WORTH WATCHING

Watch: Highlights from the 84th Annual Academy Awards Last Night!

by Ethan Anderton
February 26, 2012

Another year, another long ceremony of honoring cinema with Oscar gold. Thankfully, the ceremony barely ran overtime for the 84th Annual Academy Awards, however, host Billy Crystal wasn't exactly putting his best foot forward with some pretty lame jokes, a hokey song and dance number and a generally boring ceremony. It's not clear who is to blame in this case, as Crystal is certainly a very talented comedian, but the ceremony left something to be desired. However, there were still some choice highlights from the show, especially from the presenters themselves, and some truly great acceptance speeches. Recap them below!

Before the show even started, it seems like Sacha Baron Cohen made the biggest splash on the red carpet. After the publicity led up to his appearance, Cohen showed up as General Aladeen from The Dictator and spoke with Ryan Seacrest. The conversation was funny to start, but once Cohen brought out the ashes of his deceased comrade Kim Jong Il, well, you'll have to see what happened, embedded below from Yahoo:

Inside the Kodak Theatre (or the "Your Name Here" theater as Crystal dubbed it in the wake of Kodak's filing for Chapter 11) in Hollywood, there was plenty of emotion to go around, especially when Octavia Spencer won Best Supporting Actress for The Help and gave this heartfelt speech:

Meanwhile, another supporting start received a great honor as Christopher Plummer was named Best Supporting Actor for his work in Beginners and thus became the oldest recipient of an Academy Award. Here's his touching acceptance speech right here:

On the presenting side of things Emma Stone and Ben Stiller had fun introducing the Visual Effects award, even if Hugo winning the Oscar wasn't nearly as enjoyable as a Rise of the Planet of the Apes victory would have and should have been:

And Chris Rock proved that he should've hosted with a bit before presenting Best Animated Film:

Getting back to the awards, Jean Dujardin showed his love for America after winning Best Actor:

And while Viola Davis also deserved to be Best Actress, Meryl Streep finally got herself another Oscar:

Finally, at the end of the night Thomas Langmann accepted for The Artist winning Best Picture:

And that's a wrap on this year's Academy Awards. Honestly, the ceremony itself was pretty lackluster, and one of the better parts of the show, the opening movie mash-up with host Billy Crystal in some of the biggest movies of 2011, doesn't seem to be online just yet. Either way, I don't know what can be done, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences needs to be a little less stuffy and a lot more lively if they're going to hit their core audience. A bigger problem seems to be the complete lack of showing love for movies that seem to be more deserving and progressive as bold breakthrough films as opposed to a film that is undoubtedly charming, but also just gives the film industry a self-serving pat on the back. I guess there's always next year for the ceremony to shine and more great films to be honored. What do you think?

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