The musical
Dreamgirls led Academy Awards contenders
Tuesday with eight nominations but was shut out in the Best
Picture category after being considered a potential
front-runner. The sweeping ensemble drama Babel
was close behind with seven, including Best Picture
and acting honors for two newcomers to U.S. audiences,
Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi.
Other Best
Picture nominees were Martin Scorsese's bloody crime saga The Departed, Clint Eastwood's World War II
spectacle Letters From Iwo Jima, the road-trip comedy Little Miss Sunshine, and the monarchy-in-crisis chronicle The Queen.
Going into
nominations day, the Best Picture competition looked
unusually wide open, with no consensus on a favorite.
With Golden Globe musical winner Dreamgirls out
of the running, the race could come down to Golden
Globe drama winner Babel and The Departed, though The Queen could be a
dark-horse contender as well.
But front-runners
in all four acting categories nabbed nominations and
seem poised to come home with Oscars on February 25: Helen
Mirren for Best Actress as British monarch Elizabeth
II in The Queen; Forest Whitaker for Best Actor as
Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland; and Eddie Murphy and former American
Idol finalist Jennifer Hudson in the supporting
categories as soulful singers in Dreamgirls.
Mirren said she
had no idea The Queen would have such an
impact.
''It is one of
the hardest roles to play not just a living person but one
who is part of our everyday lives in Britain,'' Mirren said.
''Whilst her presence is with us from her image on the
letters that come through our door and on the money we
spend, we know so little of the woman behind the
image. I hope that my performance has conveyed a sense of
Elizabeth the woman as well as the queen.''
Oscar attention
is a new experience for Murphy, whose fast-talking
persona has brought him devoted audiences but few awards in
his 25-year career. For Hudson, the nomination caps a
speedy rise to stardom with her first film role, just
two years after making her name on American Idol.
The Best Actress
category featured a 14th nomination for two-time Oscar
winner Meryl Streep, padding her record as the
most-nominated actor ever, this time as a demonically
demanding boss in The Devil Wears Prada.
Joining Mirren
and Streep as Best Actress nominees were Penelope Cruz
as a woman dealing with bizarre domestic crises in
Volver, Judi Dench as a scheming teacher in Notes
on a Scandal, and Kate Winslet as a woman in an
affair with a neighbor in Little Children.
Other Best Actor
nominees were Leonardo DiCaprio as a mercenary hunting a
rare gem in Blood Diamond, Ryan Gosling as a teacher with a drug
addiction in Half Nelson, Peter O'Toole as a
lecherous old actor in Venus, and Will Smith as
a homeless dad in The Pursuit of Happyness.
Whitaker is
expected to come away with Best Actor, though sentiment is
high for O'Toole, who has been nominated seven times, losing
each. An eighth loss for O'Toole, who nearly turned
down an honorary Oscar three years ago because he
hoped to earn one outright, would put him in the
record books as the actor with the most nominations without
winning.
This finally may
be the year for another perennial loser, Scorsese, who's
tied with four other directors for the Oscar futility record
of five nominations and five losses.
The Departed marks Scorsese's return to the
cops-and-mobsters genre he mastered in decades past and is
considered his best shot to finally win an Oscar,
though a sixth loss would put him alone in the record
book as the most-defeated director in Academy history.
Prim Oscar voters
maintained their track record of ignoring over-the-top
comic performances, snubbing Sacha Baron Cohen for his
Golden Globe-winning role in the raucous
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make
Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
The comedy front
did bring supporting nominations for Alan Arkin as a
foul-mouthed grandfather and Abigail Breslin as a girl
obsessed with beauty pageants in Little Miss Sunshine, though the film's three key performers,
Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, and Steve Carell, were
overlooked.
Ten-year-old
Abigail Breslin became the fourth-youngest actress ever
nominated.
The supporting
actor category also includes Mark Wahlberg as a caustic
cop in The Departed, his scene-stealing performance
outshining those of his higher-billed costars, including
DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, and Matt Damon.
The 20 acting
nominees represent the most ethnically diverse lineup ever.
After decades during which the Oscars were a virtual
whites-only club, with minority actors only
occasionally breaking into the field, the awards have
featured a much broader mix of nominees in the last few
years.
Black actors in
particular have come into their own, with Oscar wins by
Halle Berry, Denzel Washington, Jamie Foxx, and Morgan
Freeman, and three of the four acting front-runners
this year.
Asian and
Hispanic actors still lag behind, though nominations
for Cruz, Barraza, and Kikuchi are signs that
Hollywood is making strides toward greater diversity.
While Cruz's
Volver, from Spanish director and past Oscar
darling Pedro Almodovar, was shut out for Best Foreign
Language Picture, another Hispanic film scored well. Mexican
director Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth
received six nominations, including foreign-language
film, screenplay, cinematography, and score.
''If each one of
them got nominated on their own, that would be great,
but the fact that they all did...that's just too much
for one little girl this early in the morning,'' said
Salma Hayek, an Oscar nominee for 2002's Frida,
who helped announce the nominees Tuesday morning.
Mexican filmmaker
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu earned a Best Director
nomination for Babel.
Inarritu and
Scorsese were joined in the Best Director category by
Eastwood for Letters From Iwo Jima, Stephen Frears for The Queen, and Paul Greengrass for the September 11
docudrama United 93 .
Dreamgirls looked as though it might follow
2002's Chicago as a rare musical to win Best
Picture, but like last year's music-themed Walk the
Line it was a startling omission from the Oscar's top
category.
While Murphy and
Hudson made it into the supporting acting categories,
lead players Foxx and Beyonce Knowles and director Bill
Condon were left out.
Three of
Dreamgirls' eight nominations came in a single
category--Best Original Song.
Two-time Best
Picture and Director winner Eastwood's Letters From Iwo
Jima had been considered a long shot and clearly
was the film that denied Dreamgirls its chance at the
top trophy.
Eastwood
continued his late-career surge and Oscar magic with four
nominations for the Japanese-language Letters,
including Best Original Screenplay. His World War II
companion film Flags of Our Fathers had two
technical nominations, including Best Sound Editing,
in which it will compete against Letters.
Also in the sound
editing category is Mel Gibson's violent tale of the
ancient Mayan civilization, Apocalypto, which
had three nominations.
The year's
top-grossing movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, grabbed four nominations in technical
categories, including visual effects.
The
Hindi-language movie Water is up for Best
Foreign Language Film. Its nomination comes after a
slew of accolades for its Toronto-based director and
screenwriter, Deepa Mehta. (AP, David Germain)
Read our cover
story interview with Jennifer Hudson.
