"I'm in frighteningly good company. It is very nice of the queen to allow me in for a minute," Dench said, with a nod to Mirren in a statement from London. Notes on a Scandal also garnered a supporting actress nomination for Australian Cate Blanchett.
Playing a mom who hangs out at the park with her child in Little Children, Winslet appropriately learned of her nomination while dropping her daughter off at school.
"I really am a soccer mom," said Winslet, who earned her fifth Oscar nomination. "I am so happy. I am going to be screaming and whooping all day long. I really thought I wasn't going to get a nomination. I am really going to try to enjoy this moment. I'm speechless. It feels like I've never been nominated before.''
Irish-born Peter O'Toole picked up his eighth Oscar nomination at age 74 for his performance as a lecherous old actor who falls for a young woman in Venus. "If you fail the first time try, try, try, try, try, try, try again,'' said O'Toole, reacting to his latest nomination.
O'Toole, who received his first best-actor nomination for the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, could wind up in the record books as the actor with the most nominations without winning. British oddsmakers made Forest Whitaker the heavy favorite at 1-4 for his portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.
In the supporting actor category, Djimon Hounsou, who was born in the West African country of Benin and turned to acting after a successful modeling career in Europe, was nominated for his role as a fisherman struggling to save his family in Sierra Leone's civil war in Blood Diamond.
Children of Men, by Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, received three nominations: best cinematography, best editing, and best adapted screenplay.
Among the foreign-language film nominees, Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, a gothic fairy tale about a girl's dark fantasy life in fascist Spain, was the break-out film with six nominations, including original screenplay and cinematography.
The other nominees for best foreign-language film were Denmark's After the Wedding, Algeria's Days of Glory (Indigenes), Germany's The Lives of Others, and Canada's Water.
No film better exemplified the international flavor of this year's Oscars than best-director nominee Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Babel, a saga of families on three continents linked by tragic events in the African desert.
With seven nominations, including best picture, the Mexican director's film trailed only Dreamgirls, which had eight nominations, three of them for best song. While Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett were the featured stars in Babel, the most memorable performances came from two newcomers to US audiences, Mexico's Adriana Barraza and Japan's Rinko Kikuchi who both received supporting actress nominations.
"It's a joy. American cinema is receiving people from all over the world — this can open the doors for everybody,'' said Barraza, who gives a heartbreaking performance as a nanny to two American children whose life takes a terrible turn because of tragic events half a world away.
"I think nowadays we are a global society — people are thinking in global terms, and I think it touched society as such,'' she said of Babel, speaking in Spanish from Miami.
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