Jack Nicholson in a scene from The Departed

New York, Oct. 4 (Reuters): Snubbed at the Oscars when The Aviator lost to Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, Martin Scorsese has assembled a dream cast for his new movie The Departed, setting the stage for a rematch with Eastwood.

Jack Nicholson plays a mob boss in Boston in the film about two informers, one a mobster planted in the police department, played by Matt Damon, and one a police officer who goes undercover in Nicholson’s mob, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Famed for his tales of Italian American mobsters, Scorsese turns his lens on contemporary Irish American crime in The Departed, whose story is based on the 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs. The movie opens on October 6.

“To have Jack Nicholson join up with Martin Scorsese and play a gangster is something that I think a lot of movie fans have been waiting for,” DiCaprio told reporters at a press day in New York.

Scorsese’s last film The Aviator lost out in the Oscar race to Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, and The Departed pits the two head to head again, with Eastwood’s World War II drama Flags of our Fathers also out in October.

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences passed over The Aviator in 2005 Scorsese lost his seventh Oscar bid, despite making such celebrated films as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver.

The word “Oscar” was not mentioned at the New York press event for the film, but The Departed has an unusually strong cast of male actors. The three big stars are backed up by strong performances from Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin as police officers.