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Best Director winner Martin Scorcese backstage at the
79th Academy Awards at the Kodak Theater in
Los Angeles, California, Sunday, February 25, 2007.
(Daniel A. Anderson/Orange County Register/MCT)
At last.
On his sixth try, director Martin Scorsese, the most acclaimed American filmmaker of his generation, won an Oscar Sunday night at the 79th annual Academy Awards.
His movie, “The Departed,” won best picture, best editing and best adapted screenplay, too. After being nominated for classics like “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull” and “The Aviator,” Scorsese took the prize for the diabolically dark cop-vs.-mobster drama starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson and Mark Wahlberg.
Scorsese received the trophy from friends Francis Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, his chest swelling like the fellow voted most popular at Hollywood’s senior prom. Which makes Forest Whitaker and Helen Mirren the prom king and queen.
Mirren ruled the Oscars Sunday night, glowing like a human-size statuette, and taking the lead actress award for her dryly funny turn as Elizabeth Windsor in “The Queen. Wielding her trophy like a scepter, she saluted the British monarch for her “courage and consistency.”
Whitaker, who won lead actor for his Idi Amin in “The Last King of Scotland,” accepted with tears in his eyes, speaking inspirationally of a profession that let him “connect to others.” Whitaker’s win left co-nominee Peter O’Toole 0-for-8, making him the actor with the most nominations never to win a competitive prize.
“Dreamgirls,” the most nominated film of the evening, went a meager 2-for-8 at the awards, where newcomer Jennifer Hudson took supporting-actress honors and her movie took the prize for sound editing. “Pan’s Labyrinth,” the grim and gorgeous adult fairytale set in 1944 Spain, captured three statuettes, for cinematography, art direction and makeup.
In the evening’s major upset, foreshadowing the “Dreamgirls” eclipse, Hudson’s co-star Eddie Murphy lost to veteran Alan Arkin, 72, who took supporting-actor for his role as the potty-mouthed grandpa of “Little Miss Sunshine.” The film, about a road trip by three generations of a family, also took the prize for orignal screenplay.
The show opened promisingly with Errol Morris’ crisp filmed introduction featuring most of the 130 nominees. Befitting the most international Oscars ever, the Mexican-made “Babel” won for best score and “Pan’s Labyrinth” swept the artistic categories but lost the foreign-film prize to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s “The Lives of Others,” about a bureaucrat inspired by an idealist in 1984 East Germany.
With the brand of laid-back (some might say suck-up) joshing that she brings to her daytime chat show, emcee Ellen DeGeneres played class clown to a crowd that included monarchs and despots.
And no, we don’t mean mogul David Geffen, who inserted himself publicly into the Democratic presidential primary last week by supporting Barack Obama and dissing Hillary Clinton.
Mirren’s and Whitaker’s prizes validated the idea that playing a real-life character gets you the gold, as Nicole Kidman’s Virginia Woolf, Jamie Foxx’s Ray Charles and Reese Witherspoon’s June Carter have shown.
Had Whitaker, Murphy and Hudson won, it would have been the first time in Academy history that three of four acting awards went to black performers.
While there was consensus about the acting contests, going into the evening Oscarologists could not predict best picture, which provided the more than 3 ½-hour night’s only suspense.
Of the five nominees only “The Departed,” a bloody and bloodily entertaining picture about a mob mole in the Boston police and police mole in the Boston mob, was a popcorn entertainment. The other nominees - “Babel,” “Letters From Iwo Jima,” “Little Miss Sunshine” and “The Queen” - were modest-budget affairs, none of which scored more than $60 million at the U.S. box office.
Two films about global warming were honored at the ceremony where many nominees, including DiCaprio, arrived at the red carpet in their hybrid cars. George Miller’s “Happy Feet,” the one about singing and dancing penguins who become environmentally conscious, won the prize for animated feature. Davis Guggenheim’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” a slide show delivered by an unusually charismatic Al Gore, was cited for best documentary. (Asked by DiCaprio if he had any announcement to make, the former vice president pretended he was going to announce his candidacy for the 2008 presidential election, and was interrupted by the Academy orchestra for going on too long.) Melissa Etheridge’s “I Need to Wake Up,” the theme to “An Inconvenient Truth,” won the Oscar for best song.
For the second year in a row, Gustavo Santaolalla took the trophy for best score, this time for “Babel.” He won last year for “Brokeback Mountain.”
Tweaking the Oscar convention of taking drama more seriously than comedy, funnymen Will Ferrell, Jack Black and John C. Reilly performed an amusing ballad, “Comedians at the Oscars,” about comic wallflowers at the awards prom.
Veteran composer Ennio Morricone, 79, whose 500 scores famously include the iconic music for “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” and “The Untouchables,” was presented an honorary Oscar by his friend Clint Eastwood.
With the increasing emphasis on the red-carpet arrivals, the Oscars more resemble a fashion-show runway than a film-awards event. It wasn’t ever thus.
Fifty years ago Joanne Woodward, best-actress winner for “The Three Faces of Eve,” made her own evening gown for $100. Movie queen Joan Crawford sniped that Woodward “set the cause of Hollywood glamour back by 20 years.” When Woodward wore a designer dress to the 1965 Oscars she sniped back, “I hope this makes Joan Crawford happy.”
