,? there was nothing approaching a consensus at last night's ?79th Academy Awards.?
Oscar spread its bounty around in unexpected ways last night, including an upset in the supporting actor category, won by Alan Arkin for his portrayal of a heroin-snorting, embittered grandpa in ?Little Miss Sunshine.? The favorite had been ?Dreamgirls? star Eddie Murphy.
Arkin had not been nominated since the late '60s for his leading roles in ?The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!? and ?The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,? and had never won.
More expected was the supporting actress victory of an emotional Jennifer Hudson, a former ?American Idol? contestant making her feature film debut as the lead singer pushed out of the group in the Motown inspired ?Dreamgirls.? The movie won only three of the eight Oscars for which it was nominated.
The primary contenders for best picture took the screenplay prizes, with ?Little Miss Sunshine? writer Michael Arndt winning in the original category, and Monahan for his adaptation of the Hong Kong film ?Infernal Affairs.?
That Oscar voters were giving a little something to everybody was made evident in the best costume design award for one of the year's resounding flops, ?Marie Antoinette.? 2006's most popular film at the box office, ?Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest,? won for visual effects.
?Babel,? a drama that connected three tragic stories on three continents to address the lack of global communication, was nominated for seven Oscars, but won only one, for the score by Mexican composer Gustavo Santaolalla.
To the delight of the audience at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre, former Vice President Al Gore's ?little slide show? about the dangers of global warming, ?An Inconvenient Truth? was the winner of the documentary feature award. The award was accepted by the producers and Gore, who said, ?This is not a political issue, it's a moral issue.?
Gore also participated in one of the show's more inspired gags: As he pretended to be so inspired by the audience response to his appearance that he was about to announce his candidacy in the presidential race, he was cut off for going over the allotted time by the orchestra.
And while the Pixar production ?Cars? was considered the front-runner in the animated film race, the Oscar went to the dancing penguin comedy, ?Happy Feet.?
For the first time in years, the producers of the Oscars show did not try to hook the audience by awarding the best supporting actor and actress prizes at the beginning. Instead, indication that the ceremony might be an international affair arrived with the first awards presented, to the Mexican fantasy ?Pan's Labyrinth? for art direction and makeup; it added to its bounty later with a surprise win for cinematography.
?Pan's Labyrinth? did not win for foreign language film; that award went to the German drama ?The Lives of Others.? And the Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who has scored more than 400 films but has never won an Oscar, was presented a lifetime achievement by Clint Eastwood, who had his star-making role in ?For a Few Dollars More,? an Italian ?spaghetti western,? scored by Morricone.
The Canadian-Norwegian co-production ?The Danish Poet? won best animated short film, and even the first award won by an American-financed film, the live action short ?West Bank Story,? was a comic parable about feuding Israeli and Palestinian falafel stand owners, while Clint Eastwood's ?Letters from Iwo Jima,? told from the perspective of WWII Japanese soldiers, won for sound editing. ?Dreamgirls? won its first Oscar of the evening for sound mixing.
Though ?Dreamgirls? based on the Broadway hit inspired by the early days of Motown and the rise of the Supremes, won the most overall Oscar nominations with eight, it was the first film in Academy history of the Academy Awards to have earned the most nominations without also securing a best picture bid. The result: The best picture race was considered wide open. The graphic violence in the complex cops and robbers drama ?The Departed? offended some Oscar voters, while ?Little Miss Sunshine? the most popular so-called ?independent? film of the year ? it was distributed by the specialty film division of 20th Century Fox - was a comedy, a genre traditionally shunned. by members of the Academy.
? With the exception of ?The Queen,? which Helen Mirren decidedly dominated, all of the best picture nominees were ensemble films, movies with large casts and no designated ?star.? Still, the Academy continues to ignore calls for the institution of a ?best ensemble acting ? category, though many of the other annual movie award presentations, including the Golden Globes and the Screen Actor's Guild Awards have long ago done so.
Major Oscar campaigns had been mounted for Scorsese's previous two theatrical films, ?Gangs of New York? and ?The Aviator,? Scorsese had been denied the prize, as he had for films now considered classics, including ?Raging Bull? and ?Good Fellas." Last year, Scorsese told Warner Brothers, distributor of ?The Departed? that he did not want an Oscar campaign on his behalf for the film. But he had little choice after it was released to wide critical acclaim, with many critics calling it a major return to form. But even before the film's release, one of "Departed's stars, Leonardo Di Caprio, ignored the director's wishes, telling the Free Press ?It's a crime? that Scorsese had never won the Oscar. ?No living director deserves it more,? said Di Caprio.
Terry Lawson - Detroit Free PressIn your voice
