By their very nature, the Oscars are an orgy of self-referential splendor, but Sunday things got more than a little out of hand. 
 
 
 
 From the moment Morgan Freeman (a.k.a. the voice o' God) stepped out on stage to remind us of the importance of film, the telecast of the 84th Academy Awards hawked the magic of movies with the indefatigable and square-shouldered sprightliness of an ingenue down to her last decent audition dress. 
 
 
 
 "Let's go to the movies" was the evening's theme, and although it was expressed in ways that were funny (a Christopher Guest skit), amazing (a Cirque du Soleil performance) and even sweet (stars relating their first film experiences), the collective air was surprisingly elegiac, as if the industry truly felt the need to remind itself, and the world, that movies matter. 
 
 
 
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 "Puppets, acrobats, we're a pony away from a bar mitzvah," cracked Billy Crystal about an hour into the show. 
 
 
 
 He, of course, being the most obvious attempt to evoke the glory days, to create something of an "Oscars Classic" brand. After last year's disastrous attempt to court a younger audience by casting James Franco and Anne Hathaway as hosts, Crystal rode the ever-swinging pendulum hard to the other side of the demographic spectrum. 
 
 
 
 "We've cornered the 70- to 85-year-old market," he said, "and, boy, do they spend." 
 
 
 
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 With nary a word about how he came to host for a ninth time — he replaced Eddie Murphy, who withdrew after producer Brett Ratner, having made a homophobic remark at a screening, stepped down — Crystal pulled an "As You Like It," simply resurrecting the template that made him a hosting legend. First the film clip, in which he agonized over whether to host by "appearing" in the nominated films (kissed by George Clooney, dissed by Jonah Hill). 
 
 
 
 Then, looking slim and spiffy in white tie and tails, he cracked a few in-jokes — "Welcome to the Chapter 11 theater," known as the Kodak before the company's recent bankruptcy — and launched into a song about the nine nominated films. It wound up seeming much more bittersweet and, yes, boring, than retro-cool. 
 
 
 
 Some of the problem was one of content. Once again the host and producers were faced with applauding a list of nominated films that most Americans have not seen. And this year, the two most awarded films were celebrations of Hollywood, and old Hollywood at that. 
 
 
 
 "The Artist," which eventually won best director, actor and picture, and "Hugo" are bittersweet themselves, nostalgic love letters to those artists left behind when the technology of filmmaking changed, something that seemed very much on everyone's mind during the show. 
 
 
 
 "I prefer the big screen," cracked Crystal, "which is my iPad." 
 
 
 
 Even the winners seemed to hark to another age. Early on, "Hugo" had won so many below-the-line awards that the show seemed like a Martin Scorsese tribute. And though Christopher Plummer's win was a sentimental favorite (at 82, he is the oldest actor to win an Oscar), Meryl Streep beating out Viola Davis seemed very much a victory of Hollywood royalty over the new and exciting. 
 
 
 
 Intentionally or not, an indigo haze of "ah, the good ol' days" sentiment hung over the show, from Crystal's ironic jokes and the "cigarette girls" handing out popcorn to the gilt and red-velvet color scheme of the set. And while there is nothing wrong with playing things in a minor key — certainly reverence is a safer bet than, say, James Franco in drag — during a three-hour show it can drag things down just a bit. 
 
 
 
 This isn't to say there weren't a few shining moments, including and especially Streep's funny and amazingly humble acceptance speech ("When they called my name, I had this feeling I could hear half of America going, 'Oh, no! Oh, come on, why her? Again! But whatever.") The Cirque du Soleil performance was fabulous, having musicians in the balcony was cool, and Robert Downey Jr. wins the Best Presenter Ever award for coming out to present best documentary with film crew in tow for his documentary "The Presenter." 
 
 
 
 "I have to have this up live on Netflix by midnight!" he admonished co-presenter Gwyneth Paltrow. 
 
 
 
 Guest's skit satirizing a focus group for "The Wizard of Oz" was brilliant (offering more proof that Fred Willard should be in pretty much everything), and Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis wearing white tuxes and clanging cymbals before presenting best song, well, you don't see that every day. 
 
 
 
 Chris Rock's riff about how easy it is to voice animation also cleared the smoke of the holy incense for a few minutes, raising the question of how different the show would have been if Ratner had kept his lip zipped and Murphy had remained host. 
 
 
 
 But if Crystal and his bar mitzvah humor seemed a bit dated and occasionally weirdly racist — yes, that was him in black face as Sammy Davis Jr. during the opening number, and yes, he did make a joke about there being no black women in Beverly Hills — his hand was steady on the tiller, even if the waters were bathwater calm and very, very familiar. 
 
 
 
 mary.mcnamara@latimes.com ||||| Because it’s important to get this out of the way, both presenting and hosting the Oscars are hard work. Thankless, even. For proof, let me put together a montage from the 84th Annual Academy Awards. 
 
