No best picture nomination for ‘Dreamgirls’

Along with Mirren, who plays British monarch Elizabeth II in “The Queen,” best-actress nominees were Penelope Cruz as a woman dealing with bizarre domestic crises in “Volver”; Judi Dench as a scheming teacher in “Notes on a Scandal”; Meryl Streep as a tyrannical boss in “The Devil Wears Prada”; and Kate Winslet as a housewife in an affair with a neighbor in “Little Children.”

Whitaker was nominated for best actor as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in “The Last King of Scotland,” while DiCaprio was chosen for playing a mercenary on a quest for a rare gem in “Blood Diamond.” Also nominated were Ryan Gosling as a teacher with a drug addiction in “Half Nelson”; Peter O’Toole as a lecherous old actor in “Venus”; and Will Smith as a homeless dad in “The Pursuit of Happyness.”

It was the eighth nomination for O’Toole, and another loss would put him in the record books as the actor with the most nominations without a win.

“If you fail the first time, try, try, try, try, try, try, try again,” O’Toole said in a statement.

This finally may be the year for “The Departed” filmmaker Martin Scorsese, tied with four other directors for the Oscar-futility record of five nominations and five losses.

“The Departed” marks Scorsese’s return to the cops-and-mobsters genre he mastered in decades past and is considered his best shot to finally win an Oscar, though a sixth defeat would put him alone in the record book as the losingest director ever.

“He’s been overlooked too long,” said DiCaprio, the star of Scorsese’s last three movies. “He’s deserved it many times before. I couldn’t be more happy for this film and for Marty. I’ve been blessed to have worked with him. But I’m done trying to predict what I think he deserves. Ultimately, it’s beyond anybody’s control, I guess.”

Another Oscar for Eastwood?
Clint Eastwood, who won the best-director prize two years ago for “Million Dollar Baby” over Scorsese for “The Aviator,” scored another directing nomination for “Letters From Iwo Jima,” something of a surprise considering the Directors Guild of America overlooked him.

The Japanese-language “Letters” wound up overshadowing his higher-profile companion film “Flags of Our Fathers” in awards season.

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“It was kind of strange, the whole thing. It was sort of the second-cousin film,” Eastwood said. “‘Letters’ was the smaller brother, but by the same token, it was a really good script.”

Among other surprises and intriguing turns: Ten-year-old Abigail Breslin became the fourth-youngest actress ever nominated, earning a supporting slot for “Little Miss Sunshine”; Mark Wahlberg scored a supporting-actor nomination over top-billed co-stars DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson for “The Departed”; past winner and Oscar darling Pedro Almodovar’s “Volver,” which had been considered a possible front-runner for the foreign-language prize, was not nominated; and two new faces to U.S. audiences, “Babel” co-stars Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi both were nominated for supporting actress.

When Barraza learned of her nomination, “I screamed and I jumped and I cried and kissed my husband many times,” she said.

A longshot came in with the best-actor nomination for Gosling in “Half Nelson,” a little-seen independent drama. Gosling was on the phone with his manager when he learned of his nomination, then he immediately heard tires squeal and a car crash outside his window, where a motorcycle policeman had been hit by a van.

“I was fielding all these congratulatory phone calls and watching this guy put into an ambulance, so it was a real conflict of emotion,” Gosling said. “Then I saw on the news that he had just broken his arm. I felt like it turned out to be a pretty good day for both of us.”

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