Whitaker and Mirren crowned King and Queen of the Oscars

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles

Tuesday, 27 February 2007

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The devil didn't wear Prada, but Meryl Streep did. Jack Nicholson showed up bald (but with his trademark sunglasses all the same). Leonardo DiCaprio welled up with tears (though not for one of his own movies). Al Gore made a point, once again, of not declaring his candidacy for the presidency, and Helen Mirren, looking like royalty herself, brought the house down by offering an affectionate salute to that most un-Hollywood of monarchs, our own Queen Elizabeth.

This year's Academy Awards, in other words, offered a little bit of everything. Some dead certainties were confirmed (Mirren as best actress, Forest Whitaker as best actor). Some conventional wisdom was upset (Alan Arkin beating Eddie Murphy for best supporting actor, Dreamgirls losing out for best song).

A hitherto Oscar-less Martin Scorsese won vindication at last, as he walked off with the best director statuette, and his movie, The Departed, won best picture. Mexican film talent was lavishly rewarded, although Guillermo del Toro's fantasy tale about fascism, Pan's Labyrinth, unexpectedly garnered more Oscars than Alexander Gonzalez Iñarritu's widely praised Babel.

As the hostess, Ellen DeGeneres, quipped at the start of the night: "Nobody knows who's going to win - unless you're British and then you know you have a pretty good shot." If there was a unifying theme, it was the popularity of the winners - at least with the audience inside the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. They roared with approval for Mirren, gave Scorsese his long-delayed ovation, and poured out so much love for Gore and his anti-global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, it was a wonder the red carpet on Hollywood Boulevard didn't turn rainforest green.

This was not a night designed to appeal to conservative middle America - an unprecedented number of winners were not only not American, they did not speak English as a first language. Ennio Morricone, the veteran spaghetti western composer who picked up a lifetime achievement award, delivered his speech in Italian.

Politically, the evening was the antithesis of the Bush presidency. Gore, the man who won more votes than George Bush in 2000 but was denied the White House, told the audience the whole event had been overhauled this year to maximise energy efficiency and recycling. (Tell that to the drivers of the monster limos parked outside.) While Melissa Etheridge played "I Need To Wake Up", her Oscar-winning song from An Inconvenient Truth, graphics behind her flashed advice on weatherising houses and favouring public transport over individual car use. One imagined television sets being turned off all over Texas and Oklahoma - this was, after all, confirmation of every well-worn cliché about right on, liberal Hollywood.

DiCaprio - who turned up not in a stretch limousine but a petrol-electric hybrid car - looked like a besotted puppy as he shared the stage with Gore and later shed a tear as An Inconvenient Truth won best documentary. He teasingly asked the former vice-president if he had anything big to announce - the media has, after all, been abuzz with speculation that an Oscar could be a platform for another White House run. Gore pulled a (blank) piece of paper from his jacket and waxed rhetorical to "my fellow Americans" before the music drowned him out. DeGeneres did a fine job of deflating the pomposity of the occasion. Picking up on the politically correct earnestness, she observed: "Let me offer you this. If there were no blacks, Jews or gays there would be no Oscars - or anybody named Oscar for that matter."

The best of the night belonged, as it should, to the award winners. Scorsese gave perhaps the most caffeine-fuelled acceptance speech in Oscars history, blurting out "thank you" no fewer than 12 times before suggesting someone should "double-check the envelope" and embarking on a list of acknowledgements that echoed the machine-gun fire dialogue of his movies.

Etheridge, meanwhile, was perhaps the first female winner to thank her wife. As she quipped backstage, brandishing her Oscar: "This is the only naked man that will ever be in my bedroom." Both Whitaker and Jennifer Hudson, the newcomer who won best supporting actress for her showstopping turn in Dreamgirls, thanked God with noticeably more passion than they thanked their agents - which may serve them better in the next world than in this.

It wasn't a bad night for Brits. Kate Winslet and Judi Dench may have been eclipsed, and The Queen may not have won everything it was up for, but Scorsese's producer, Graham King, put a distinctly English accent on the evening's final speech. And the award for classiest speech went, hands down, to Mirren, who managed to be gracious, funny, modest and resplendent all at the same time. She gave the lion's share of her speech to praise for Elizabeth Windsor. "I salute her courage and her consistency. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Queen!"

Heartland America may have been appalled, but one imagines in the television room at Buckingham Palace a certain quiet satisfaction.

The winners

Best Motion Picture: The Departed

Lead Actor: Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland

Lead 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