Photo: Matt Petit © A.M.P.A.S.

Last night at the US Academy Awards, for the first time since 1964, European actors won all four of the top acting prizes while, in what a poker player might term a straight flush, the prize for best foreign film went to the nuanced German-language WWII heist film The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher), the first ever win for Austria.

Three of the four main roles, your correspondent notes, were bad-guy characters, proving once again that nothing says evil to Hollywood better than foreign.

British-Irish leading man Daniel Day-Lewis won the Oscar for best actor for his role as a morally depraved 1920s oil barron in "There Will Be Blood" -- upstaging co-nominated Americans George Clooney, Johnny Depp and Tommy Lee Jones. French actress Marion Cotillard won best actress in "La Vie En Rose" playing legendary chanteuse Edith Piaf, the first French actress to win the prize since 1960. British actress Tilda Swinton won best supporting actress playing a Machiavellian corporate lawyer alongside Clooney in "Michael Clayton" and Spanish-born Javier Bardem went home with best supporting actor for his portrayal in "No Country for Old Men" of bulbous-headed, desert-stalking psycho killer Chigurh from the Cormac McCarthy book of the same name.

Despite several nominations, Canada got shut out in the end.

* foreign films in English don't qualify