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77th Academy Awards
Date	Sunday, February 27, 2005
Site	Kodak Theatre Hollywood, Los Angeles, California
Preshow	Billy Bush Jann Carl Chris Connelly Shaun Robinson
Host	Chris Rock
Producer	Gilbert Cates
Director	Louis J. Horvitz
Highlights
Best Picture	Million Dollar Baby
Most awards	The Aviator (5)
Most nominations	The Aviator (11)
TV in the United States
Network	ABC
Duration	3 hours, 14 minutes
Viewership	42.16 million 25.29 (Nielsen Ratings)
< 76th Academy Awards 78th >

The 77th Academy Awards honored the best films of 2004 and were held on February 27, 2005, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, California. They were hosted by comedian Chris Rock.

The nominees were announced on January 25, 2005. Martin Scorsese's biopic of the eccentric Howard Hughes, The Aviator, led the pack with eleven nominations including Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Picture. Marc Forster's Finding Neverland and Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby each had seven nominations. Ray and Sideways rounded out the nominees for Best Picture.

The 77th Academy Awards was the first Oscar telecast since the 72nd Academy Awards to receive a TV rating of TV-14. This is most likely due to many "edgy" comments made by Chris Rock during the ceremony. Since this, every future telecast to date would receive a TV-14 rating.

News and recap

• As of February 27, 2005, the field of Best Picture nominees did not include a bonafide blockbuster at the U.S. box office. For the first time in 20 years, and what would continue for the next few years, none of the nominees for Best Picture was among the year's top ten releases in box office at the time of the nominations, and as a group they most probably had the lowest box-office performance of any Best Picture field in history. To date, The Aviator was the highest earner with $93.7 million in domestic box office receipts, and ranked as the 24th highest grosser of 2004. It was followed by Ray at $74.9 million and Million Dollar Baby at $64.7 million.
• There was a considerable amount of controversy surrounding the omission of political-themed documentaries from the Best Documentary Feature Film category. However, this was not necessarily an oversight on the part of the Academy, as many of the candidates were rendered ineligible.
  • Fahrenheit 9/11 was intentionally withheld from submission in the Best Documentary Feature Film category by producer Michael Moore, in hopes of affecting the 2004 presidential election by airing it on broadcast television. Under rules established by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, documentaries shown on television within nine months of their theatrical release are ineligible for the documentary Oscar. Instead Moore submitted it for the Best Picture category which does not have that same rule.
  • Popular political documentaries Control Room and The Corporation were rendered ineligible by the fact that they had been broadcast in their entirety on network television within 9 months of their U.S. theatrical release.
• The popular The Motorcycle Diaries was not selected by any country as its official nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, as the crew, director, cast and filming locations were all affiliated with different nations. As it had no specific country of origin, no country was willing to make it their official selection for the category.
• When Chris Rock makes his introduction, the music accompanying him is a slightly jazzed up version of Brad Fiedel's theme from The Terminator.
• The ceremony attracted an average audience of 42.14 million, down three percent from the preceding year. However, the target age 18-49 demographic ratings stood at 16.84, higher with the preceding year's 15.68.
• During one segment Rock asked "Who is this guy?" in reference to actor Jude Law who seemingly appeared in every movie Rock had seen that year and implied Law was a low-rent Tom Cruise (he made a joke about filmmakers rushing production and being unable to get the actors they want: "If you want Tom Cruise and all you can get is Jude Law, wait [to make the film]!") . Nearly two hours later, a defensive Sean Penn took the stage to present and said, "In answer to our host's question, Jude Law is one of our finest young actors." (At the time, Penn and Law were shooting All the King's Men.) This was later mocked on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart impersonating Penn explaining old jokes like airline peanuts. Law was not the only actor that Rock poked fun at that evening, however—he turned the joke on himself at one point, saying "if you want Denzel [Washington] and all you can get is me, wait!"

Notable quotes

• "I don't want to take my time—I want to get off the stage." –Charlie Kaufman
• "My grandma used to sit down and talk to me, she said I want you to be a Southern gentleman, and she still talks to me, only now in my dreams. And I can't wait to go to sleep tonight because we've got a lot to talk about. I love you." –Jamie Foxx
• "To answer our host's question, Jude Law is one of our finest actors." –Sean Penn, while presenting, responding to Chris Rock's question "Who is Jude Law?"

Trivia

• As the film's producers, Clint Eastwood and Albert Ruddy shared the Best Picture Oscar for Million Dollar Baby. Over 30 years earlier, Eastwood had been the presenter for Best Picture when Ruddy won his first Oscar as producer of The Godfather.

Major awards

Winners are listed first and highlighted in boldface.

Other awards

Academy Award ceremony presenters and performers

Breakdown

(Awards won/nominations)

• 5/11 - The Aviator
• 4/7 - Million Dollar Baby
• 2/6 - Ray
• 2/4 - The Incredibles
• 1/7 - Finding Neverland
• 1/4 - Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
• 1/5 - Sideways
• 1/3 - Spider-Man 2
• 1/2 - The Sea Inside (Mar adentro)
• 1/2 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• 1/2 - The Motorcycle Diaries (Diario de motocicleta)

Special honors

• Roger Mayer, president of Turner Entertainment and head of the Motion Picture and Television Fund, received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
• Director Sidney Lumet was awarded an honorary Oscar.

In memoriam

A special tribute to past host Johnny Carson was presented by host Chris Rock with previous emcee Whoopi Goldberg discussing Carson's legacy to television and the Academy Awards in the segment.

Presented by Annette Bening with a musical solo by Yo-Yo Ma The Academy recognizes those motion picture contributors that pass away in the previous year. In the order that they appear, the following actors and artists were featured: former president Ronald Reagan, Peter Ustinov, Carrie Snodgress, director Dan Petrie Sr., composer Dave Raksin, Fay Wray, film agent Phil Gersh, composer Elmer Bernstein, writer Carole Eastman, animator Frank Thomas, director Russ Meyer, Jerry Orbach, film editor Ralph E. Winters, writer Robert E. Thompson, Howard Keel, Janet Leigh, Christopher Reeve, Ossie Davis, producer Jerry Bick, Mercedes McCambridge, producer/writer William Sackheim, cinematographer Ed Di Gullio, writer Nelson Gidding, Paul Winfield, director Philippe de Broca, composer Jerry Goldsmith, Rodney Dangerfield, Virginia Mayo, Tony Randall and Marlon Brando.

See also

Academy Award portal

• Academy Awards
• List of Academy Awards ceremonies
• History of cinema
• 2004 Golden Raspberry Awards

External links

• Internet Movie Database (IMDb): Road to the Oscars
• Academy Awards Official Web Site
• E! Online: Oscars 2005