The rest of the Best

Cinematography

Pan’s Labyrinth

Guillermo Navarro

Like frequent collaborator Guillermo del Toro, a fellow Mexican, Guillermo Navarro has a flair for conjuring fantasy realms but imbuing them with a visceral sense of reality. In director Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Navarro had to make a young girl’s imaginary world, peopled with strange creatures and voluptuous settings, mesh with the stark brutalities of Spain in the 1940s. He had to make winged fairies coexist visually with olive-drab scenes of a rural village, and a monster’s banquet look both enticing and strangely terrifying.

His efforts paid off in one of the most luminous (literally and narratively) movies of recent decades. It earned him his first Academy Award nomination and, on Sunday, the Oscar.

Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki had been favored by many to win this category for his work on “Children of Men.” He had been recognized by the American Society of Cinematographers just last weekend. But “Pan’s Labyrinth” was a favorite Sunday, also garnering awards for makeup and art direction.

In his acceptance speech, Navarro repeated himself from the day before in Santa Monica, when he had picked up a Spirit Award, thanking his wife and children for “giving me wings.” He called the Academy Award “a recognition for the collective effort to support the vision of the genius of Guillermo del Toro.”

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Costume Design

Marie Antoinette

Milena Canonero

Milena Canonero, who had won two Oscars for her work on Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” and Hugh Hudson’s “Chariots of Fire,” was singled out for her lavish, opulent designs for “Marie Antoinette.”

In her acceptance speech, she acknowledged the family heritage of “Marie Antoinette” director Sofia Coppola, noting that they were introduced by Coppola’s father, Francis Ford Coppola, on the set of his film “The Cotton Club.”

In designing for “Marie Antoinette,” Canonero tapped fashion heavyweight Manolo Blahnik to create the shoes, bringing a contemporary edge to the classically inspired looks.

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Documentary

An Inconvenient Truth

Davis Guggenheim

In his bid to go green, Al Gore also went gold.

In a remarkable turn for what started as a documentary based on a slide show about the effects of global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth” lets the former vice president add the ultimate show business award to his resume.

“My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis,” Gore said. “It’s not a political issue, it’s a moral issue.”

“We [made this film] because we were moved to act by this man,” director Davis Guggenheim said, gesturing to Gore. He also cited producers Lawrence Bender and Laurie David.

After premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, the film became a critical success and a must-see for liberals, but some conservatives considered it much ado about nothing.

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Documentary short subject

The Blood of Yingzhou District

Ruby Yang and Thomas Lennon

A young Chinese village boy orphaned by AIDS, and himself infected with the disease, stands at the dramatic center of the documentary directed by Hong Kong-born filmmaker Ruby Yang and produced by Thomas Lennon.

Yang and Lennon, who originally met on Bill Moyers’ “Becoming American: The Chinese Experience,” wrote the first major AIDS-prevention campaign aired on Chinese television. The spots featured Yao Ming and Magic Johnson.

“With this disease, film and television can save more lives than doctors can,” Lennon said when the film opened last June. “Our work in China is a humanitarian effort first, and artistic considerations are a distant second. How could it be otherwise?”

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Film editing

The Departed

Thelma Schoonmaker

This is Thelma Schoonmaker’s third win in six nominations, which included other films by her longtime friend and collaborator, director Martin Scorsese, with whom she’s worked since his 1980 film “Raging Bull.”

For “The Departed,” she worked to sustain the tension that drives this operatic gangster thriller, though she has said she was tempted to dwell on the story’s rich characters. At the same time, Schoonmaker maintained the subtle humor and light touch that added levity to even the bloodiest scenes.

Accepting her award, she referred to her Oscar-deprived director (who would finally win minutes later) by saying, “This is the third film you’ve given the Oscar to that was made by Martin Scorsese and, believe me, I wouldn’t be standing here if it wasn’t for him.... Working with Marty is quite something: It’s tumultuous, passionate, funny, and it’s like being in the best film school in the world.”

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Live-action short

West Bank Story

Ari Sandel

Director Ari Sandel gave an eloquent speech after collecting the live-action short Oscar.

“I made a comedy musical about Israelis and Palestinians that takes place between two falafel stands in the West Bank,” he said. “It’s a movie about peace and about hope. To be able to get this award just goes to show that there are so many other people out there who support that notion that the situation between Israelis and Palestinians is not hopeless.”

The abbreviated Middle East conflict -- between owners of the Kosher King and Hummus Hut -- premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005. There he picked up an agent and manager, who surely will be fielding more calls this morning for their client.

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Original score

Babel

Gustavo Santaolalla

This marks the second win for composer Gustavo Santaolalla, who took home the Oscar last year for “Brokeback Mountain.”

