Oscar’s best moments were the montages

The morning after (and more than 100 tweets) later, The King’s Speech and Inception remain Oscar night’s big winners, picking up four statuettes apiece. The stuttering monarch movie swept the biggest categories — Best Picture, Actor for Colin Firth, Director for Tom Hooper and Original Screenplay — while the latter picked up four Oscars in technical categories. Hooper’s win was probably the biggest upset of an evening that lived up to expectations. Natalie Portman, Christian Bale and f-bomb-dropping Melissa Leo won for Actress, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress, respectively. Here’s a complete list of winners.

The water-cooler consensus holds that young hosts Anne Hathaway and James Franco were definitely not the winners of the evening, as non-comedians given the weakest Oscar night jokes I can remember. I want to focus on the positives this morning, and will point out that Hathaway was totally charming and excited and worked really hard. And James Franco is... really handsome, I guess. My favorite ad-lib was Cate Blanchett seeing the make-up montage for The Wolf Man and deadpanning, “That was gross.” Two of the most impressive moments of the evening were the montages of the 10 Best Picture nominees that opened the show (accompanied by The Social Network’s version of “In the Hall of the Mountain King”) and lead into the Best Picture win (framed around the big speech of The King’s Speech). Maybe they showed favoritism to The Social Network and The King’s Speech, but they were ingeniously edited, and one of the rare times the craft of the show equaled the craft of the work it was honoring.

Also, this montage of four big 2010 films as “musicals” was pretty clever, and maybe the closest the evening came to being hip: