My Academy Awards party was a great success, no thanks to the awards themselves, which were easily the most predictable I'd seen in years. Fortunately, I saw this coming, took a completely naive approach to forecasting the winners, and ended up winning my own Oscar pool.

One could argue that the shortened awards campaign season has made the show easier to predict, since the voters have been given less time to grow tired of their early favorites. If the campaigning had gone on for two months instead of one, Johnny Depp and Shohreh Aghdashloo each might have walked away with a trophy.

Still, it was a fun party, with a rented projector throwing a huge image of the broadcast across my living room wall, and a surreal guest list that included regular blog commentators shh, end, tamara, and even drew hu. My favorite moment was when Sofia Coppola thanked Wong Kar-Wai in her acceptance speech. I knew that those melancholy Tokyo landscapes seemed strangely familiar...