• Hugh Jackman was one of the best hosts ever. I've never seen Bob Hope, or Billy Crystal, or David Letterman sing and dance like that. He obviously enjoyed himself thoroughly and his joy was contagious.
• The Dark Knight was rightly snubbed by the Academy (except for Heath Ledger's performance, which deserved the Oscar, even if he hadn't offed himself).
• Tropic Thunder should have been nominated for Worst Picture of the Year. I managed to make it through about 8 minutes of that sophomoric piece of crap before turning it off.
• Isn't Beyonce Knowles' 15 minutes of fame up yet? I'd pay to see Etta James kick her ass.
• For all the people here bitching about the Oscars, why don't you go work on that screenplay you started 20 years ago and then put away so you could sit on your ass and watch re-runs of "Everybody Loves Raymond"? Then maybe you can give an acceptance speech that no-talent wannabe's can carp over and dissect?

Yes, they tried to be different, but they tried a little too hard. I would have preferred the traditional clips from the nominees' performances to this old-winners-pay-tribute-to-the-nominees stuff, which seemed labored.

When they did show clips (of the Best Picture nominees), they did this baffling and extremely annoying thing of splicing in clips from other movies that had nothing to do with anything.

Plus, what the other posters said about the weird handling of the tribute sequence. I suppose it would have looked OK if you have one of those garage-door-size flat-screen TVs, but on an ordinary CRT TV it was unreadable.

I loved the opening number and thought Hugh Jackman was great. I also liked the idea of having a group of previous winners in each of the acting categories come on to introduce this year's nominees. In a number of cases there were interesting connections between the previous winner and the current nominee they were speaking about. And the nominees seemed genuinely moved by what was being said.

...but certainly one of the top two. Hugh Jackoff, er, Jackman's embarrassingly hit-the-mute-fast musical numbers gave Rob and Snow a run for their money. The stoner bit, like most of Judd Apatow's bullshit, was downright ugly. Platitudes to the shallow, flashy mediocrity that is "Slumdog Millionaire" was reminiscent of similar sweeps by bloated, superficial crap like "Gigi" and "The Sound of Music". Penn and Winslet, though richly deserving of their Oscars, could both use a course in public speaking. Ben Stiller, as usual, was a dick. I turned it off the second Slumdog was announced as Best Picture (I was hoping, till the bitter end, for a "Crash"-type upset for "Milk") so at least I was spared the spectacle of those darling little slumpuppies swarming the stage like so many Nahasapeemapetilon octuplets.

And, just in case you were wondering, I do not own a copy of "Birth of a Nation". I do, however, own "A Touch of Class"--something these Oscars could have desperately used.

Yeah, Dark Knight--thanks for that. Dark Knight was an exploitive film, but it did bring back some of the 9/11 chill. Wall-E did something of the same too, and perhaps for this reason they both struck me as vital. Neither so bleak, though. Both are as much romances as they are anything else: wall-e and the joker made good use of their barren (unpeopled, with the former; peopled but with boring, predictable people, with the latter) landscapes, but really come to life when the love of their lives comes into their lives (with both batman and eve being reserved, muscled, bad-asses, interestingly enough). The batman and joker romance as part of the Romance montage, then? I would like to have seen that. Would have shown the Oscars got the point.

OK, let me preface this by saying I watch the show every year, for the most part for a few decades now. here's my thoughts:

1. Hugh Jackman is one of the most talented performers of our time. Wolvereen is well-rounded. With that said, the use of those talents for this show was horrible It seemed disconnected to the rest of the show, like watching Tony award performances spliced into the Oscars.

2. The multiple presenters idea sucked, plain and simple.

3. The show draggggggged on forever. So much so that for the first time in many years I shut it off and went to bed. For a 3.5 hour show, the first 1.5 hours felt like 3 hours alone.

4. The big musical number with Beyonce was too fast paced, too many songs - so much so that it seemed like a whirlwind.

5. The comment about Beyonce's weight are so indicative of our culture's obsession with appearance. It's actually refreshing to see someone with real thighs and not someone who spends more time with a personal trainer, weight therapists, and plastic surgerns than the normal person. My beef (no pun intended) with her is that she is a mediocre talent at best. Yeah she can sing and dance, but so can millions of other people. She lacks star quality, that undefinable "thing" that creates star (not celebrity) mystique. Average at best.

6. I hated the way the nominees had to sit in the orchestra pit, right in front. How uncomfortable is that? Having worked in the industry myself for a few years, I've known some people who have attended, nominated or not, and said it is like sitting through dental surgery. The only thing that makes it worthwhile is if you win.

Once again it back to the drawing board. They need to figure out a way to honor the past, celebrate the present and bring the show into the future. All that and make it entertaining, after all, isn't that what the industry is based on?

• They did away with the voice over while the award winners were walking to the stage that said this is the 3rd nomination and 1st win for.... Strangely, I missed that, especially for some of the technical categories.
• I didn't care much for the best song medley, but I understand the desire to move things along. They had two Slumdog songs that both had Indian inspired choreography surrounding the Wall-E song that was half Indian and half African choreography, for a movie involving futuristic robots. Huh?
• Jack Black had the joke that stuck with me most afterwards, about how he made lots of money from animated films by making movies for Dreamworks then taking the money and betting on Pixar to win. His "Yes!" when Pixar then went on and won was a nice exclamation point on the joke.
• The structure of presenting the "non-big" awards in the chronology of making a movie, writing -> design -> filming -> effects/editing, worked very well. Also, keeping one set of presenters for each section helped keep the show moving.
• The camerawork was annoying for those times when things were on the screen behind the stage. I want to see that, not the stage with the screen behind it.
• I couldn't figure out why some awards got a podium, and some did not. Why did the best song award winner have to stand there holding his statue while accepting? Were they trying to speed things up at that point?
• The gang of previous winners presenting the various acting awards was nice, but sometimes awkward. I'm not sure I'd want to see it again next year though.
• Boy, blink and you miss the announcement for the Technical Awards banquet. They didn't even clips from any of it, and it was sandwiched alone between two blocks of commercials.
• Yay! They moved the boring part about the accounting to a small blurb at the end.