Well, it's over for another year. They came, they packed the Kodak Theatre, they saw interpretive dance / shadow puppet people, and a few of them collected awards. But above all else tonight saw the inevitable finally happen when Martin Scorsese walked away with what is undoubtedly the most overdue Oscar in Academy history. The Departed proved the night's biggest winner all round, taking home four of the little golden guys, but the one to spark thunderous applause was the win for Best Director, making it seventh time lucky for Marty in that particular category.
Guillermo Del Toro's **Pan's Labyrinth **also did well, notching up three, but sadly Empire's favourite Mexican didn't manage to bag one for himself. The big misser-out of the night though, was Del Toro's contemporary, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, whose Babel managed a single victory from six nominations
The final, full leader board stands as follows:
The Departed – 4 (Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Editing)
Pan's Labyrinth – 3 (Art Direction, Make Up, Cinematography)
Little Miss Sunshine – 2 (Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay)
An Inconvenient Truth – 2 (Documentary Feature, Song)
Dreamgirls – 2 (Supporting Actress, Sound Mixing)
Babel – 1 (Original Score)
**Letters From **Iwo Jima – 1 (Sound Editing)
The Queen – 1 (Leading Actress)
**The Last King Of **Scotland – 1 (Leading Actor)
Happy Feet – 1 (Animated Feature)
The Lives Of Others – 1 (Foreign Language Film)
Marie Antoinette – 1 (Costume Design)
Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest – 1 (Visual Effects)
For a full list of winners and nominees, click here.
Elsewhere, what could have been a highly predictable and dull affair was kept fun and lively, and the writers of host Ellen DeGeneres' monologue and links can celebrate the fact that they'll be in work for at least another year. Things really got into gear though, when we were given the all-singing, not-so-much dancing, presenting trifecta of Will Ferrell, Jack Black and John C Reilly. Not to be outdone, Jerry Seinfeld told it like it is with his objections to picking up after himself in movie theatres before he called An Inconvenient Truth as the winner of the Oscar for Documentary Feature.
The Kleenex award for teary speech of the year goes to Jennifer Hudson, a Specsavers Honourable Mention the The Man Who Should Have Remembered His Glasses, Clint Eastwood, and the Leonard Cohen Flat Delivery Trophy was Philip Seymour Hoffman's from the moment he pretty much opened his mouth.
But all of the snappy segues in the world couldn't stave off the lag that anyone who sat through the full, unedited ceremony was experiencing by the early stages of the second half. 2007's ceremony will go down as a good (great if you're Scorsese), if vastly predictable year, best remembered in a brisk highlights package – most of which should consist of Marty's acceptance speech, and the terrific presentation from his friends and filmmaking peers Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.