For the first time since “The Godfather, Part II” 32 years ago, the best picture Oscar went home with a bunch of wiseguys.
At last month’s Critics’ Choice Awards in Santa Monica, Calif., Martin Scorsese picked up one of his many national awards for directing “The Departed.” That night he joked that his brash, profane gangster picture was the first film of his “that has a plot.”
The plot thickened nicely for Scorsese at the 79th Academy Awards on Sunday, when at the end of a nearly 4-hour telecast from Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre, “The Departed” won four Oscars including best film.
As widely expected, Scorsese was named best director, in his sixth shot at the Oscar in that category. His first nomination was for “Raging Bull” a generation ago; Scorsese was most recently nominated for “The Aviator” (2004).
With a relentless series of thank-yous, Scorsese thanked the Academy and picked up his trophy from “my old, old friends,” fellow directors Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.
Scorsese also acknowledged “that crazy script” by William Monahan, adapted from the 2002 Hong Kong drama “Infernal Affairs.” It won for best adapted screenplay. “The Departed” won also for Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing; she and director Scorsese have collaborated on several films. The film’s four wins put it at the top of an evenly spread-out heap.
In the top category, “The Departed” was no sure thing going in. “Babel,” the earnest, multilingual, kaleidoscopic drama about a near-fatal shooting in Morocco and its international repercussions, was considered a strong contender along with the small-scale comedy “Little Miss Sunshine.” But “The Departed” prevailed, the sole big-budget studio diversion in a list of best-picture nominees that also included “The Queen” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.”
Capping a long list of accolades for their work in “The Queen” and “The Last King of Scotland,” Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker were named best actress and actor.
“The biggest and the best gold star I ever had in my life,” Mirren said of her statuette. She thanked the real-life queen for “her dignity, her sense of duty and her hairstyle.”
Mirren’s Queen Elizabeth, forced to reconcile her private stoicism with the public’s expectations in the wake of Princess Diana’s 1997 death, was one of the year’s most widely admired portrayals.
“Ever since Diana, people want glamor and tears . . . the grand performance . . . and I’m not very good at that,” Mirren says to Michael Sheen’s Prime Minister Tony Blair. Mirren’s performance managed its own, wittily detailed grandeur through sly and subtle insight, treating the royal icon as neither pathos machine nor caricature.
Similarly, Whitaker’s galvanic performance in the little-seen “Last King of Scotland” found the menace, volatility and surprising humor in Ugandan president and murderous despot Idi Amin.
Whitaker, who has developed a reputation for sweetly discombobulated acceptance speeches, started his first-time Oscar speech with “Just a second, just a second . . . so, OK.” Acting, he said, “for me is believing in that connection.” He added that “through divine belief we can create a new reality.”
Though nominated for eight Oscars, the most of any film this year, the musical “Dreamgirls” made do with a supporting actress award for South Sider Jennifer Hudson, whose romper-stomper rendition of “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” cemented her status as a front-runner earlier this year.
“I have to just take this moment in. . . . Look at what God can do!” a breathless and tearful Hudson said. She thanked God twice and Jennifer Holliday once, Holliday being the Broadway originator of the role Hudson plays in the “Dreamgirls” film version.
The film won also for sound mixing, though it lost best song — it had three separate numbers competing in that category — to “I Need To Wake Up,” the Melissa Etheridge anthem from “An Inconvenient Truth.”
In a field of what presenter Jerry Seinfeld called “five incredibly depressing movies,” Al Gore’s global warming primer also won for best documentary.
“We were moved to act by this man,” director Davis Guggenheim said, referring to his star. Gore then spoke. “We need to solve the climate crisis,” said the former vice president and winner of the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election. “It’s not a political issue; it’s a moral issue.”
In low-keyed but heartfelt style, the celebrated Second City comedy troupe alum Alan Arkin was named best supporting actor for his irascible, heroin-snorting grandpa in “Little Miss Sunshine.” Eddie Murphy went into the Oscars with a perceived edge in this category, thanks to his flashy, skillful turn in “Dreamgirls,” but Arkin prevailed and expressed his thanks to everyone supporting “our small film,” and to his fellow performers.
Acting, he said, is “a team sport.”
“Little Miss Sunshine” scribe Michael Arndt, winning for best original screenplay in a highly competitive field, cited a long-ago trip in a VW bus as his primary story inspiration. “My family drove 600 miles with a broken clutch,” he said. He dedicated his Oscar to his family and his late father. “This is for you. Thank you.”
The penguins of “Happy Feet” zoomed the cars of “Cars” and the less profitable comic spooks of “Monster House,” winning the award for best animated feature. “Happy Feet” director George Miller accepted the statuette wearing a particularly penguin-looking tuxedo.
After snaring Oscars for cinematography, art direction and makeup, “Pan’s Labyrinth” surprisingly did not win for best foreign language film. That award went to the equally celebrated German film “The Lives of Others,” about an East German surveillance functionary and his slippery relationship with those he is charged with surveying.
In another surprise, “Pan’s Labyrinth” cinematographer Guillermo Navarro was picked over Emmanuel Lubezki, widely considered a shoo-in for his stunning, bleached-out long-take imagery in “Children of Men.” Sherry Lansing, Chicago native, Northwestern University alum and the first woman to run a major Hollywood studio, picked up the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from presenter and colleague Tom Cruise. Lansing thanked her husband, director and fellow Chicago native William Friedkin, from the podium, and of the humanitarian award, she said, “I promise to spend the rest of my life trying to live up to it.”
A special Oscar was given to composer Ennio Morricone, whose place in cinema history was made the minute he wrote his first spaghetti-western theme for director Sergio Leone and star Clint Eastwood.
The relatively high profile of “The Departed,” the sole big-budget, Hollywood-studio best picture nominee in this year’s quintet, ensured frequent cutaway shots of the un-nominated and shaven-headed Jack Nicholson, who looked like an auditioner for “The Rod Steiger Story.”
Prior to the evening’s top awards, “The Departed” won Oscars for best adapted screenplay and best editing.
As for the evening’s funniest single line, it was a tossup between presenter Robert Downey Jr.’s reference to his state of drug-addled disorientation a decade ago, before rehab, and the unseen announcer’s intonation of the sentence: “Ladies and gentlemen, Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ben Affleck.”
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BIG WINS
BEST PICTURE
“The Departed”
ACTOR
Forest Whitaker, “The Last King of Scotland”
ACTRESS
Helen Mirren, “The Queen”
SUPPORTING ACTOR
Alan Arkin, “Little Miss Sunshine”
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Jennifer Hudson, “Dreamgirls”
DIRECTOR
Martin Scorsese, “The Departed”
FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
“The Lives of Others,” Germany
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
William Monahan, “The Departed”
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Michael Arndt, “Little Miss Sunshine”
ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
“Happy Feet”
ART DIRECTION
“Pan’s Labyrinth”
CINEMATOGRAPHY
“Pan’s Labyrinth”
SOUND MIXING
“Dreamgirls”
SOUND EDITING
“Letters From Iwo Jima”
ORIGINAL SCORE
“Babel,” Gustavo Santaolalla
ORIGINAL SONG
“I Need to Wake Up” from “An Inconvenient Truth,” Melissa Etheridge
COSTUME
“Marie Antoinette”
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
“An Inconvenient Truth”
DOCUMENTARY (SHORT SUBJECT)
“The Blood of Yingzhou District”
FILM EDITING
“The Departed”
MAKEUP
“Pan’s Labyrinth”
ANIMATED SHORT FILM
“The Danish Poet”
LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM
“West Bank Story”
VISUAL EFFECTS
“Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”
