A director's due
The Departed earns Martin Scorsese, long denied an Academy Award, two top honors.
By STEVE PERSALL
Published February 26, 2007
At long last, legendary director Martin Scorsese won an Oscar. Moments later Sunday night, his film, The Departed, took the top prize, for Best Picture at the 79th Academy Awards.
Scorsese had been tied with Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Altman, King Vidor and Clarence Brown for the most fruitless nominations five among directors.
"Could you double-check the envelope?" Scorsese joked when directors Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola called him to the stage.
In an Oscars ceremony noted for the diversity of its nominees, the acting prizes went to Hollywood veterans and a newcomer who got voted off American Idol.
Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker completed their awards-season sweeps, taking home the best actress and best actor awards for, respectively, The Queen and The Last King of Scotland.
Mirren played Queen Elizabeth II after the death of Princess Diana. In accepting her award Sunday, Mirren saluted the monarch.
"For 50 years and more, Elizabeth Windsor has maintained her dignity, her sense of duty and her hairstyle," Mirren said. "She has had her feet firmly planted on the ground, her hat on her head, her handbag on her arm and she has weathered many, many storms. I salute her courage and her consistency."
First-time nominee Whitaker won for his portrayal of mercurial Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. "When I first started acting, it was from my desire to connect with everyone, that thing inside each of us, that life I feel exists in all of us," Whitaker said. "Acting for me is about believing in that connection."
Jennifer Hudson, 25, the preshow favorite who had won a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award, seemed genuinely surprised as she accepted the best supporting award for her role as Effie White in Dreamgirls.
"I have to take this moment in," the former American Idol contestant said, struggling for breath. "I can't believe this. Look what God can do. ... Thank you all for helping me keep the faith even when I didn't believe."
It took 38 years, but Alan Arkin took home the best supporting actor award. The 73-year-old actor, who played a heroin- snorting, porn-addicted grandfather in Little Miss Sunshine, was last nominated in 1968 for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
Only the late Henry Fonda and Helen Hayes had longer gaps between nominations and wins: 41 years for Fonda, 39 for Hayes.
Arkin placed his Oscar on the stage floor and read from handwritten notes, choking back tears when thanking his wife, Suzanne, and family. Most of his remarks were devoted to the Little Miss Sunshine cast and crew who provided "the same sense of trust, joy and community that the film speaks about."
Arkin's win was something of a surprise, since most of the preshow momentum seemed to belong to Dreamgirls' Eddie Murphy.
Other upsets included the penguin-propelled comedy Happy Feet beating out the Disney-Pixar blockbuster Cars for best animated film, and Germany's The Lives of Others edging Pan's Labyrinth for foreign language film.
The Departed was the night's big winner with four awards, including adapted screenplay and film editing. Pan's Labyrinth got three awards.
Al Gore and director Davis Guggenheim accepted the best documentary feature Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, an academic treatise on global warming.
"It's not a political issue, it's a moral issue," Gore said in his acceptance speech. "We have everything we need to get started with the possible exception of the will to act. That's a renewable resource. Let's renew it."
An Inconvenient Truth became the third documentary to win more than a single Oscar when Melissa Etheridge claimed best original song for her environmental anthem I Need to Wake Up.
Marie Antoinette's costume designer Milena Canonero won her third Academy Award and first since 1981's Chariots of Fire.
Comedian Ellen DeGeneres was the host for the first time. Her style, which works well on her daytime talk show, seemed too casual for entertainment's most glamorous night. DeGeneres channeled her obvious nervousness through wisecracks about how anxious the nominees must have been.
When her material ran out, she resorted to her trademark dance moves, leading a gospel choir conga line through the Kodak Theater auditorium.
Gore was funnier early in the show when Leonardo DiCaprio urged him to use the global telecast for an important announcement, possibly entering the 2008 presidential campaign. The former candidate hedged, then began reading a statement: "I'd like to formally announce my intentions to..." until the orchestra played him off the stage.
Other award winners Sunday included The Blood of Yingzhou District for best documentary short; Ari Sandel's West Bank Story, a musical spoof of Israeli and Palestinian relations, best live action short; The Danish Poet, best animated short; and Clint Eastwood's war epic Letters from Iwo Jima, sound editing.
Sound mixer Kevin O'Connell (Apocalypto) extended his all- time Oscar record of 19 nominations without winning. Dreamgirls claimed the sounding mixing prize instead. Composer Gustavo Santaolalla won his second consecutive Oscar, this time for Babel after last year's Brokeback Mountain.
The top-grossing film of 2006, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, cashed in its only nomination, winning for best special effects.
Steve Persall can be reached at persall@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8365.