Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller were funny in their shtick together, presenting the award for Best Costume Design. I do not want to love Owen Wilson but I am enslaved. He's a fuckin' badass genius. I read the "Royal Tenenbaums" script, and I have to say, it ruled so hard it made my stomach hurt from spleen and jealousy. It was better than the film. I want to be Owen Wilson, either that or eat Owen Wilson, with fava beans and a nice Chianti. He was robbed, he and Wes Anderson shoulda gotten the best original screenplay Oscar, instead of "Gosford Park." "Tenenbaums" was daringly original; "Gosford" was a highbrow formulaic retread. Boo.

Halle Berry made history last night, not so much for being the first African-American woman to win an Oscar in the best actress category, but for freaking horribly, uncontrollably out and making the worst, most hysterically rambling, discomfiting and liquefied acceptance speech in Oscar's 74-year history, and I thought Julia Roberts was going to hold that title for a long time. I know it was a big deal for Halle, who claimed her award for All Black Women Everywhere Ever, but her acceptance tantrum had such an alarming cringe factor, I had to leave the room. When they tried to pry her off the stage, she made that screeching Bilbo Baggins monster addiction-face when he Wants the Ring. It was a heavy, strange, grand-mal meltdown. America squirmed.

Even though I felt like it was a self-conscious gesture on the part of the Academy ("We'll top off the Overdue Apotheosis of Sidney Poitier by throwing Denzel the Best Actor award we didn't give him when we totally ignored 'Malcolm X,' eh? Whaddaya say?"), still, I am always glad to see Denzel accepting awards. What's not to love about Denzel? Not much: The man could not peel Julia Roberts off of himself, backstage. She was practically climbing into his tux. His wife better kick Julia's skinny, home-wreckin' heinie.

The drafting of Cirque du Soleil as halftime entertainment was a good call. The refined lowbrow stunts of the Cirque healed a lot of the trauma we are still feeling from Debbie Allen's interpretive dance-pain fiasco. Actually, the Cirque was the best thing the Oscars has done in years. The only problem was, those bungee-trapeze Frenchies injected LIFE into the Kodak Theater, which brilliantly exposed the fact that, despite the presence of all the most slobbered-over luminati living, there was little or no vibrancy anywhere in the building before or after.

There were no surprises in the best supporting actress category; Jennifer Connelly proved once again that that statuette always goes to the new babe. It must have to do with Hollywood's need to manufacture a new face to do magazine covers or endorse Japanese soap or something. Something smells collusion-esque and Sony-riffic to me, about the supporting actress ruse -- it's just so predictable.

Connelly's speech was cute, the way she read it with her face lowered the whole time, reading off a bunch of papers. It was evocative of a shy fourth-grader doing an oral presentation on the solar system. Maybe she was ashamed because she sold her soul.

I was glad Randy Newman finally got the award for best song; with his 16 nominations and zero wins, he was the Susan Lucci of the Oscars. But he had to win: Enya is the music I imagine when I am standing in a meadow in a white dress, closing my eyes and rapturously rubbing soft, quilted, two-ply toilet tissue against my cheeks. Sting, that perfectly unblemished and sincerely perfectly superior and theologically self-actualized übermensch, is essentially becoming the musical Tom Cruise. And Diane Warren is the SWORN ENEMY OF ALL MUSIC.

Little Ronnie Howard took best director and best film for "A Beautiful Mind." Sigh.

Ron Howard is a completely adequate and, I feel, aggressively nongenius director. His choices are deeply, unapologetically pedestrian. He possesses lots of clunky homegrown skill and absolutely no lightning bolts of wild inspiration, which is why that script was a brilliant choice for him; John Nash (and, by extension, Russell Crowe) makes up for all the primal soul-fire Ron Howard, kindly proto-honky, utterly lacks. "A Beautiful Mind" was a Good Film. Not a brilliant film. If Peter Jackson had directed it, it might have been a revelation.

But Ronnie is nothing if not the original Company Boy. He has been tenured into the marrow of the system; he is Hollywood's dearest, most faithful mediocre son, and last night they gave him the party they've been tacitly promising him since 1978.

So that was it. The Hobbits and the Africans were simultaneously lauded and robbed, and the Academy tried to hypnotize us into passive acceptance by acting earthy. They seemed to be saying: See? We're just regular folks.

Yeah, they're regular all right, those famous multimillionaires who never go to the post office or the DMV or sort receipts for taxes or fly coach or pay to see movies or get older or worry about the rent or medical insurance or college tuitions. They're just like you and me, only with fucking everything, and they don't want us around while they're having it, but we're allowed to watch them have it, once a year, on TV. So we'd better enjoy it. Or they'll sic Tom Cruise on us again, and, God, we don't want that.

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