Martin Scorsese's mob epic The Departed won best picture at the Academy Awards and earned the filmmaker the directing prize that had long eluded him. Helen Mirren won best actress for playing the British queen, and Forest Whitaker earned best actor for his portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.
"Could you double-check the envelope?" said Scorsese, who arguably had been the greatest living American filmmaker without an Oscar.
He received his Oscar from three contemporaries and friends, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. "So many people over the years have been wishing this for me," he said.
In an evening when no one film dominated as the Oscars shared the love among a wide range of movies and the nominees showed an international flair, three of the four acting front-runners won: best actress Mirren as British monarch Elizabeth II in The Queen; best actor Whitaker as Amin in The Last King of Scotland; and supporting actress Jennifer Hudson as a soul singer in Dreamgirls.
The other front-runner, Eddie Murphy of Dreamgirls, lost to Alan Arkin for Little Miss Sunshine.
"For 50 years and more, Elizabeth Windsor has maintained her dignity, her sense of duty and her hairstyle," said Mirren, who has been on a remarkable roll since last fall, winning all the major film and television prizes for playing both of Britain's Queen Elizabeths.
"She's had her feet planted firmly on the ground, her hat on her head, her handbag on her arm and she's weathered many many storms. If it wasn't for her, I most certainly wouldn't be here. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Queen,"' Mirren said, holding her Oscar aloft.
The soft-spoken Whitaker won for an uncharacteristically flamboyant role as the barbarous yet mesmerizing Amin.
"When I was a kid the only way I saw movies was from the back seat of my family's car at the drive-in movie," Whitaker said. "It wasn't my reality to think I would be acting in movies, so receiving this honor tonight tells me it's possible. It is possible for a kid from east Texas, raised in south-central LA and Carson, who believes in his dreams, commits himself to them with his heart, to touch them and to have them happen."
Arkin played a foul-mouthed grandpa with a taste for heroin in Little Miss Sunshine, a low-budget film that came out of the independent world to become a commercial hit and major awards player, including a nomination for best picture.
"More than anything, I'm deeply moved by the open-hearted appreciation our small film has received, which in these fragmented times speaks so openly of the possibility of innocence, growth and connection," said Arkin.
Hudson won an Oscar for her first movie, playing a powerhouse vocalist who falls on hard times after she is booted from a 1960s girl group. The role came barely two years after she shot to celebrity as an American Idol singing finalist.
"Oh my God, I have to just take this moment in. I cannot believe this. Look what God can do. I didn't think I was going to win," Hudson said through tears of joy. "If my grandmother was here to see me now. She was my biggest inspiration." Germany's The Lives of Others, about a playwright and his actress-girlfriend who come under police surveillance in 1980s East Berlin, won the foreign-language Oscar.
On stage, director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck thanked his actors and crew and had a special word of thanks for fellow native German speaker Arnold Schwarzenegger, "for teaching me that the words 'I can't' should be stricken from my vocabulary,'" von Donnersmarck said.
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