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Oscars: Whitaker, Mirren win | Pics
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| SHOWTIME: Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt arrive for the 79th Academy Awards. |
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| WALKING 'THE WALK': Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and his wife Maria Hagerman walk the red carpet. |
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New Delhi The majority of Oscars went to pre-ceremony favourites and upsets were restricted to minor categories but the 79th Academy Awards is unlikely to be remembered as a vintage year.
In the key categories, Dame Helen Mirren got the best actress award for her role in the film The Queen while Forest Whitaker won the best actor for The Last King of Scotland.
Ending one of the longest losing streaks at the world's top film awards, veteran director Martin Scorsese won his first Oscar in his 40-year-old career for crime thriller The Departed.
Scorsese had been nominated five other times for directing classics like Raging Bull and Goodfellas.
However, Canada's official entry in the best foreign film category, Water lost out to Germany's The Lives of Others.
But all is not lost for Indians at the Academy as Indian born producer Ravi Malhotra’s West Bank Story won the Academy Award in the Best Short Film Live Action category.
The 20-minute flick spoofs the tension between Israelis and Palestinians using humour to provide a fresh perspective to a contentious issue.
Former American Idol contestant Jennifer Hudson won the Oscar for best supporting actress for her performance as the spurned lead singer of a female trio in Dreamgirls.
Hudson's show-stopping singing and sympathetic character had made her the odds-on favorite to win the award. It was the 25-year-old's first movie role for which she also picked up Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards.
An Inconvenient Truth, the big-screen adaptation of former US Vice-President Al Gore's slide-show lecture about the perils of global warming, won the Academy Award for best documentary feature.
The award went to director Davis Guggenheim and producers Lawrence Bender (of Pulp Fiction fame) and Laurie David, the environmentalist wife of Seinfeld co-creator Larry David.
The savage fairy tale Pan's Labyrinth set the ball rolling with the first three Academy Awards for art direction, make-up and cinematography, kicking off an Oscar evening stuffed with contenders from around the globe.
"To Guillermo del Toro for guiding us through this labyrinth," said art director Eugenio Caballero, lauding the writer-director of Pan's Labyrinth, the tale of a girl who concocts an elaborate fantasy world to escape her harsh reality in 1940s fascist Spain.
In a surprise victory, veteran actor Alan Arkin, who plays an irascible grandfather in Little Miss Sunshine, won the best supporting actor Oscar.
"More than anything, I am deeply moved by the open-hearted appreciation our little movie has received," Arkin said, after joking that he almost didn't get the job because the directors thought him too virile.
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