Michael Dwyerwatches the Oscars, where Scorsese's Boston-Irish gangster film, The Departed, won four awards
While there were no awards for the Irish nominees at the 79th Academy Awards, the night's big winner, The Departed, is a thriller populated by Irish-Americans, most of them criminals, in present-day Boston. The first remake to take the most coveted Oscar, for Best Picture, since Ben-Hurin 1959 - it is based on the stylish 2002 Hong Kong thriller, Infernal Affairs - The Departedwon Martin Scorsese his long-overdue first Oscar as Best Director at the age of 64.
Ever since The Departedwas released last October, it was widely tipped to end Scorsese's unlucky run after losing out five times in that category over the past 26 years, when he was nominated for Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, GoodFellas, Gangs of New Yorkand The Aviator. He also received screenplay nominations for GoodFellasand The Age of Innocence. A trio of Hollywood heavyweights - Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola - took to the stage of the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, and after a brief comedy routine, they declared Scorsese the winner.
At last, one of American cinema's greatest directors has shed his bridesmaid status. "Could you double-check the envelope?" Scorsese joked after he finally walked all the way up the aisle to the winners' podium.
Earlier, The Departedhad collected Oscars for William Monahan in the Best Adapted Screenplay category and for Scorsese's longtime collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker, for Best Film Editing. It crowned its achievements by taking the final award, Best Picture, in what was regarded as the most wide-open category in an unexciting year.
"Heaven help the faithful departed," reads a Mass card on the Boston grave of an Irish immigrant early on in Scorsese's movie. Later, an Irish-American detective refers to a murder victim as "the departed". That term provides an apt title for an enthralling morality tale in which the mortality rate escalates in tandem with the tension.
The Departedhinges on a clever inversion of the good cop/bad cop set-up from the Hong Kong thriller on which it is based. It features a flamboyantly Satanic Jack Nicholson as cold-blooded Irish-American gangster Frank Costello, who grooms a janitor's son, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), as his protégé. When Sullivan enters the Boston police force to become Costello's mole, another young Irish-American, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), is chosen to go deep undercover within Costello's gang.
Back at the top of his form after several ventures where period production values distracted from substance, Scorsese elegantly shapes this ripe material into a muscular thriller that is by quite some way his richest, most satisfying movie since GoodFellas. It is stamped with the propulsive energy that's a trademark of his most accomplished movies, and never slackens over a fleeting two-and-a-half hours of expertly constructed, dynamically staged and supremely stylish cinema.
Violent films rarely win Hollywood's most coveted prize, and the violence in The Departedis often brutal and jolting, and barely leavened with throwaway black humour. Catholic motifs abound - Sacred Heart pictures, confession references and crucifixion imagery - as prominently as Scorsese's familiar preoccupation with Catholic guilt. And the movie is steeped in Irish references: a gangster says "Sláinte" in a bar where an Irish signpost is a decoration; Nicholson adopts a deliberately Oirish accent to sing a verse of Mother Macree; the Dropkick Murphys invigorate an action sequence with driving céilí-rock; and one character remarks, "Freud said the Irish were the only people impervious to psychoanalysis."
Whereas Scorsese finally struck gold with his eighth nomination, Peter O'Toole lost out yet again on his eighth nomination as Best Actor for Venus, and he retains the distinction of being the most nominated actor who has never taken that award, although he received an honorary Oscar four years ago. It could be far worse. Sound mixer Kevin O'Connell was nominated for the 19th time and lost again, although it did not help that he was up for a Mel Gibson film, Apocalypto, which failed to win in any of the three technical categories where it was nominated. Either Hollywood has not forgiven Gibson for his anti-Semitic outburst, or they were not all that impressed with his Mayan epic.
O'Toole visibly grimaced with disappointment when the Best Actor award went to Forest Whitaker for his exuberantly intimidating portrayal of the late Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, in The Last King of Scotland. Whitaker gave the evening's most emotional and quietly powerful acceptance speech.
There was no surprise when Helen Mirren was voted Best Actress for her subtle and sensitive performance as the present British monarch in The Queen. "For 50 years and more, Elizabeth Windsor has maintained her dignity, sense of duty and her hairstyle," Mirren observed as she accepted her Oscar, the only victory on the night for The Queen, which entered the ceremony with six nominations, one for its Irish costume designer, Consolata Boyle.
However, films in contemporary settings very rarely are given Oscars from an electorate more impressed with period costumes, and the award went to Milena Canonero for her lavish frocks in the vapid Marie Antoinette. Boyle's trip to Los Angeles was not in vain, however, as she received a prize from her peers at the Costume Designers Guild Awards a week before the Oscars.
The only minor upset in this year's Oscar acting categories came when Eddie Murphy, the favourite to win Best Supporting Actor for Dreamgirls, lost out to veteran Alan Arkin, who had not been nominated since The Heart is a Lonely Hunter(1968) and won for Little Miss Sunshine, the low-budget comedy which also collected the Best Original Screenplay award for writer Michael Arndt.
Having been eliminated as a contestant on the US TV talent contest American Idol, Jennifer Hudson collected the Best Supporting Actress award for her showstopper film debut in Dreamgirls, but that film, which had eight nominations, picked up just one more Oscar, for Best Sound.
The over-rated Babel, directed by Mexican film-maker Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, had seven nominations, but took only one Oscar - to Argentinian composer Gustavo Santaolalla for Best Musical Score, a category he also won for Brokeback Mountain.
Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's post-Spanish Civil War fantasy-thriller, Pan's Labyrinth, which went unrewarded at the Cannes Film Festival last year, picked up three Oscars - for cinematography, art direction and make-up, but it lost out in the prestigious Best Foreign Language Film category, where the winner was Florian Henckel von Donnersmark's The Lives of Others, a chilling, riveting picture of surveillance, informing and betrayal in 1980s East Berlin.
Dreamgirlsseemed assured to collect the Best Song award, given that it had three of the five nominations, but the prize went to Melissa Etheridge for I Need to Wake Up- the first time that award was given to a song from a documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Illustrating former US vice-president Al Gore's passionate case against global warming, that film won for Best Documentary.
Gore received a standing ovation when he collected the award with director Davis Guggenheim. The only revelation at this year's bland Oscar ceremony is that Hollywood suddenly has gone all green - give or take a few hundred gas-guzzling stretch limos bringing everyone to the ceremony.
Shortly before Gore and Guggenheim collected the documentary award, Gore was joined on stage by Leonardo DiCaprio to promote the campaign on www.oscar.com that tells us all how we can play our part in saving the planet. Gore produced a speech and pretended he was formally announcing something - his candidature for the US elections next year, one assumes - before, with perfect timing, the music cut him off.
This was one of the few mildly diverting moments in a sluggish ceremony padded out with compilations of film clips that seemed pointless and merely exercises in nostalgia.
The most amusing inserts featured agile performers ingeniously shaped in silhouette to form the logos of some nominated films, and one of those clever entertainments included comedian Ellen DeGeneres, who was chirpy, affable and inoffensive in her debut as presenter of the ceremony.
