'Brokeback' Riding High In Oscar Race

"It's pretty [expletive] cool!" Huffman said about her Oscar wake-up call Tuesday. Not many filmgoers have seen the movie about a preoperative male-to-female transsexual who suddenly discovers she has a son -- but it's been embraced by many critics.

Huffman said she was still hopping up and down after hearing her name read. "My life has been pretty spectacular," she said. "I'm one lucky girl."

She took a deep breath and thought about the academy's choices for movie nominations this year. "Theater is a reflective art form and I wonder if the same is true for movies," she said. "Politically, we're more on the right than ever. Maybe socially we're moving toward understanding and healing."

For the Oscars this year, politics comes with the popcorn. George Clooney finds himself in three races: for Best Supporting Actor as the CIA operative in Middle East oil thriller "Syriana" and for Best Director and Original Screenplay for "Good Night, and Good Luck."

Grant Heslov, who wrote the "Good Night" screenplay with Clooney, said the two had kicked the idea around for some time. "Murrow was somebody who was talked about in George's house -- his father was a journalist," Heslov said.

The film re-creates Murrow's television shows using the exact words the newsman spoke when the shows first aired. Heslov said the verisimilitude is important because "the truth is, this is not a biopic, it's a film about five episodes of television, when Murrow went after McCarthy."

Heslov said his friendship with Clooney dates to an acting class in Los Angeles where they met 20 years ago. "What's it like working with George? He's a pain in the [butt]. So demanding." Heslov was joking. "No, it's fun. We'll work and then [mess] around and then work some more. It's fun."

He added that he learned of his nomination, announced before dawn on the West Coast, while "I was on my 26th mile of running." Maybe he was getting giddy.

"I'm totally kidding," he continued. "I was gardening. No, I was in bed listening on a radio. I didn't wake my wife up." Until he heard his name. "I started making some noise," he said. "I started jabbing my wife and woke her up."

In the documentary feature category, one of the nominees was the popular family fare "March of the Penguins."

"Yes, the little folks in the tuxedos have done well," said Luc Jacquet, the film's director, speaking from his home in France. The documentary is the second highest grossing ever (after Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11"). Jacquet said he believes it is because humans can relate to the emperor penguin, "the strength of his character, his force, his will, the sparseness of his life and where he lives." When Jacquet mentioned that he is at work on another documentary set in nature, we said we hoped it would be warmer than Antarctica in winter. "Yes, thanks, warmer," he said.

Speaking of tuxedos: Dana Adam Shapiro, one of the two filmmakers (along with Henry Alex Rubin) of the nominated documentary "Murderball," was surprised. "Ever since 'Grizzly Man' was not shortlisted, I was wondering what the criteria were," he said. (Shapiro was referring to the decision by the academy not to nominate Werner Herzog's doc about a nature lover from Malibu who lived with the brown bears of Alaska -- until they ate him. Herzog took top prize for the film from the Directors Guild of America over the weekend.)