‘Babel,’ ‘Dreamgirls’ win Golden Globes

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Two great directors honored
The best director prize went to Martin Scorsese for the mob tale “The Departed,” the second Globe for the filmmaker, boosting his prospects to finally win an Oscar after five nominations, all losses.

American director Clint Eastwood’s Japanese-language World War II saga “Letters From Iwo Jima” won the honor for foreign-language film, a prize usually reserved for movies from outside the United States.

“You don’t know what this does for my confidence,” said director Eastwood, whose “Letters” and its English-language companion piece “Flags of Our Fathers” generally have failed to catch on with audiences and earlier Hollywood awards.

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Backstage, Eastwood joked, “Now that I’m a foreign director, I’ve got to learn some languages.”

The talking-auto comedy “Cars” took the first-ever Golden Globe for animated film, a category added because of the rush of cartoon flicks Hollywood now churns out.

“Animation is awesome everybody. It’s my life. I’ve lived in it. It’s so exciting to have our own category,” said “Cars” director John Lasseter, the innovative director of the “Toy Story” movies who pioneered the current computer-animation craze.

“The Queen” won the movie screenplay honor for Peter Morgan.

‘I haven't made an awful lot of movies’
Warren Beatty received the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement.

“The truth is I haven’t made an awful lot of movies, in fact,” Beatty said, joking about the busy schedules of other older actors and filmmakers such as Eastwood and Jack Nicholson. “Something like this is enough really for a guy to go out and make another movie.”

As Hollywood’s second-biggest film honors, the Globes are something of a dress rehearsal for the Oscars, whose nominations come out Jan. 23. The Oscar ceremony will be on Feb. 25.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association that presents the Globes has roughly 85 members, while about 5,800 film professionals are eligible to vote for the Oscars.

Yet the group has a strong history of forecasting eventual Academy Awards winners and providing momentum for certain movies and stars as Oscar voters begin to cast their ballots.

Such Globe best-picture winners as “Shakespeare in Love,” “American Beauty,” “Gladiator” and “Chicago” went on to win the same prize at the Oscars. Globe voters were off target the past two years, anointing 2004’s “The Aviator” as best drama, a prize that went to “Million Dollar Baby” at the Oscars, and 2005’s “Brokeback Mountain,” which lost to “Crash” come Oscar night.

But all four of 2005’s acting recipients at the Oscars — Philip Seymour Hoffman, Reese Witherspoon, George Clooney and Rachel Weisz — also won Golden Globes.

Nominations for the Oscars closed Saturday, so the outcome of the Globes cannot affect who gets nominated.

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