 Perhaps this is just another thing to blame Brett Ratner for, since his mouth cost him the gig and Eddie Murphy went with him, forcing the Academy to make the safe choice of calling on Billy Crystal to host for the ninth time. 
 
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 And somewhere, against all odds, James Franco is buying drinks for everybody. The colossal hosting disaster from last year is now forgotten by the safe, unfunny, retro-disaster that was Crystal making jokes that he laughed at repeatedly and overseeing an Oscars telecast that was as poorly paced as any in recent memory. 
 
 While it’s true that the Oscar host gets too much blame when it goes wrong, there was nary a comedic bit from Crystal that didn’t seem like it came from the prior decade or was as obvious as a crying baby in church. If the Academy wanted safe, it got safe, but it also got what seemed like a lounge act that was entirely too chummy and self-satisfied. 
 
 But Crystal is just the rod with nowhere to run in a lightning storm. More blame should be placed on the direction of the show, which started deathly slow (after the predictable and no longer fresh or creative video spoof from Crystal) and then got shockingly more slow as it went along. 
 
 In years past, the formula that always undid any awards show was simple (and yet few ever fixed it): Start strong, have a bloated and boring middle that then made a mess and a rush of the ending, which is always the most anticipated part of the show. How many times through the years has an awards telecast ran long or too close to the end time and left people we actually tuned in for – best actors, directors and best film winners – to race through their acceptance speeches and thus let all the air out of the room? 
 
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 Well, inexplicably, this year’s Oscars managed to make that formula look brilliant. It started slow, got slower, bloated the entire affair with montages, glazed the eyes of viewers (“What, was that really the best director award?”) and then ladled on even more montages until it culminated in the predictable – if warranted – crowning of The Artist. About the only thing to raise a pulse was Meryl Streep winning again (in what most people will consider an upset), and that’s only going to piss off viewers even more. 
 
 So, yeah, not the Oscars' finest moment. And when it comes nowhere near the ratings of the Grammys, the cherry will drop on top. 
 
 For much of the night, there was an annoying feedback coming from the main stage microphone that people complained about with ferocity online. Did no one monitor the sound? There also was no palpable sense of excitement or entertainment. And here’s where it gets a little tricky for the Hollywood community. Yes, so many people in so many varied categories have done great work, and they need to be feted for that, but in the real world when people are watching the Oscars, they don’t really care as much about sound, editing, makeup, etc. 
 
 The trick is to include those awards but to keep up the excitement level as a broadcast for people who really only want to know about the acting categories, the director and best film. Sure, film fans have plenty of other categories they love – foreign film, documentary, etc. But the average viewer wants to be entertained while they wait for the big categories. 
 
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 What they got instead was a ceaseless parade of montages that hammered home the same theme: Movies are magic. They make the world a better place. They make life worth living. Everybody gets swept away at the movies. Isn’t it magical? 
 
 First off, stop dropping the anvil on us. Secondly, at some point the level of self-congratulation about how your work makes the life of The Little People more magical begins to feel condescending, arrogant and annoying. So how about three of those montages instead of, what, 33? 
 
 The pacing was sloppy and slow until -- hey, here we go -- best actors. People could be forgiven for having nodded off by then or perhaps, lulled into a stupor, missing the whole thing because they walked to the fridge or went to the sink to splash cold water on their faces. 
 
 Worse for Crystal, the Ellen DeGeneres commercials were like some kind of counterattack. She was funny in them. Like The Artist, people became mesmerized and leaned into their sets, wishing Ellen would jump out and host. Chris Rock – yes, please host. Tina Fey – please write and host! It was one of those nights. 
 
 And not a good night. 
 
 Here were a few worries I had: That Sacha Baron Cohen would steal the thunder (a bad precedent – look for one of the Transformers next year or some superhero in a costume or Murphy as Norbit or some Disney balloon). I worried that the great Christopher Guest & Players bit would be the highlight (outside of some really sweet acceptance speeches, it probably was). I worried that people were switching over to The Walking Dead or Luck. 
 
 On the other hand, I was happy for people who helped save the show – Emma Stone, Christopher Plummer, even Angelina Jolie sticking her leg out with authority helped distract from the feeling that the clock was melting. There was even a macaroni-and-cheese commercial that provided a ray of light. 
 
 Just a guess here – but since this makes two fairly horrendous Oscars in a row, the Academy will have to really rethink the process next year. And not to guess about others' feelings, but you can bet that other critics will revile this effort as well. 
 
 For all of this talk about how the movies are magic (montage, montage, montage), maybe someone in the business could have sprinkled some of that magic on this telecast. It certainly didn’t transport us to another world – unless that world was a show on another channel. 
 
