-Oscars-

The 84 Annual Academy Awards were held yesterday at LA. The biggest night of movies celebrated 2011 in film. As a huge Oscar fan, the night was super exciting for me. I'm dividing the post in to 3 parts: red carpet, ceremony and award, to make it maybe a little more easier to read. But first, here is the full list of WINNERS

Red Carpet

I watched the red carpet show by AP before the official ABC telecast started, so I'm basing this on both of them. Oscars Red Carpet is one of the greatest nights for fashion, the Superbowl of Award Shows some say, and celebs brought their A-game to the event. A good slide show of the dresses celebs donned at this 500ft long red carpet you can find here at Huffington Post. My favourites were Penelope Cruz (Old Hollywood elegance), Tina Fey (I did not see that coming) and Natalie Portman (all time favourite looked smashing in her vintage Dior from 1954).

One of the first to arrive, and maybe the funniest man on the carpet, was nominee Nick Nolte. When asked if he was nervous, he replied "I'm scared my teeth will fall out, I'm seventy you know?". He also showed the interviewer how one tooth wobbles, and it really did. He also said, he wouldn't wanna win, since he might swallow his teeth if he gasped. So he was all about the teeth.

Another representative of the older attendees was James Earl Jones (recipient of Honorary Oscar this year). When asked if he is going to party hard that evening, his wife Cecilia Hart responded laughing: "Yeah right, maybe room service!".

Judd Apatow (attended as the producer of Bridesmaids) represented with his wife Leslie Mann who told Tony Bennet stood at her dress for over five minutes, but she let him since it was nice. The couple also shared their secret to red carpet stamina, power bars. Apparently power bars were in favour of Bridesmaids cast, since Maya Rudolph also carried them with her. She also said good under garment helps at the red carpet.

Among the first big stars to arrive, was another Bridesmaids star, and a nominee, Melissa McCarthy. She was wearing shoes designed by her good friend Brian Atwood. The two attended same school and it was Brian who pushed Melissa to try stand-up, thank god! He had also engraved her shoes with a special note, which Melissa didn't share, I guess it was something personal.

I've been wondering why The Help director Tate Taylor and star/nominee/winner Octavia Spencer attended all red carpets together, but she told that the two used to be roommates, and she cheered him on while he adapted The Help as a movie.

Emma Stone, Octavia's co-star, looked great as well, and before she could be interviewed, she ran to hug the camera man who was an old friend of hers. Still very down to earth after all the success she's had. Her dress was similar to the one Nicole Kidman wore at the 2007 Oscars 

And as reported, Sasha Baron Cohen attended the Oscars as the dictator after all. During his pathetic publicity stunt, he threw the ashes of "Kim Jong-Il" on Ryan Seacrest. Halle Berry must've been happy she couldn't attend the event, since the ashes were originally meant for her. See the video of the "accident" here. He was escorted out right after that. I still can't believe they let him attend, anything for the viewers, eh?

Some real royalties did attend the event though. Prince Albert II of Monaco with his wife Princess Charlene were present at the awards as the guests of the previous CEO of ABC. They are the good kind of royalty who can appear in these kind of events without it being too much of an issue.

Royalty of Comediennes, Tina Fey, looked astonishing. I was so happily surprised. I'm glad she chose that over the fanny pack and biker shorts she jokingly said were her second choice.

Another beautiful lady of the evening was Michelle Williams who was nominated for her role as Marilyn Monroe  in My Week With Marilyn. She said that to prepare for the role, she practiced her skills on his mailman in full Marilyn mindset. Her gal-pal Busy Phillips (Cougar Town) was present of course, as she has during the whole award season.

Towards the end of  the Red Carpet Show, ABC aired small video of Rico Rodriguez  ( Manny from Modern Family) about how he watched all the Best Picture nominees in one day. Funniest part was when he was watching The Help shit-eating scene, and he look disgusted since he was eating chocolate covered ice cream at the time. His face was priceless.

Overall the red carpet was full of classy ladies and handsome gentlemen. And like Sandra Bullock said, it was "sexy times all the times".

The Show

The ceremony itself was pretty mediocre I think. I never really liked Billy Crystal, in anything, but he is a safe host with certain quality. The opening spoof focused on getting Crystal to host again with nominated movies as the background. He even got a smooch from George Clooney in the video. During his monologue he performed his standard "Oscar,Oscar" song about this years nominees. Safe start.

