LOS ANGELES (AP):

They ground up Steve Buscemi in a wood-chipper. They made baby-snatchers out of Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter. They turned mythic Greek wanderer Odysseus into a depression-era roots-music minstrel with George Clooney's face.

Two of the most imaginatively twisted minds in modern film, Joel and Ethan Coen, completed their journey from the fringes to Hollywood's mainstream on Sunday as their crime saga, No Country for Old Men, won a leading four Academy Awards, including best picture.

In a year when the quirky, offbeat and just plain weird storytelling of the Coens triumphed at the biggest ceremony in show business, the oddball brothers found a lot to like in their fellow nominees.

"It sounds like a cliché, but all the movies that were nominated were really interesting to me personally, and that isn't always the case," Joel Coen said. "All of them, to me, personally, I thought were fantastically good movies."

The Coens' brooding, bloody tale of violence in a desolate corner of west Texas was the American standard-bearer for an Oscar show that otherwise had an international flair.

All four acting prizes went to Europeans: Frenchwoman Marion Cotillard, the best-actress winner for La Vie En Rose; Spaniard Javier Bardem, who took supporting actor for No Country; and Brits Daniel Day-Lewis and Tilda Swinton, he claiming his second best-actor honour for There Will Be Blood, she winning supporting actress for Michael Clayton.

Lawbreakers

Crime often has paid for the Coens, a pair of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett fans who gravitate toward lawbreakers even in their comedies, such as Cage and Hunter's infant-kidnappers in Raising Arizona, the bumbling thieves in The Ladykillers, an abduction that leaves a trail of bodies, including Buscemi in Fargo, or Clooney and his fellow jailbreakers in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The biggest commercial success among the best-picture nominees, the US$100 million-hit Juno, came away with the original screenplay Oscar for first-time scriptwriter Cody Diablo, who penned wickedly smart dialogue for her cast, led by best-actress nominee Ellen Page as a pregnant teen.

Adding to the international Oscar flavour, the animation winner was a US film set in a Paris restaurant, Ratatouille. The best-song recipient was a tune written by the Irish and Czech stars of a micro-budgeted romance set in Dublin, Once.

The globe-trotting thriller The Bourne Ultimatum swept all three of its categories, film editing, sound editing and sound mixing. Other winners included three films set around Britain and Europe: Atonement (music score), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (costume design) and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (art direction).