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Eastwood, Scorsese Among Oscar Nominees for Best Director
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As Hollywood prepares for 77th Academy Awards February 27, Alan
Silverman takes a look at the Best Director nominees Sunday February
27, Hollywood celebrates itself with the 77th annual Academy Awards
for excellence in motion pictures. Alan Silverman has a look at the
nominees for one of the most prestigious and most unpredictable
categories at this year's Oscars - Best Director.

Eastwood adds yet another crusty character to his acting resume as the
boxing trainer in Million Dollar Baby.







Clint Eastwood and Hillary Swank in scene from Million Dollar
Baby"He's a man who is searching for something," explains Eastwood,
"and, through his reticence to build a relationship with this young
lady as a fighter, he sort of finds himself as a man and finds his
heart. He has a sort of rebirth of sorts.

In addition to a best lead actor nomination for his performance,
Eastwood is up for best director - his third career nomination that
category. He was nominated last year for Mystic River and won the
Oscar for his 1992 western Unforgiven. In January he won the top honor
from his peers in the Directors Guild of America for Million Dollar
Baby - making Eastwood the front-runner for the directing Oscar. Only
six times since 1949 has the DGA winner not gone on to take home the
Academy Award.

One of America's most acclaimed filmmakers of the past three decades
has never won the best director Oscar, but that could change with his
entry this year: The Aviator, an epic biography of billionaire Howard
Hughes and his early years in Hollywood.

Leonardo DiCaprio is a best actor nominee for his performance as
Hughes in the film that earns Martin Scorsese the fifth best director
nomination of his career.







Martin Scorsese (Photo courtesy AMPAS)"It would be wonderful to win, I
think," Scorsese says. "It probably is better that I didn't win in the
1970s or mid-80s or something. My view on making films is somewhat
different in a way and I think it's something that, maybe, I was not
able to handle at the time. You really have to keep it in
perspective."

The Aviator is up for 11 Oscars: the most nominations of any film this
year.

Ray, the tuneful biography of American music legend Ray Charles, has
six nominations including best director for Taylor Hackford.







Taylor Hackford (Photo courtesy AMPAS)"It took 15 years to get this
film made and not because we couldn't come up with the concept for
it," Hackford says. " It was pretty clear. [It was] Because I couldn't
find the money. The Ray Charles career is astounding and it really
goes and goes. I made a choice to tell 40 years of it, but I could
have gone on for another 40. It wasn't just around the United States,
it was internationally. How do you tell a story that big for $3.95?
You just can't do it. I kept telling people and they'd say 'oh, it
could be interesting if you could just make it for $10 million.' I
said I wish I could, but I'm not going to choose one little moment in
Ray Charles's life and say that's his life. That was the problem."

That kind of dedication could appeal to Academy voters, who are
expected to pick Hackford's Ray star, Jamie Foxx as best actor.

The wine country of the central California coast is the setting for
the mid-life crisis comedy Sideways.

Alexander Payne is nominated for both writing and directing Sideways,
but he has mixed feelings about what it means.







Alexander Payne (Photo courtesy AMPAS)"Any time in the arts when you
single out 'the best' or 'this is better than other things,' I don't
think that's very good," he says. "I think it's kind of pernicious. I
also bear in mind, always, that the Oscars were drummed up in 1928 as
a legitimacy seeking and money-making gimmick by studio heads ... and
it remains that. It's a commodity. I remember my dad called me the
morning we were nominated and said 'Alexander, I don't want this to go
to your head.' I said 'Yes, Dad, but I want it to go to other people's
heads' because it's a commodity that keeps your career going,
especially if you're making movies that are not typical studio fare."

Sideways has five Oscar nominations.

'Not typical studio fare' certainly describes the work of English
filmmaker Mike Leigh, who earns his second career best director
nomination for the powerful drama Vera Drake.

Leigh rehearses for months with his actors, like best actress nominee
Imelda Staunton, to create the nuanced performances.







Mike Leigh (Photo courtesy AMPAS)"I hope that what I do is to work
with actors in a way that respects them as fellow artists," Leigh
says. "I hope that this is a kind of acting that rises above the
normal function of an actor, which is to remember the lines and not
fall over the furniture and hit the marks. This is about actors being
artists and helping to bring into existence something that didn't
previously exist over and above the performance itself."

Mike Leigh, Alexander Payne, Taylor Hackford, Martin Scorsese and
Clint Eastwood: one of them will take home the best director Oscar at
the 77th annual Academy Awards.