No Country for Old Men, the most accomplished and exciting of the best picture nominees, deservedly took home the top prize for putting the moral maelstrom of 1980 America into tough, thrilling Western form.
But the 80th annual Academy Awards registered like a ceremony in transition.
It was a night when risk-taking auteurs, virtuoso craftsmanship and cultural confusion bumped together with erratic results.
Although Hollywood and critics have been proudly proclaiming the embrace of difficult movies, the crowd-pleasing The Bourne Ultimatum was the only film that won every prize for which it was nominated.
And the new Hollywood proved it could be as predictable as the old by awarding Daniel Day-Lewis' landscape-devouring portrayal of an oil magnate in There Will Be Blood. (At least Javier Bardem deserved the night's other Oscar "lock" as best supporting actor for the dry-ice killer in No Country.)
The winsome, no-budget romantic musical Once won best song, but the costume design award went to the plush, old-fashioned look of Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Robert Elswit won for his daring cinematography on Blood (by far the best thing about that movie), but so did the superb traditional makeup job that aged Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose.
Scribe-of-the-month Diablo Cody won for best original screenplay for Juno, but the academy also followed its time-honored practice of honoring a prestigious Holocaust movie, this time for best foreign-language film: Austria's The Counterfeiters.
The last time Jon Stewart hosted, the movies pushed their social-political issues up front and the races were tight: Brokeback Mountain and Crash engendered a Clinton-Obama rivalry, and those of us who disliked both movies could root for Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck.
This time, the filmmakers behind No Country, Blood and Atonement went for more sweeping tragedies or cultural denunciations. It took Alex Gibney, director of the best documentary winner, Taxi to the Dark Side, to urge the country to move from the dark side toward the light.
When Cotillard beat out Away from Her's Julie Christie for best actress, and Tilda Swinton grabbed best supporting actress for Michael Clayton over I'm Not There's Cate Blanchett, the stage seemed set for a surprise or two.
