A pleasant evening with Oscar

OK, that was a good show.

For one thing, no one film dominated — the Oscar love got spread around pretty evenly, and the nominees were all deserving, such that you couldn't really fault any of the choices. Hoffman and Witherspoon, Clooney and Weisz, Lee and McMurtry and Altman all got their due. The speeches were gracious. Huzzahs all around.

Grizzly Man was robbed by not even being nominated, of course, but we knew that already — I don't think it would have beaten Penguins anyway.

But Crash? Crash? No, I don't think so. History will record that win as a lucky last-minute shift in the winds of fortune and favor (or possibly as Hollywood's love-letter to itself). Good movie, the making of which was somewhat remarkable, but I don't think it's a Best Picture. Not even close, really. At least, not in the year of Walk the Line, Brokeback Mountain, Good Night and Good Luck, Capote, Munich, Grizzly Man, Batman Begins, March of the Penguins, King Kong, Syriana, Wallace and Gromit...

But that's OK. The show was fun to watch, even if the rude producers did keep playing off the non-celebs (these are the people who never get the spotlight — can't we just let them have their moment?), and it was difficult to watch the great Lauren Bacall struggle through her tribute to film noir.

Huge credit to Jon Stewart. He set the perfect tone for the event: light, fun, and not too serious (with great help from Tom Hanks, Jack Nicholson, Will Farrell and Steve Carell, Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep, and especially the cool and unflappable George Clooney — not to mention the absence of Sean Penn). And Stewart was so damn funny.

And oh, the montages. Stewart's joke about looking forward to “a tribute to montages” couldn't have come on a better night — we got the look at great biopics, the film noir tribute, the traditional “farewell” to those we lost over the last year, and then, oh yes, the gay-cowboy montage. Possibly the funniest thing I've seen all year. Beautiful.

How they managed to omit Howard Hughes's The Outlaw from that cowboy montage is a mystery. Maybe the homoerotic imagery was just too over-the-top to stand alongside Charlton Heston and The Duke. Still, if you want to see really outrageous sexual tension between gunslingers, check out The Outlaw. Against all historical probability, a crusty Doc Holliday (Walter Huston), a rotund Pat Garrett (Thomas Mitchell), and a naive Billy the Kid (Jack Beutel) trade meaningful looks and suggestive dialog while poor Jane Russell struggles mightily to distract them with her impressive boobs. Now that's a movie.