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" Say what you will, but the Oscars are the O.G. of awards shows, the ultimate in class, flash, pomp, and pizazz. Maybe it&amp;#039;s all that Hollywood glitz and glamour, or maybe just that they&amp;#039;ve been doing it longer than anyone else, but even at their most boring they&amp;#039;re better than the best of any of those other second-string shows. This year, while perhaps predictable and a little staid, wasn&amp;#039;t boring. From the moment Jennifer Lawrence tripped \u2014 and it&amp;#039;s not a party until J Law takes a dive \u2014 to the final celebratory dance of 12 Years a Slave&amp;#039;s Steve McQueen, this was an absorbing three-and-a-half, or five if you watched the red carpet, hours of television. Here&amp;#039;s our play-by-play of the moments you&amp;#039;ll need for the water-cooler rap sessions. Ellen made a dashing Disney security guard in her glittery velvet jacket and side-striped pants, easily navigating the show with a Peter Pan vibe, even if she did take some of the jokes a little too far. Anne Hathaway was tall, beautiful, and, um, bedazzled? Rocking what appeared to be the breastplate of a magical suit of armor, she somehow pulled it off and pulled up Jared Leto for his Best Supporting Actor award for Dallas Buyers Club. Which was well-deserved. You can make all the Jordan Catalano jokes you want, but dude deserved it. Bonus points for name-checking the unrest in Ukraine and Venezuela, oddly one of the only live political notes in an evening rife with politically-minded movies. Let&amp;#039;s all pause for a well-timed and thinly veiled moment of product placement while Ellen shoots a selfie with her giant smartphone. Jim Carrey said some stuff that he may or may not have written himself, but in doing so proved why he&amp;#039;ll likely never get one of those golden statues all his own. Pharrell got &amp;quot;Happy,&amp;quot; somehow exchanging the shorts he arrived in for his now-famous flaccid Canadian Mountie hat. Come to think of it, maybe the shorts are the hat, and not happy with taking over the music world, he&amp;#039;s dropping a new, multi-function apparel line, too. Auto-Tune for your closet. Let&amp;#039;s face it, if he did, it would be great, and all the A-listers who jumped at the chance to dance with him would be rocking it:  Dallas Buyers Club ate up a lot of awards, adding Best Makeup and Hair early in the game. Emma Watson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt presented Gravity with Best Visual Effects, and in the process won class couple for being just plain adorable together. Continuing the high school vibes, Zac Efron, aka a new generation&amp;#039;s Jared Leto on an Abercrombie trip, introduced Karen O and Vampire Weekend&amp;#039;s Ezra Koenig, who got all indie-rock and played the Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;The Moon Song&amp;quot; from Her, melting hearts and making us all feel like we were skipping art class. Kate Hudson looked amazing, and Jason Sudekis didn&amp;#039;t wear Pharrell&amp;#039;s hat, but he should&amp;#039;ve. They presented the Best Live Action Short Film award to Helium, which, while we didn&amp;#039;t see it, looks damn good. Admittedly, not a lot of information relayed there. Moving right along...  Best Short Documentary went to The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life. This was followed by Best Documentary, 20 Feet from Stardom, and we should have been more excited, but some of us felt The Act of Killing got robbed, and some others can&amp;#039;t see anything when Bradley Cooper is around except his hair in those curlers in American Hustle, and it&amp;#039;s at once humorous and distracting and totally taking away from the gravity of the awards, for which we apologize. Thanks, House of Cards, for making sure Kevin Spacey will, forever onward, scare us just a little bit. U2 played the song &amp;quot;Ordinary Love&amp;quot; for Nelson Mandela from a movie about Nelson Mandela, and it was pretty awesome because of course it was. Oops, time for more product placement. Native advertising is the future, everybody. No matter how disgusting and pandering it is. The Scientific and Technical Oscars are awarded separately, but they included all manner of geek-chic things like drones and supercomputers, somehow leaving out Walter White&amp;#039;s trunk-dwelling machine-gun robot, which, even though it&amp;#039;s from TV, seems like a glaring omission. Chris Hemsworth and Charlize Theron gave some awards, and we&amp;#039;ll have to rewind the DVR to get you specifics, because everyone in the room was staring at one of &amp;#039;em. Oh, wait. It was sound mixing, and Gravity won. Turns out if you do it right, they really can hear you