Oscar made a play to throw off its malaise last night, with a dash of street-smart attitude and a shakeup of its presentational style, offering a desperate bid to halt the slide in ratings over recent years and the growing lack of interest for the awards among North American filmgoers.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which manages the Oscars, tapped comedian Chris Rock for master-of-ceremonies duties -- the first black man to host the awards on his own -- going outside the sphere of safely earnest jokesters such as Billy Crystal and Steve Martin for the first time in years.
Martin Scorsese's Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator seemed to be the favourite, with 11 nominations going into the evening. It was up for best picture against Clint Eastwood's distaff pugilist film Million Dollar Baby (seven nominations), the sentimental J. M. Barrie biography Finding Neverland (seven), the Ray Charles biopic Ray (six), and the road-movie ode to pinot noir Sideways (five).
In the early going, The Aviator took an award for supporting actress, with Cate Blanchett winning for her role as Katharine Hepburn, as well as awards for editing, cinematography, art direction and costume design. Accepting her Oscar, Mr. Scorsese's long-time editor Thelma Schoonmaker paid tribute to the director, who has never won an Oscar, saying, "This is as much yours as it is mine, Marty."
Morgan Freeman won as supporting actor for his role as a washed-up boxing cut man in Million Dollar Baby.
The National Film Board of Canada took the spotlight with director Chris Landreth's film, Ryan, which won for best animated short.
The film, which was supported by the film board, is a portrait of the former NFB animator Ryan Larkin, whose career spiralled down when he hit a period of drug and alcohol abuse. He now lives on the margins in Montreal.
Accepting his award, Mr. Landreth saluted "the grace and humility of one guy watching from Montreal." Mr. Landreth added that the film board staff with whom he worked "are true visionaries in Canadian filmmaking."
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events took the award for makeup, and Born Into Brothels won for best documentary feature.
But there seemed to be no single film that had won the hearts of the academy and would sweep the awards, as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King did last year and Titanic did in 1998.
None of the best-picture nominees has crossed over to become a cultural and media phenomenon like last year's controversial hits The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11.
Some of the year's most popular films were nominated in the animated feature film category, which was won by The Incredibles.
The only two nominated films to land in the top 10 of last weekend's box office were Million Dollar Baby and The Aviator.
Furthermore, the actors up for the performance trophies included only a few of the rare Hollywood species that can single-handedly sell a film.
Leonardo DiCaprio, Clint Eastwood, Johnny Depp and Don Cheadle were up in the leading actor category, but Jamie Foxx was widely expected to walk away with the trophy for his impersonation of Ray Charles in Ray.
The odds-on favourite in the best-actress category, Hilary Swank, had little box-office pull and was all but absent from major motion pictures since she won the statuette in 2000 for her role in Boys Don't Cry.
Sapped of any populist groundswell, the only excitement going into last night's telecast was over how outrageous Mr. Rock might prove to be on national television, and whether Mr. Foxx would break down in tears while paying homage to his recently deceased grandmother if, as expected, he won the best-actor trophy.
Mr. Rock did not disappoint, kicking off the telecast with jokes about the four black actors nominated, a relatively high number, and following it up a man-on-the-street comedy bit in which he found no black moviegoers who had seen any of the films up for the best picture award. But the Academy hedged its bets, opening with a dry montage of famous movie clips, narrated by Dustin Hoffman, and including a tribute to Johnny Carson.
The highest-profile Canadian nominee was the writer Paul Haggis, a creator of the TV series Due South, who was up for the best adapted screenplay award for his script for Million Dollar Baby. The writers for Sideways took home the award.
The other National Film Board-supported project that was nominated did not take home an award. Hubert Davis's Hardwood, was a short documentary about his father, Mel Davis, a former Harlem Globetrotter.
Simon Houpt