His score helps weave together “Babel’s” interlocking stories that unfold across four countries and disparate cultures, each of them dealing with the universality of familial love.

Santaolalla is an Argentine musician whose work also appeared in other films directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, such as “21 Grams” and “Amores Perros.”

In the international spirit of the evening, Santaolalla said that music marked “our own true identity, beyond languages, countries, races and religions.”

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Original song

I Need to Wake Up from An Inconvenient Truth

Music and lyrics by Melissa Etheridge

With three of the five nominations, “Dreamgirls” was the movie to beat for original song. But befitting a year in which Leonardo DiCaprio announced that the Oscars had “gone green,” the award went to Melissa Etheridge’s “I Need to Wake Up,” composed for Al Gore’s global warming call to arms, making it the first song written for a documentary to take the category.

“I have to thank Al Gore for ... showing that caring about the Earth is not Republican or Democrat,” first-time nominee Etheridge said in accepting the statuette. “It’s not red or blue. We are all green.”

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Sound editing

Letters From Iwo Jima

Alan Robert Murray and Bub Asman

Also nominated for Clint Eastwood “Flags of Our Fathers,” Alan Robert Murray and Bub Asman won for their work on Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” the first for both.

“We deliberately wanted to make them different,” Asman said backstage. “It was a different war for both sides. We tried like crazy to make it feel like it was pretty scary for everybody there.”

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Sound mixing

Dreamgirls

Michael Minkler, Bob Beemer and Willie D. Burton

The lush tones of no fewer than 22 Motown-inspired songs would likely not have sounded so smooth were it not for re-recording mixers Michael Minkler and Bob Beemer, and production mixer Willie D. Burton.

The three film audio veterans served up a final mix that hit all the right notes, providing a foundation for the credible and sonically impressive array of vocal performances from the movie’s stars.

These Dreamettes of sound mixing were considered a front-runner, given the academy’s penchant for musicals, earlier demonstrated by nominations of or awards for “Moulin Rouge,” “Chicago” and “Ray.”

“We congratulate Bill Condon,” said Minkler. “In the end you thanked us for making your dream, but it’s really the other way around.”

The sound mixers had already been lauded by their peers: They picked up the Cinema Audio Society’s award for outstanding achievement for “Dreamgirls” on Feb. 17.

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Visual effects

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

John Knoll, Hal Hickel, Charles Gibson and Allen Hall

With two “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies in back-to-back production -- last summer’s “Dead Man’s Chest” and the upcoming “At World’s End” -- the team at Industrial Light & Magic wasn’t sure if it could make “Dead Man’s Chest’s” release date, much less deliver Oscar-winning visual effects.

But as luck -- not to mention many hours of advance research and development -- would have it, ILM dug deep into its digital treasure chest to unearth Imocap, an on-set motion-capture tool that helped faithfully parlay actor Bill Nighy’s human performance of the slippery cephalopod Davy Jones into an unfathomably realistic, 100% computer-animated character.

The effects studio also relied on Zeno, a facial-animation system; a tool called Joint Motors to bring Jones’ tentacled beard to life; and Sticktion, which made Jones’ salty surfaces wet and sticky like spaghetti. A recipe for digital wizardry that paid off.

“The naysayers said four blind kids from the Bronx couldn’t make it in visual effects,” John Knoll said. “But here we are.”

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Adapted screenplay

The Departed

William Monahan

“The movie that made me want to be a screenwriter was Robert Bolt’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ ” William Monahan said. “I don’t know what happened in the universe to end up in the same audience as Peter O’Toole.”

The former novelist, short story writer and magazine editor’s brief speech was nonetheless a broad expansion on his nine-second speech upon winning the Writers Guild of America Award for his “Departed” screenplay two weeks ago. His nerves apparently weren’t a problem.

“Well, Valium does work,” he joked Sunday.

The 46-year-old Monahan can now justify his decision to pursue screenwriting. He translated Alan Mak and Felix Chong’s jagged Hong Kong thriller “Infernal Affairs” into wonderfully fertile cinematic terrain for director Martin Scorsese.

The Boston native effectively maintained the gritty intricacies of the original film’s cops-and-criminals plot, its themes of loyalty and betrayal, while transcribing it to Beantown’s class warfare and regional history. He also handed Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg some of the best gut-punching, macho dialogue they’ve ever been offered.

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Animated short

The Danish Poet

Torill Kove

The offbeat tale of a Danish poet who overcomes foul weather and a shattered heart ended up conquering Hollywood as well.

Narrated by Liv Ullmann, the 15-minute film marked the first Oscar win for writer-director Torill Kove. The Montreal animator earned a 2000 nomination for another animated film called “My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts.”

