'Million Dollar Baby,' Eastwood take top Oscars

LOS ANGELES -- Tough was enough in Clint Eastwood's strong-and-silent early days as a scruffy Old West gunslinger or a modern vigilante cop.\nWith 2003's "Mystic River" and now "Million Dollar Baby," Eastwood has shown that tough doesn't begin to scratch the surface of his filmmaking talents.\nThe boxing tale "Million Dollar Baby," his raw mix of soaring sentiment and harsh fate, was the heavyweight at Sunday's Oscars, winning best picture and three other awards, among them the directing prize for Eastwood and acting honors for Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman.\nSwank became a double Oscar winner, previously winning best actress for "Boys Don't Cry."\nThe other acting awards went to performers in real-life roles, Jamie Foxx for lead actor for his uncanny emulation of Ray Charles in "Ray" and Cate Blanchett for supporting actress as Katharine Hepburn, the love of Howard Hughes life, in "The Aviator."\nEastwood, who at 74 became the oldest directing winner ever, noted his mother was with him when his Western "Unforgiven" won the 1992 best-picture and directing Oscars.\n"She's here with me again tonight, so at 96, I'm thanking her for her genes," Eastwood said. "I figure I'm just a kid. I've got a lot of stuff to do yet."\nThe 77th Oscars were another heartbreak for Martin Scorsese, whose Howard Hughes epic "The Aviator" won the most awards with five but failed to bring him the directing Oscar that has eluded him throughout his distinguished career. A five-time loser, Scorsese matched the record of Oscar futility held by a handful of legendary filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Altman, who also went 0-for-5 in the directing category.\nEastwood, whose first credited screen role came in the 1955 Francis the Talking Mule flick "Francis in the Navy," has climbed in the ensuing half-century to the ranks of Billy Wilder, David Lean, Robert Wise and Steven Spielberg, other filmmakers who have won two or more directing Oscars.\nCritics say Scorsese's best work is decades behind him, noting that recent epics such as "The Aviator" and "Gangs of New York" do not measure up to earlier masterpieces such as "Mean Streets" and "Raging Bull."\nOn the other hand, Eastwood has entered a late-career zenith, delivering complex character studies two years in a row that rank toward the top of his long resume as actor and director, which includes the "Dirty Harry" series and such Spaghetti Westerns as "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."\n"Tough ain't enough," says his character in "Million Dollar Baby," a role that also earned Eastwood a best-actor nomination.\nA last-minute addition to the Oscar race, "Million Dollar Baby" did not even begin shooting until June and had been scheduled for release in 2005 until distributor Warner Bros. took a look at an early cut and scrambled to release it in December.\n"To make a picture in 37 days takes a well-oiled machine. That well-oiled machine is the crew _ the cast, you've met a lot of them," Eastwood said.\nHe went on to mention several longtime collaborators, including art director Henry Bumstead, 89, whom he called "the head of our crack geriatric team."\nIt was the second straight year an Eastwood film won two of the four acting Oscars, Swank named best-actress as a tenacious fighter who rises to champion status before her life takes a cruel twist, Freeman picked for supporting actor as an ex-boxer with wisdom.\nLast year, Eastwood's dark morality play "Mystic River" earned the lead-actor prize for Sean Penn and the supporting-actor award for Tim Robbins.\nSwank once again beat out main rival Annette Bening, nominated for the theater farce "Being Julia." Bening had been the front-runner for "American Beauty" five years ago but lost to underdog Swank.\n"I don't know what I did in this life to deserve all this. I'm just a girl from a trailer park who had a dream," said Swank, who played an indomitable boxer.\nSwank joined Vivien Leigh, Helen Hayes, Sally Field and Luise Rainer as the only actresses with a perfect track record at the Oscars: Two nominations and two wins.\nAs he had at earlier awards triumphs, Foxx led the Oscar audience in a rendition of the call-and-response chant from Charles' 1959 hit "What'd I Say," whose funky electric-piano grooves play over the opening credits of "Ray."\n"Give it up for Ray Charles and his beautiful legacy. And thank you, Ray Charles, for living," said Foxx, who climbed to Oscar glory after an early career built mainly on comedy, including his TV series "The Jamie Foxx Show."\nFoxx had been a double Oscar nominee, also picked in the supporting category for the hit man thriller "Collateral."\nPlaying Hepburn in "The Aviator," Blanchett had the spirit of the Oscars' most-honored actress on her side. Hepburn, the love of Hughes' life in the 1930s before she began her long romance with Spencer Tracy, earned 12 nominations and won a record four Oscars.\n"Thank you, of course, to Miss Hepburn. The longevity of her career I think is inspiring to everyone," said Blanchett. She added thanks to "Aviator" director Scorsese, saying, "I hope my son will marry your daughter."\nOscar host Chris Rock said Blanchett was so convincing that Sidney Poitier, Hepburn's co-star in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," showed up at Blanchett's house for supper.\nThe wins by Freeman and Foxx followed Denzel Washington and Halle Berry's triumph three years ago for "Training Day" and "Monster's Ball," the only other time blacks claimed two acting Oscars.\n"It means that Hollywood is continuing to make history," Freeman said backstage. "We're evolving with the rest of the world."\nThe superhero action comedy "The Incredibles" won the animated-feature prize, beating 2004's biggest box-office hit, the fairy-tale sequel "Shrek 2." It was the second-straight animated Oscar for Pixar Animation, which won a year ago for "Finding Nemo."\n"I don't know what's more frightening, being watched by millions of people, or the hundreds of people that are going to be annoyed with me tomorrow for not mentioning them," said Brad Bird, writer-director of the "The Incredibles."\nThe latest win dabs salt on the Walt Disney Co.'s wounds over the looming expiration of its distribution deal for Pixar films, which ends after next year's "Cars." The back-to-back Oscars underscore Pixar's growing ascendance and the weakening position of animation pioneer Disney, which has yet to win the animated-feature Oscar with any of its homegrown films and whose biggest recent cartoon hits have all been made by Pixar.\nWith no huge hits among best-picture nominees, Oscar organizers worried that TV ratings could dwindle for the live ABC broadcast. The Oscars tend to draw their biggest audiences when blockbusters such as "Titanic" or "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" are in the mix, stoking viewer interest.\nProducers of the show hoped the presence of first-time host Rock might boost ratings, particularly among younger viewers who may view the Oscars as too staid an affair.\nRock chided some celebrities by name, but his routine was fairly clean for the comedian known for a foul mouth in his standup act.\nOrganizers also tried to spice up the show with new presentation tactics, including herding all nominees on stage at the same time, beauty-pageant style, for some awards.\nThe first prize of the night, for art direction, was awarded that way, with a total of nine nominees from five films spread across stage behind presenter Berry. The Oscar went to "The Aviator," whose awards also included cinematography, film editing and costume design.\n"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" took the original-screenplay award for Charlie Kaufman. "Sideways" won the adapted-screenplay prize for director Alexander Payne and his writing partner, Jim Taylor.\n"My mother taught me to write, and she died before she could see any of this, so this is for you, mom," Taylor said.\n"The Sea Inside," the Spanish film based on the true story of a bedridden euthanasia lobbyist, won as best foreign-language film, while "Born Into Brothels," which examines the lives of children of prostitutes in Calcutta, India, received the Oscar for feature-length documentary.