10 Random Thoughts I Had While Watching the 2012 Academy Awards

1. Meryl Streep wins Best Actress! Somewhere is Halle Berry breathing a sigh of relief that she will continue being the category's only black winner?

2. I hope that Jean Dujardin improves his English soon. I'm eager to see him become a huge Hollywood player and not go the way of Life Is Beautiful's Best Actor Roberto Benigni. Whatever happened to him? But getting back to Dujardin, Hollywood adores those female Gallic beauties -- Caron, Signoret, Aimee, Deneuve, Adjani, Huppert, Binoche, Cotillard -- but there's a lot more to their male counterparts than Gerard Depardieu!

3. Two 2011 Best New Artist GRAMMY nominees in one Oscar telecast! Justin Bieber didn't sing anything (thankfully), but Esperanza Spalding's lovely rendition of "What a Wonderful World" during the In Memoriam segment proves that the best woman won. Now I might finally get around to checking out her music.

4. It's too bad Best Supporting Actor Christopher Plummer isn't gay in real life. Now that I'm done dating guys half my age (or so I say), he's exactly the type of man I'm looking for: debonair, talented, smart, funny and grown -- as he reminded us, just two years younger than Oscar himself.

5. My favorite tweet of the evening (afternoon, for me, Oz time), courtesy of my friend Vagner: "sandra bullock's face is either a mask or a real doll mold...."

6. Couldn't they have given honorary Oscar recipients James Earl Jones and Oprah Winfrey better seats? Or better yet, allow them onstage. It's still Black History Month, you know. Maybe the Academy is still sore over Oprah's Nielsen ratings drama.

7. When Viola Davis was the first one on her feet after Colin Firth called Meryl Streep's name, for a moment, I thought the Academy had pulled another Best Actress tie, like it did at the 1969 ceremony by honoring both the old school (The Lion in Winter's Katharine Hepburn) and the new (Funny Girl's Barbra Streisand). Nothing against Viola Davis, whom I loved in The Help and was fully expecting to win, but I'm glad I was wrong. Let Meryl Streep have her solo moment so that the Oscars can stop being all about her getting her third one and start being about getting Glenn Close and Annette Bening their first ones.

8. It's too bad that during her Best Actor testimonials Natalie Portman didn't acknowledge that she did her first film, 1994's The Professional, with Best Actor nominee Gary Oldman. Colin Firth had the balls to remind us that he and Streep co-starred in the dreadful Mamma Mia!, whose director helped win Streep her third Oscar for their second terrible director-actress collaboration. I wonder if Portman and Oldman hate each other.

9. Speaking of Firth, what film did he and Michelle Williams do together when she was 12 and he was 35? Did he appear on an episode of Dawson's Creek? I'm too excited over Jean Dujardin to do a proper Wikipedia/IMDb check. (Update: My good friend and Us Weekly film critic Mara Reinstein checked, and it was 1997's A Thousand Acres.)

10. Did I imagine Reese Witherspoon tearing up while talking about the 1987 Goldie Hawn film Overboard? Maybe she was thinking of that fact that Rachel McAdams, star of the romantic-drama hit The Vow and Best Picture nominee Midnight in Paris, is now a bigger box-office draw than she is. Sadly (for her), the titular declaration of her under-performing This Means War didn't go in her favor. Now this really means war!