 Email: Tim.Goodman@THR.com 
 
 Twitter: @BastardMachine ||||| It was a jolly good show, probably as good a show as any that lasts more than three hours and is obliged to run commercials for GCB and which bestowed its biggest awards upon a movie only a tiny percentage of the TV audience has seen. This year’s Oscar telecast was a comforting affair, starting with host Billy Crystal. By now, Crystal has achieved that status of being as reassuring as he is funny — you feel relaxed watching him, knowing he’s in charge and alert to the mood of the house. (The house, in fact, the former Kodak Theatre, became a Crystal running gag, renamed things like “Chapter 11 Theatre” and “the Your-Name-Here Theatre.”) Crystal’s opening filmed segment, inserting himself into some of the front-runners, was both funny by itself and funny just because he’s done it before and we like seeing him do it again. (My favorite line here: Billy, in place of Brad Pitt in Moneyball, telling the coaching table, “Clams you’re giving me, clams!”) 
 
 For once, even the big production number worked well: the Cirque du Soleil’s movie-salute performance was impressively startling in its nonstop athletic grace, and didn’t overstay its welcome. As for unexpected pleasures, certainly the taped bit about the focus group for The Wizard of Oz, featuring a Christopher Guest mini-reunion that included Guest, Bob Balaban, Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, Catherine O’Hara, and Jennifer Coolidge, was the most clever, concise, witty, and laugh-out-loud funny. 
 
 With Hugo taking many of the early technical awards and The Artist most of the high-profile later ones, it can’t be said there were too many surprises among the winners. Certainly even Meryl Streep seemed startled to take the best actress Oscar over the performer widely speculated as the favorite, Viola Davis. 
 
 No, it remained for the presenters to provide a few surprises, as well as a few head-scratching moments. Sandra Bullock pulled a fine poker-face speaking German after announcing she’d be speaking Mandarin Chinese. Emma Stone went charmingly over-the-top with Ben Stiller (“Perky gets old fast with this crowd”). In those taped segments in which various stars talked about what they loved about the movies, Morgan Freeman made me want to see The Outlaw Josie Wales again. 
 
 But why was Angelina Jolie thrusting out a leg so aggressively that co-winner Jim Rash (Dean Pelton on Community) felt inspired to mimic the gesture when he arrived on stage to co-collect the Best Adapted Screenplay Award? And was anyone else at home feeling a ringing in your ears from the tinny feedback of the microphones, a flaw I figured the show would repair during a commercial break, but took a long time doing so? 
 
 Natalie Portman and Colin Firth had to continue the unfortunate tradition of speaking directly to each Best Actor nominee while reciting stilted, scripted praise: It’s awkward for presenters, the nominees, and for us watching, and ought to be abandoned. At the other extreme, the calculated spontaneity of presenters Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis — in white tuxes, clanging cymbals — was a pretty funny joke that ended up being more broad than anything Crystal did. 
 
 Circling back to the host: I like the way Crystal embraced the old-fashioned, kill-‘em-with-volume approach to hosting; it wasn’t just in keeping with his own previous Oscar appearances, but also very much in the tradition of the Bob Hope Oscar years. Gone was any trace of the Oscars chasing after a younger audience; Crystal’s line about “slamming the 78-84 [year-old demo]” was notable for both its light candor and for Billy Crystal using the term “slam” in this context. 
 
 I have to add that the biggest thrill I got watching the Oscars this year was seeing the great children’s book author William Joyce win for his gorgeous animated short, “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.” Joyce has given the world such great art (George Shrinks; Dinosaur Bob) that his reward was exhilarating. 
 
 Overall: You couldn’t really say that anyone was robbed of an award he or she should have won (though I sure as hell wish more people had seen Nick Nolte in Warrior), and any Bill Crystal song parody that includes the phrases “Hanks is a memory” and “What’s it all about, Malick” has to be counted as a good night. 
 
 Agree? Disagree? 
 
 Twitter: @kentucker
– Last night's Oscars, like its Best Picture, was a throwback to a different time in film history. And though the show may have topped last year's Anne Hathaway-James Franco fiasco, it was boring and tired throughout: "The whole night looked like an AARP pep rally," writes Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times. "For a town that prides itself on tinsel and titillation, the night was pretty tame." "It all looked very familiar," but that "is perhaps necessary when so few of the nominated films are." "The colossal hosting disaster from last year is now forgotten by the safe, unfunny, retro-disaster that was (Billy) Crystal making jokes that he laughed at repeatedly and overseeing an Oscars telecast that was as poorly paced as any in recent memory," notes Tim Goodman in the Hollywood Reporter. But in the Los Angeles Times, Mary McNamara applauds Crystal's dependability. "His hand was steady on the tiller, even if the waters were bathwater calm and very, very familiar." Indeed, he's become a kind of comfort food, writes Ken Tucker in Entertainment Weekly. He's "as reassuring as he is funny—you feel relaxed watching him, knowing he’s in charge and alert to the mood of the house."