The start of the show was kind of slow, many technical awards. Then Octavia Spencers win speeded things up a bit. The first time nominee gave an emotional speech without being boring, score! Soon after Christopher Plummer won his Oscar and got the audience go "aaaaw" when he thanked his wife. 

In midst of the awards, Cirque De Soleil performed their gravity defying show, with people flying every which way, though they could have made the show bit more modern and with nominated films, instead of old classics like Metropolis and North By Northwest.  You can watch the performance here.

The Memoriam part was very beautiful, with the audience finally realising that its better if they don't clap to everyone separately, especially since it would've covered Esperanza Spalding's beautiful singing. She was the winner of Grammy for Best Newcomer last year.

Among the funniest moments of the evening, was Chris Rock, who presented Best Animated Feature (Kermit and Miss Piggy got demoted to a small joke on the balcony). Rock made fun of the process of animation, saying it was the easiest thing, referring only to his voice-over part. "We just do few lines and get millions". One of the highest paid voice-over actress Cameron Diaz at least seemed amused in the audience.

Will Farrel and Zach Galifianakis, who presented the Best Original Song, were the best presenters of the evening. They came out with cymbals and matching white tuxes and fumbled with the cymbals while trying to open the letter, comedy gold, especially with the girl who brought the awards as she tried to help the comedians.

Among the highlights of the show was Angelina Jolie in her own statuesque way, when she kept posing with her leg shown. Jim Rash tried to recreate the scene when he accepted his award for best Adapted Screenplay, but didn't quite match the sex-appeal of Jolie.

Jennifer Lopez also brought the hotness to the stage, when she "had a wardrobe malfunction". Now I've studied the pictures a lot, and even after lot of sites say it was a nip slip, I don't see a nip anywhere. The nip slip even got its own twitter account, where it declared "I've seen the light".

To surprise of many, Meryl Streep won the Oscar for Best Actress for her role in Iron Lady. And as always, she gave a great speech, remembering to thank his husband and loyal make-up artist of 30 years (Also a winner that night). Streep got the audience laughing with her comment: ''When they called my name, I had this feeling that I could hear half of America going, Ohhh, no, not her'' she said. ''But you know, whatever.'' With 17 nominations and last win in '82, this win was well deserved.

And as reported Uggie was present at the show, though in very minor role. He was part of Crystal's mind reading joke, and later when the Artist won for Best Picture, he was up on the stage with his co-star and Best Actor winner Jean Dujardin.

Overall the show was good, but not great, mainly because of the hosting. The presenters actually got more laughs than Crystal I think. And the most annoying thing about him, was how he had to keep fishing for the laughs with awkward breaks and laughing at them himself. Well maybe next year will be more successful, I say bring back Ellen or Steve Martin.

The Awards

The awards provided some surprises. My predictions were 2/3 right, with 18 right guesses, I'm pretty proud, since the misses mostly came at doc categories.

I was so sure The Artist  would get Best Editing and Cinematography, since they usually go for the Best Picture winner, but not this time. Girl With The Dragon Tattoo got the award for editing to the surprise of the winners, since they seemed pretty speechless on the stage, saying " We did NOT expect this".

Cinematography award went for Hugo which pretty much ruled the tech awards, though I do think The Artist made better job in this category, but I'm guessing the  3D won the voters over.

Now the short films and doc's were a total miss for me, since I didn't see any of them, so I don't blame me for getting them wrong, though I got 1 right, yay! To me the documents and shorts have always been the dull part of the Oscars, mainly because they hardly ever run in cinemas anywhere else except NY and LA, so it's not like I can see them very easily.

The shocker (or not) of the evening was Merly Streep's win. It could have been foreseen with the adoration the Academy has shown to Mrs. Streep in the past years. Nevertheless I was still rooting for Viola Davis up to the last second. But Streep deserves her win, she did amazing job, but then again so did Davis. Makes me question again the Academy's racial values, since as reported in the past week, majority of the members are white elder males. But as always Davis was very gracious even though she didn't win.

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And in case you still haven't seen the nominees or winners, here is a cute video of them as remade by kids.

 For more great pictures, go to http://oscar.go.com/photos

That concludes my Oscar recap, hope you enjoyed!

Weekly post coming in few days too! 

Photos from Celebuzz, Huffington Post, Socialite Life, TheWrap, Pleated Jeans and Oscar Official Site.