Four for The Departed, 1 for Babel

In a year of unparalleled diversity and international muscle at Hollywood’s film honours, the Academy Awards finished as a love fest for a long-overlooked American: Martin Scorsese.

In a year of unparalleled diversity and international muscle at Hollywood’s film honours, the Academy Awards finished as a love fest for a long-overlooked American: Martin Scorsese.

After Scorsese’s five previous losses in the direction category, he won for mob epic The Departed, which also won best picture. Awards watchers had viewed Scorsese as a lock to win at last, and while he clearly coveted an Oscar, the director said he had not counted on anything. “It was an overwhelming, overwhelming moment for me, I must say. I didn’t know. When people say, ‘It’s your year, your year.’ Thank God we’ve been able to make so many films over the last 36 years without winning awards. But we’ve been able to get the pictures made,” Scorsese told reporters backstage. “This comes as an extraordinary surprise.”

There were a couple of real surprises in the relatively predictable Oscar ceremony, which ran almost four hours under the pleasant but lightweight stewardship of first-time host Ellen DeGeneres. Front-runners actress Helen Mirren of The Queen, actor Forest Whitaker of The Last King of Scotland and supporting actress Jennifer Hudson of Dreamgirls all won. But the fourth front-runner, Eddie Murphy, lost the supporting actor award to Alan Arkin of Little Miss Sunshine.

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Mirren said backstage that she had no clue what the queen might think of the film or her performance. “I’m not expecting a call from her majesty. Not ever. I wouldn’t expect it and I wouldn’t desire it,” Mirren said backstage. “There are many countries in the world where one would not be allowed to make this film. It’s generous of the queen and the royal family to sit back and not interfere. I do believe she is a noble person in the best sense of the word.”

The Departed led the Oscars with four prizes, also winning for adapted screenplay and film editing. While Hollywood films and American actors still dominated, the ceremony offered its most global reach ever.

Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s dark fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth won three Oscars, including the cinematography prize. The globe-trotting ensemble drama Babel, made by del Toro’s countryman Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, had seven nominations, though it won only one, for best score by composer Gustavo Santaolalla. It was the second-straight Oscar for Santaolalla, who received the same prize a year ago for Brokeback Mountain.

The global theme extended to the documentary win for An Inconvenient Truth, which chronicles Al Gore’s campaign to educate people on the dangers of global warming. “This is not a political issue. It’s not a political movie. Some of the solutions will have to be worked out within the political sphere, but it really should be bipartisan, and it should be seen as a moral issue,” Gore said.

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Germany’s The Lives of Others, about a playwright and his actress-girlfriend who come under police surveillance in 1980s East Berlin, won the foreign-language Oscar.

Hudson won supporting actress for her first movie, playing a powerhouse vocalist who falls on hard times after she is booted from a 1960s girl group in Dreamgirls.