scream in space. Not wanting to hedge their audio bets, Gravity also took home the Sound Editing award, which seems like kind of an obvious one-two punch, right? A very perky Christoph Waltz presented the wonderful, wild, beautiful spellcheck nightmare that is Lupita Nyong&amp;#039;o with her well-deserved Best Supporting Actress award for 12 Years a Slave, and everyone in the world immediately fell in love with her. A solid win, even if J Law did have her moment of brilliance with the science oven. Ellen made a pizza gag, which may have been just an innocent \u2014 and lucky \u2014 pizza delivery guy bringing pies to the front rows. Based on the way marketing works these days, it may also turn out to be a guerrilla stunt for ABC&amp;#039;s new reality show, Real Delivery Dudes of LA. Only time will tell, but here&amp;#039;s hoping the guy, whether he&amp;#039;s the real deal or some schlub from central casting, gets to keep the huge cash tip she passed Pharrell&amp;#039;s ubiquitous lid around for. A rough-seeming Bill Murray and Amy Adams presented the award for Cinematography, and Murray took the opportunity to shout out his recently passed friend, fellow Ghostbuster, and noted comedic genius, Harold Ramis, and we all got a little misty. Oh yeah, and Gravity won this, too. Surprise! Whoopi Goldberg presented a tribute to the 75-year-old Wizard of Oz and showed us her ruby slippers, and we don&amp;#039;t believe for even a second that they&amp;#039;re a gimmick. She rocked them a little too well. Because she&amp;#039;s somehow contractually obligated to perform at every awards show, ever, Pink jammed out a version of &amp;quot;Somewhere Over the Rainbow,&amp;quot; and we went and got some snacks from the kitchen. This year&amp;#039;s In Memoriam section was heavy. We&amp;#039;ve lost a lot of talented people. Hoffman. Gandolfini. Walker. Ramis. Black. Funicello. Caesar. They even included Sarah Jones, killed by a freight train on set just a week ago while working on the Greg Allman biopic Midnight Rider. All told, nearly fifty names. Oh, Goldie. Sigh.  John Travolta can sense your Thetans, mortals. Jamie Foxx and Jessica Biel sparked with chemistry, enough so that Foxx danced a little jig, and then awarded \u2014 gasp! \u2014 Gravity Best Score. Best Song went to Frozen, netting Robert Lopez the coveted EGOT: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony. Basically, dude&amp;#039;s a boss and gets free drinks for life. Also, he and his wife, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, had the most real speech of the evening, so good that we&amp;#039;d love to grab a drink with &amp;#039;em any time they&amp;#039;re back in NYC.  Spike Jonze, described awkwardly as a &amp;quot;former skateboarder,&amp;quot; won what is somehow his very first Oscar. Best Screenplay, for Her, which no doubt has Siri fuming. The legendary Sidney Poitier, elegant at 87 as ever and with no less a jewel as Angelina Jolie on his arm, awarded Alfonso Cuar\u00F3n of, you guessed it, Gravity Best Director. Daniel Day-Lewis made Sandra Bullock cry, just a little, by awarding Best Actress to Cate Blanchett for Blue Jasmine. During Blanchett&amp;#039;s speech she thanked, rightfully, Woody Allen, to an awkward smattering of polite applause. We all felt uncomfortable for a moment or two after that, but then it was on to... Jennifer Lawrence, resplendent in red, bestowing upon Matthew McConaughey Best Actor for True Detecti... Err, Dallas Buyers Club. When one considers just the physical preparation for the role \u2014 he lost a quarter or so of his body weight in just a few months \u2014 let alone the level of mental acuity required to portray a character so thoroughly as he did, it&amp;#039;s no surprise. With a speech that boiled down to some solid advice \u2014 &amp;quot;Be your own hero,&amp;quot; and his trademark &amp;quot;Alright alright alright!&amp;quot; \u2014 he claimed his stature and sauntered off, a gentleman and freshly minted legend in his own time. What can be said for the Best Picture? Nope, not Gravity, though you&amp;#039;d be forgiven for thinking so based on their performance thus far. No, 12 Years a Slave had to win, for combining poignant, introspective, brutally honest storytelling with superlative acting and directing. When director Steve McQueen rushed through his pre-written speech and then burst out in ecstatic dancing, we were all right there with him.  What happened to American Hustle and Wolf of Wall Street? Only the Academy knows, and they&amp;#039;re not telling. But no matter how you shake it, for the marquee awards, there are no rational arguments. Which means that, balls or not, it&amp;#039;s a job well done. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a27643/oscars-recap-2014/>