As the nominations for the 79th Annual Academy Awards were announced Jan. 23 in Beverly Hills by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Sid Ganis and past Oscar-nominee Salma Hayek, Hollywood.com was there.
DreamWorks and Paramount woke up early this morning to find that Oscar gold was no longer just a dream but a definite reality. The studios garnered eight nominations for Dreamgirls—leading the pack, while Babel came in loud and clear in a very close second with seven nods.
In the Best Actor category, Leonardo DiCaprio garnered only one nomination for Blood Diamond, in which he plays a mercenary hunting a rare gem. The one nod is unlike his double nomination during this month’s Golden Globes, but he lost to Forest Whitaker, who is expected to take home the gold statue as well for his portrayal as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. Other nominees in this category include Will Smith, who plays a homeless dad in The Pursuit of Happyness and Peter O’Toole for his portrayal of a lecherous old actor in Venus. And sneaking in under the radar was first-time nominee Ryan Gosling, as a teacher with a drug addiction in Half Nelson.
If O’Toole wins this year he would join Henry Fonda and Paul Newman as actors who won their first competitive Oscars after having received Honorary Awards from the Academy.
In the Best Actress category, it’s good to be queen for recent two-time Golden Globe winner Helen Mirren, who is nominated for her role as a British monarch Elizabeth II in The Queen. Other Oscar hopefuls include fellow Globe winner Meryl Streep for The Devil Wears Prada—giving her a record-breaking 14 career nominations—and Kate Winslet as a bored housewife who has an affair with her neighbor in Little Children.
At 31, Winslet is the youngest actress to receive five acting nominations. The previous record holder was Olivia de Havilland, who was 33 when she received her fifth nomination in 1949 for The Heiress.
Another lead actress nominee, Judi Dench, recognized for Notes on a Scandal, is the only performer who was also nominated last year for Mrs. Henderson Presents. And rounding out the list is first-time nominee Penelope Cruz for Volver, who received a resounding “Yes!” from her best friend Hayek during the announcements.
But Cruz isn’t the only Latin performer to be recognized this year by the Academy—a moment Hayek called “historic.” Babel’s director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu received a nod along with supporting actress nominees Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi. The film is also up for Best Picture. While Cruz’s Volver, from Spanish director and past Oscar darling Pedro Almodovar, was shut out for foreign language picture, another Hispanic film scored well—six-time nominee, Mexico’s Pan’s Labyrinth, up for Best Foreign Language film.
Hayek, who was nominated for an Academy Award in 2002 for her lead performance in Frida, could not help but wear her emotions on her sleeve.
“I’m so happy. I mean, if each one of them had gotten nominated on their own, it would have been overwhelming for me. It’s too much for a little girl my size this early in the morning,” the actress said, laughing.
Supporting role nominations saw a few surprises this time around, with DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson and Matt Damon feeling a bit “departed” from the list for their roles in The Departed, all of whom were nominated for a Golden Globe. The only actor from the film who has a chance at taking home the gold for the first time in his career is Mark Wahlberg, as a vengeful cop .
Vying for the same trophy are Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond), Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine), Eddie Murphy (Dreamgirls) and Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children), the latter two of which have been nominated for the first time. Arkin, who plays a foul-mouthed grandfather in Sunshine, was last nominated 38 years ago. Some shutouts included Brad Pitt for Babel and Ben Affleck for Hollywoodland.
In the supporting actress category, four of the five nominees are first-timers and all were nominated in the same category for the Golden Globes—Babel‘s Barraza and Kikuchi, Cate Blanchett (Notes on a Scandal), American Idol’s Jennifer Hudson in her first-starring film role in Dreamgirls–and relative newcomer and the youngest of the bunch at the age of 10, Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine)—also the fourth youngest actress to ever be nominated.
The sun was definitely shining over this little indie that could—Little Miss Sunshine—which has a chance at four Oscars, including Best Picture, even though the film’s three key performers, Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette and Steve Carell, were overlooked. Even the sea of reporters from around the globe who gathered inside the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre couldn’t help but get into the spirit of the movie about a girl obsessed with beauty pageants—with on-camera reporters like E!’s Giuliana DePandi and some from Fox 11 News donning pageant sashes after the nominees were announced.
On the comedy front, like the Hollywood Foreign Press, Academy voters still can’t get enough of Borat, which is in the running for Best Adapted Screenplay.But Sacha Baron Cohen unfortunately was overlooked in the acting department.
For directing, Martin Scorsese goes back to what he does best in the cops and mobsters genre film The Departed and gets his eighth Academy Award nomination and sixth in this category. He is slated to finally take one home, but Clint Eastwood is close on his heels with Letters from Iwo Jima and has previously won in this category for Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby. If Letters wins, it would be the first foreign language film to win in the category. Others directing nods went to Stephen Frears for The Queen and Paul Greengrass for United 93.
Last but not least, the Best Picture race seems very tight. Along with Little Miss Sunshine, the other Best Picture hopefuls are The Departed (5 nominations), Letters from Iwo Jima (4 nominations), Babel (7 nominations) and The Queen (6 nominations). But the biggest surprise had to be the omission of Dreamgirls on the Best Picture list, which won the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy
Famous entertainment journalist Jeanne Wolf weighed in on the Dreamgirls snub.
“There are phone calls all over town going, ‘Wait a minute, ‘Dreamgirls’ didn’t get Best Picture,” Wolf said. “But another film from the same studio, Letters from Iwo Jima seemed to be the one that pushed it aside. So Paramount has to be happy, DreamWorks has to be happy. But on the other hand, they have to be asking themselves, ‘What happened?’ because everyone thought it was a sure thing. [And] I think a lot of the Academy voters thought United 93 would get it a Best Picture slot, but remember there is only five.”
But putting all seriousness aside, Wolf added what an Oscar nomination really means—especially for the ladies. “[Salma’s] been in this whole crazy nomination race and knows what it truly really means—the dress, the dress, the dress. What am I going to wear?” she said, laughing.
And you can see for yourself when the Academy Awards airs at 5 p.m. PST (8 p.m. EST) Sunday, Feb. 25 from the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.
Click Here for a Complete List of Nominations