The often humorous yarn chronicles the journey of a poet named Kaspar in search of a famous Norwegian writer. Along the way, the poet comes to see how small steps can make deep footprints in life.

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Animation

Happy Feet

George Miller

The academy’s warmth for chilled-out tap-dancing penguins from the South Pole gave something of a cold shoulder to Disney animation czar John Lasseter. The Oscar win for George Miller’s “Happy Feet” was viewed as an upset, especially after Pixar’s “Cars” won the Golden Globe last month.

This is not where the story ends. Plans are underway for “Happy Feet 2,” but not before director Miller tackles an unnamed CG toon, an indie doc and another installation of “Mad Max,” the franchise that made him famous in 1979.

“Everywhere I go on the road with ‘Happy Feet’ there are little girls with pictures of penguins wanting to take a photo with me,” Miller said. “I’m more used to testosterone-driven guys wanting me to sign pictures.”

The win marks a notable return to Hollywood for Miller. The former practicing physician from Australia had been absent for more than a decade from the Oscar scene since his best-picture nomination for the CG-laden “Babe” in 1996, and a 1993 nomination for the “Lorenzo’s Oil” screenplay.

For “Cars,” despite its muscle cars and dazzling American vistas, it’s been a bumpy road. It opened last summer to less-than-anticipated business for a Pixar film.

“Cars” eventually kept pace with box-office expectations as it played solidly throughout the summer, but Lasseter and Pixar have come under marketplace scrutiny since Disney bought the company for a hefty $7.4 billion last spring in a bid to revive its feature animation division with new creative leadership based on the computer animation studio’s model of success.

For what’s normally considered kiddie fare, both toons touched on weighty matters. For “Cars,” it was the deleterious effect on small-town America of the postwar superhighway system. “Happy Feet” came with a strong environmentalist-tinged message.

Miller’s absence from the Oscar campaign trail because of an extended vacation in India ultimately did not handicap “Happy Feet.”

“It’s a leap of faith to make a film, and animated feature films take so long in production,” he said. “It is a good feeling to be recognized for everyone’s hard work on it. But to be honest, the biggest relief was to know that the film got out there and that audiences went to see it.”

“I asked my kids, ‘What should I say?’ ” if his film should win, Miller said in his acceptance speech. “They said, ‘Thank all the men for wearing penguin suits.’ ”

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Art direction

Pan’s Labyrinth

Art direction, Eugenio Caballero; set decoration, Pilar Revuelta

This is the first Oscar win for production designer Eugenio Caballero, who, with set decorator Pilar Revuelta, gave life to writer-director Guillermo del Toro’s gothic fairy-tale universe as well as his interpretation of Franco’s fascist Spain.

In the first Oscar given during the ceremony Sunday night, Caballero thanked cinematographer Guillermo Navarro for “his beautiful light” and director Del Toro for “guiding us through this beautiful labyrinth.” The native of Mexico also dedicated the Oscar win to his mother and “all the filmmakers of my country.”

Working on location in Segovia and in the Sierra de Guadarrama near Madrid, the team had to be resourceful to create lush green mountain settings in the arid Spanish countryside that at the time was charred by rampant forest fires. They built all 36 sets from scratch, including the stone-based labyrinth, the forbidding lodge and the Pale Man’s Cocteau-esque lair.

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Makeup

Pan’s Labyrinth

David Marti and Montse Ribe

Forget computer-generated imagery. Director Guillermo del Toro wanted the elaborate imaginary creatures of “Pan’s Labyrinth” to be real. He turned to his collaborators from “Hellboy” and “The Devil’s Backbone,” makeup artists David Marti and Montse Ribe of DDT Barcelona, to bring the creepy Pan, the cannibalistic Pale Man and the various fairies, sprites and frogs to life. Actor Doug Jones spent five hours a day in the makeup chair.

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Original screenplay

Little Miss Sunshine

Michael Arndt

Michael Arndt’s win for his road trip comedy about a family full of dreamers forced to accept their rather severe, but very funny, limitations must strike the writer as a major vindication of the original screenwriting voice, which was nearly lost during his screenplay’s five-year development process.

“Little Miss Sunshine’s” win wasn’t much of a shock, though, given its near sweep of this year’s other awards (Writers Guild, Britain’s BAFTA, the Broadcast Film Critics Assn.) and the beat-up yellow van full of goodwill that has been steadily rolling toward the Kodak Theatre since the film’s release last summer. On Saturday, it also won best first screenplay at the Spirit Awards.

“Forgive me, my voice is really shot,” whispered Ardnt, who then went on to thank the performers and co-directors. “A writer is only as good as the people he works with.”

-- Compiled by Martin Miller, Mark Olsen and Sheigh Crabtree