Wrap-up: Winners and losers

The big winners at the Academy Awards:

The Departed: Four Oscars, the most of any film, out of five nominations. (The only loser: supporting actor Mark Wahlberg.)
Martin Scorsese: If you saw the surge of excitement when his name was announced showed, pretty much everyone in Hollywood wanted this guy to win this year. It was Marty's party.
Pan's Labyrinth: Five nominations, three wins -- although it did not, as expected, win best foreign film. That went to ...
The Lives of Others: Pan's was more widely known, but this critically acclaimed but little-seen German film benefited from the rule that voters in this category must see all five films.
Ellen DeGeneres: Not many killer jokes that got big laughs, but overall she did a fine job filling the shoes of Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg. She'll be back.

The losers:

Babel: Seven nominations, only one Oscar, for Guillermo Santaolalla's score.
Children of Men: Three nominations, zero Oscars.
Dreamgirls: Eight nominations, two Oscars, for supporting actress and sound mixing. Shut out for original song.

And a couple of mixed bags:

Little Miss Sunshine: It got best original screenplay and Alan Arkin scored a mild upset as best supporting actor, but it missed out on the biggest prize of the night.
The show itself: Producer Laura Ziskin's offbeat opening worked well, as did the decision to push the supporting actor awards further back into the show. The show was short on the pomposity that has marked many Oscars in the past. But: The show really seemed to lose steam in the second half -- and some of the later pieces, like Michael Mann's montage about what movies say about America, seemed pointless.