Date: 8th February 2005

Oscar nominees gather for lunch


Kate Winslet says her fellow Oscar nominees are friends not rivals.

She was speaking at the Beverly Hills lunch honouring contenders at the 77th Academy Awards.

Kate is nominated for a best actress Oscar for Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind reports IOL.com.

She said: "It doesn't feel competitive. It really doesn't. It's like you're all going through this thing together and it's just so kind of exciting and mysterious and strange and glorious. And you're all sort of in the bubble together."

Jamie Foxx, who has two Oscar nominations, said although he had been busy making acceptance speeches for the Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild Awards and other film honours, he had not run out of excitement.

He said: "There are so many things that I want to say, I could never run out of things. Like I've always said to my friends, even when we dreamt of what we want to be, we never dreamt this."

Aviator director Martin Scorsese who has been nominated for best director prize four times says he's ready for the prize.

He said: "It would be wonderful to win, I think. It probably is better I didn't win in the 70s or mid 80s or something. Maybe I was not able to handle at the time."

Scorsese is going against director Clint Eastwood, whose Million Dollar Baby star Hilary Swank also finds herself in a two-woman contest for best actress against Annette Bening, nominated for the theatre farce Being Julia.

Virginia Madsen, nominated for supporting actress for the road-trip romance Sideways, said she now had opportunities to work on big movies with major actors and filmmakers. Before her Oscar nomination, Madsen would periodically call her agent and meekly ask: "You got anything for me?"

Source: Press Release