Hollywood departed from its tradition of honouring commercially successful films at the 77th Academy Awards as it gave out the Oscars to more intimate movies.

Seventy-four-year-old actor, director and producer Clint Eastwood scored big on Sunday night as his "Million Dollar Baby", a film about an underdog female boxer, won four top awards.

Proving the pre-Oscar buzz right legendary director Martin Scorsese's more ambitious and showy film "The Aviator" about the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes won five out of its 11 nominations but not the Oscar for best director. This was the fifth time that Scorsese did not make it.

"Million Dollar Baby" captured best picture, best director (Eastwood), best actress (Hillary Swank) and best supporting actor (Morgan Freeman).

Jamie Foxx, widely projected to win the Oscar for best actor for his uncannily accurate portrayals of the blind rhythm and blues musician Ray Charles, lived up to the expectations for the movie titled Ray. Foxx unsuccessfully fought off tears as he recalled how his grandmother was his first acting teacher who told him "act like you got some sense".

"Now she talks to me in my dreams," he said, sobbing. "And I can't wait to go to sleep tonight because we got a lot to talk about. I love you."

For India, the only indirect triumph came when "Born into Brothels", a touching documentary about children of Kolkata's red light district by Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski, won the best documentary feature. "Little Terrorist", a short by Ashvin Kumar, on a Pakistani boy who strays into India through a porous border while trying to retrieve a cricket ball did not make the cut.

Black actors were prominent in the number of nominations - five nominations for four actors - indicating Hollywood was slowly but surely turning colour blind.

Freeman, considered by many as "an actor's actor", won for best supporting actor for his portrayal of a worldly-wise former boxer in "Million Dollar Baby".

Scorsese's "The Aviator" had to be content with best supporting actress for Cate Blanchett, best cinematography for Robert Richardson, best costume design for Sandy Powell, best sound editing for Thelma Schoonmaker and best art direction for Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo.

On the large number of nominations for black actors this year, Freeman observed: "It means Hollywood is continuing to make history. Life goes on. Things change. They never stay the same. We are evolving with the rest of the world."

None of the movies honoured have yet crossed the $100 million in gross receipts unlike the 2004 Oscar winner "The Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King", which went on to make over a billion dollars.

Among the highlights of the ceremony was comedian Chris Rock as the master of ceremonies. Known for his brilliantly incisive comic routines loaded with four letter words, Rock predictably cleaned up the language but his humour remained edgy. For instance, the manner in which he made a distinction between stars and the rest was biting since it put down fellow actors by name, especially British actor Jude Law who appeared in several films last year. Rock was careful to see that he was equally unsparing about his own acting career.

The comedian reserved his most telling comments for President George W. Bush, describing him as a genius who had managed to successfully re-apply for a job (presidency) despite huge blunders in running up a deficit and the Iraq war.

He said if a Gap employee had run up that kind of deficit and then launched a market war on the rival Banana Republic for allegedly producing "toxic tank tops" he would have been fired. The toxic tank tops were a reference to the weapons of mass destruction which were never found in Iraq and which were Bush's main argument to invade the country.