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Sunday 25 February 2007: The 79th Annual Academy Awards at the Kodak Theater, Hollywood & Highland

“There’s a billion people watching right now!” declared Ellen DeGeneres, fulfilling her childhood ambition to host the Oscars® - with a statement unlikely to calm the nerves of the nominees in the audience assembled before her.

Martin Scorsese finally won Best Director – and a huge standing ovation – for The Departed, which was also named Best Picture. It won four Oscars in all, ahead of Pan’s Labyrinth (three), and Dreamgirls, Little Miss Sunshine and An Inconvenient Truth (two each).

The prizes were well spread around this year, although British hopes were realised when Dame Helen Mirren was named Best Actress. She dedicated her award to the Queen herself, who “for more than fifty years has maintained her dignity, duty and hairstyle”.

But there was disappointment for Peter O’Toole, who lost out in the Best Actor category for the eighth time, in this instance to Forest Whitaker, who made it a clean sweep in the awards season by taking the Best Actor Oscar for The Last King of Scotland, a British film.

Here is the full list of Oscar winners:

Visit www.oscar.com

The 78th Annual Academy Awards® ceremony, hosted for the first time by The Daily Show's Jon Stewart, was staged at the cavernous Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland on Sunday evening, 5 March 2006.

Honours were shared this year, with no runaway winner. Four films took three Oscars® each - Crash, Brokeback Mountain, King Kong and Memoirs of a Geisha, while three British films were winners too - The Constant Gardener (for Rachel Weisz), Wallace & Gromit (Nick Park's fourth Oscar) and the short film, Six Shooter, written and directed by Londoner, Martin McDonagh.

George Clooney was a popular winner for Syriana in the first category of the evening, having missed out on other awards from many nominations this year. The Oscars for best actor and actress (and several other categories) mirrored the British Academy prizes handed out a fortnight earlier.

And the Oscars went to:

The Orange British Academy Film Awards - London, 19 February 2006

Presented on Sunday 19 February 2006 at London's flagship Odeon Leicester Square - with the glitzy event occupying the whole of the Square.

Host Stephen Fry introduced UK cinema's reddest of red carpet nights, a gathering of A+ list talent from all over the world.

Biggest winner, three weeks before the Oscars®, was Brokeback Mountain, which won four BAFTA masks, including Best Film and Best Director. Memoirs of a Geisha collected three, while Walk the Line and Crash took two each.

Philip Seymour Hoffman was there to receive his Best Actor award for Capote, although George Clooney departed empty-handed (nominated for both Syriana and Good Night, And Good Luck), and there was some local disappointment as The Constant Gardener claimed only one prize from its ten nominations.

And the 24 BAFTAs went to.

For details of past winners, visit www.bafta.org and www.oscar.com