'Million Dollar' Oscars

Two of Hollywood's grand old men met head to head at last night's 77th annual Academy Awards -- and Clint Eastwood put Martin Scorsese on the canvas. Meanwhile, an overnight sensation arrived at the top, and an actress proved she's more than a flash in the pan.

Clint Eastwood's acclaimed boxing drama ''Million Dollar Baby" won the 2004 best picture Oscar at the ceremonies, while Eastwood himself took home the award for best director, beating out Scorsese, who many had predicted would win a long-overdue statuette for his Howard Hughes biopic ''The Aviator."

It marked the third time that Scorsese has lost the directing Oscar to an actor-turned-filmmaker. The others were to Robert Redford in 1981 and Kevin Costner in 1991.

Jamie Foxx, the heavy favorite, took best actor for his vivid performance at Ray Charles in ''Ray." In his speech, the actor, who was also nominated for a supporting role in ''Collateral," led the audience in a shout-out to the late Charles, who may now have won as many awards in death as he has in life.

Five years after ''Boys Don't Cry," Hilary Swank consolidated her reign at the top of the American film industry by winning a second best actress Oscar, for her portrayal of boxer Maggie Fitzgerald in ''Million Dollar Baby," which won four awards overall. It was also the second time Swank took the best actress award over Annette Bening, who was nominated for ''Being Julia." (Bening was up for ''American Beauty" in 2000.)

Held at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, the 2004 Oscars were an evening in which the American film industry turned out in elegant dress and honored its most beloved own, even as first-time host Chris Rock worked overtime to impart a hip new spin to a ceremony that many felt has been showing its age in an era of awards-show overkill.

As expected, ''The Aviator," Scorsese's epic drama about the life and obsessive-compulsive times of billionaire Hughes, was a winner in many of the categories. The film, whose 11 nominations far outdistanced the competition, won five Oscars, for cinematography, art direction, costumes, and editing, the latter going to longtime Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker (it was her second Oscar, after ''Raging Bull").

''Aviator" costar Cate Blanchett took the best supporting actress statuette for her role as legendary star Katharine Hepburn, an inspired impression that divided viewers as to its verisimilitude. Blanchett thanked Hepburn and especially Scorsese, to whom she proposed a jesting arranged marriage when she said, ''I hope my son marries your daughter."

The most welcome Oscar during the first part of the evening went to Morgan Freeman, who won best supporting actor for his role as a broken-down ex-fighter in ''Million Dollar Baby." Freeman, who had been nominated for acting Oscars three times before but had never won, received a standing ovation from an audience of his peers.

Wins by Freeman and Foxx marked the first time African-American performers have won both the male acting awards.

Another much-appreciated win was Jim Taylor and Alexander Payne's award for best adapted screenplay for the critically acclaimed ''Sideways." In his speech, Payne acknowledged the film's underdog status at the Academy Awards -- and the shocking omission of star Paul Giamatti from the best actor nominees -- when he shared his award with his cast.

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, often held up as one of the most visionary talents in his field, shared the prize for best original screenplay with Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth for the dazzling headgames of ''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." True to form for the writer of ''Adaptation," Kaufman gave a charming meta-speech that started with him nervously counting off the time-clock's seconds.

These were grace notes in an evening that seemed set on avoiding the tacky, audience-grabbing set-pieces of Oscar years past. There was no Billy Crystal galloping through a musical-comedy tour of the films up for best picture this year. Even Beyonce singing the nominated song from the French film ''The Chorus," backed by a boys choir, came off as a good idea.

The Lifetime Achievement Oscar went to director Sidney Lumet, one of the most respected filmmakers in the industry and a man whose films, many set in a gritty, well-worn New York City, have been singled out by the Academy time and again.

Brad Bird's ''The Incredibles" won the award for best animated feature, to no one's surprise, while ''Born Into Brothels," a moving saga of children, poverty, and photography in India, won best documentary feature. Best makeup went to the underrated Jim Carrey comedy ''Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events." The award for best visual effects went to ''Spider-Man 2," one of the few commercial blockbusters to be nominated for anything.

The award for best foreign language film went to ''The Sea Inside," a true-life drama from Spain about a quadriplegic (Javier Bardem) fighting for the right to die. Coupled with the strong showing of ''Million Dollar Baby," the win made assisted suicide the trendy subject of this Oscar year.

Overall, the evening was brisk, smooth, well-balanced, and competently dull. Acceptance speeches were shockingly short, and only the duet by Carlos Santana and Antonio Banderas on the nominated song ''Al Otros Lado del Rio" from ''The Motorcycle Diaries" came anywhere near such moments of legendary cheese as the Rob Lowe/Snow White ''Proud Mary" debacle of 1989. (And even that wobble was righted when composer/original performer Jorge Drexler won the Oscar for best original song -- and, as his speech, sung a few beautiful a cappella bars of his own tune.)

While the filmmaking community walked the red carpet with decorum, Rock pulled the rug out from the Academy's sense of dignity time and again. In his opening monologue, he brought up the two blockbusters everyone else tactfully avoided, ''Fahrenheit 9/11" and ''The Passion of the Christ," and amusingly insulted newly-minted stars Colin Farrell and Jude Law (he was chided for that later by presenter Sean Penn, scaling new heights of humorlessness).

In the most bluntly hilarious reality-check of the evening, Rock took a prerecorded trip down to LA's Magic Johnson Theater to find out what average folks were seeing at the movies.

The results were probably not what the Academy Board of Governors might have hoped for -- favorite films included ''Alien vs. Predator" and ''White Chicks," and no one had seen any of the films nominated for best picture. But they said volumes about the difference between what Hollywood thinks it does best and what it actually does well.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com