'Aviator,' 'Million Dollar Baby' lead Oscar nominations

Is this finally director Martin Scorsese's year?

After being snubbed by Academy voters for such classics as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and GoodFellas and more recent films like The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York, the maverick director felt the embrace of the Motion Picture Academy like never before Tuesday as The Aviator, Scorsese's epic biography of renegade filmmaker and flyboy Howard Hughes, took a leading 11 nominations, including Best Picture. No Scorsese film has ever garnered that much Academy attention.

Sentiment may be on Scorsese's side, but The Aviator does appear to have a competitive race in its flight path, as Clint Eastwood's boxing drama Million Dollar Baby picked up seven nods of its own, including Best Picture. All but one of its nominations were in major categories. Baby scored a 1-2 punch for Eastwood, as it follows his own Mystic River, which was a double Oscar winner last year.

Another Best Picture nominee up for seven trophies is a second biopic, Marc Forster's Finding Neverland, which chronicles the life of Peter Pan creator J.M. Barrie. Big screen biographies were obviously popular with voters this year, as another Best Picture nomination went to Taylor Hackford's Ray, which details the life of the late musician Ray Charles.

Rounding out the list of Best Picture contenders is Alexander Payne's Sideways, the year's most popular film with critics and a rare comedy to compete for the top prize.

Stuck on the Best Picture sidelines were Terry George's Hotel Rwanda and Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which may have been snubbed for opposite reasons. Rwanda may have been released too late to really catch fire, while Eternal Sunshine came out back in March, an eternity considering Oscar voters' notoriously short attention spans. Some Oscar watchers had also hoped for a Best Picture mention for The Incredibles, but like Shrek and Finding Nemo before it, that film was relegated to the Best Animated Feature category.

Four of the five Best Picture nominees also saw their directors nominated - Scorsese, Eastwood, Hackford and Payne. They are joined by British director Mike Leigh, whose import Vera Drake chronicles the plight of an abortionist housewife in 1950s England. The little-seen film has been embraced by proponents of both sides of the abortion issue.

In a Best Actor race that garnered much press for being even more competitive than usual, the five anointed leading men were led by Jamie Foxx, whose performance as the title music man of Ray astounded audiences who were only used to his broad comic work on TV's In Living Color. The actors' branch was so enthralled with Foxx that they actually gave him another nomination, for Best Supporting Actor in last summer's Collateral. This nomination is controversial in that few people would classify that role as being supporting since he is in virtually every scene of the film. But either way the feat makes Foxx only the second male actor ever nominated for two acting Oscars in the same year.

Foxx is joined in the Best Actor race by Leonardo DiCaprio for The Aviator, enjoying his first Academy attention since 1993 after being famously snubbed for 1997's Titanic.

Don Cheadle, another actor with a habit of being relegated to being an Academy also-ran, finally scored his first career nomination for Hotel Rwanda as a hotel manager who ends up saving thousands of lives during the Rwandan genocides of 1994.

Johnny Depp became this year's only repeat acting nominee from last year with his Best Actor mention for Finding Neverland. In 2003, Depp competed in this category with Pirates of the Caribbean.

And just how big were biographies this year? The only Best Actor nominee not playing a real person this year is Million Dollar Baby's Clint Eastwood, whose nomination follows his acting nod for 1992's Best Picture-winning Unforgiven.

Eastwood most likely stole the spot many expected to go to Sideways' Paul Giamatti, the only member of that film's above-the-line players to be left wanting.

Also snubbed: Eternal Sunshine's Jim Carrey, whom the Academy seems to simply refuse to recognize, as well as Kinsey's Liam Neeson and The Sea Inside's Javier Bardem.

The Best Actress race appears to be shaping up as a rematch of the 1999 showdown between Hilary Swank and Annette Bening. That year, the unknown Swank from Boys Don't Cry stole the thunder of American Beauty's Bening. This year, Swank is back with plenty of spunk as the lead in Million Dollar Baby, while Bening scored perhaps the best reviews of her career with the broad theatre comedy Being Julia. The race will be close between these two women, and it's possible that enough vote-splitting will occur that the remaining nominees may still have a chance to prevail.

They include Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind's Kate Winslet, with her fourth career nomination, as well as imports Imelda Staunton for Vera Drake (which has yet to open in most of the United States) and Catalina Sandino Moreno for Maria Full of Grace (which is already on DVD and video).

Overlooked for Best Actress were the well-regarded turns by Kill Bill Vol. 2's Uma Thurman, Closer's Julia Roberts, and Before Sunset's Julie Delpy.

Joining double nominee Foxx in the Best Supporting Actor race was Million Dollar Baby's Morgan Freeman. This nod is Freeman's fourth, and he will likely emerge as the sentimental favorite as he has still yet to win despite beloved work in both The Shawshank Redemption and Driving Miss Daisy.

Also selected was critical favorite (and former co-star of TV's Wings) Thomas Haden Church of Sideways. Church's boozing playboy has won the lion's share of critics' early kudos in this category.Another sitcom vet, Alan Alda of M*A*S*H fame, scored his first ever Academy attention as a villainous senator in The Aviator. Alda's nomination came as a mild surprise.

Rounding out the category was British actor Clive Owen, who scored a mention as an emotionally dysfunctional dermatologist in Closer. Owen just won a Golden Globe for this performance a few weeks ago.Snubbed for Best Supporting Actor this year was Peter Sarsgaard of Kinsey, who was similarly overlooked last year for his work in Shattered Glass. Kill Bill's David Carradine and Finding Neverland's tot Freddie Highmore were also expected to potentially score here, but both came up short.

The Best Supporting Actress nominations were led by Sideways' Virginia Madsen, enjoying a comeback from B-movie obscurity with this, her first nomination. Giving Madsen some stiff competition is The Aviator's Cate Blanchett with her second career nod, this time for playing Academy grande dame Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator.Natalie Portman, also a Golden Globe winner, scored her first nomination for her deceitful lover in Closer.

Kinsey's Laura Linney proved to be that film's sole nominee with her nod here, while Hotel Rwanda's surprise nominee Sophie Okonedo helped make 2004 the most successful year in Oscar history for black actors. The recognition of Okonedo, Freeman, and Cheadle, combined with the double nod for Foxx, means that five of the 20 acting nominations went to black performers, dwarfing the previous record of just three.Who is missing for Best Supporting Actress? Spanglish's Cloris Leachman, Ray's Sharon Warren and Finding Neverland's Kate Winslet, who missed out on matching Jamie Foxx's double nominations.

The writing nominations went to an eclectic mix of studio offerings and indie upstarts, with Best Original Screenplay mentions going to The Aviator, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Hotel Rwanda, The Incredibles and Vera Drake.

The Best Screenplay Adaptation nominations went to Before Sunset, Finding Neverland, Million Dollar Baby, The Motorcycle Diaries and Sideways.

Other nominations of note:

• The strong showing by African-American actors this year lengthens the Academy's streak of nominating at least one black performer for each of the past four years - a record.
• Composer John Williams, up for his score for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, furthered his record as the most-nominated living person, with his 43rd mention.
• The year's two most controversial movies - Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, were both largely ignored. Passion only scored technical nods for cinematography, makeup, and scoring, while Moore's refusal to submit his film for Best Documentary (hoping instead for a Best Picture nod) left Fahrenheit with nothing at all.

Chris Rock will host the 77th Annual Academy Awards, presented live on ABC on Feb. 27.