Paige Murphy, Entertainment Editor

And the Oscar goes to … The Hurt Locker! This year’s Academy Awards, which aired on March 7, had double the amount of Best Picture nominees, a lack of Best Original Song performances and a blue Ben Stiller.

The 82^nd Annual Academy Awards began, not with hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, but with How I Met Your Mother’s Neil Patrick Harris.

Harris, dressed in a sparkling black dress suit, acknowledged our confusion.

“I know, what am I doing here?” Harris said.

But his opening act of dancing and singing was entertaining — a fun way to start off the night.

Then Martin and Baldwin came on stage. Their opening jokes were about everything from the 10 Best Picture nominees to Meryl Streep’s 16^th nomination. They even took out cardboard 3D glasses to look at Avatar director James Cameron in the crowd.

The first award of the night was Best Supporting Actor, presented by Penelope Cruz. The award went to Christoph Waltz for Inglorious Basterds. Paying homage to the film, the lovable Waltz said that Cruz and an Oscar together in one night were an “Uber-Bingo.”

The Best Animated feature nominees were introduced with a cute skit involving their main characters being pre-Oscar interviewed by Barbara Walters. Up took home the award, as expected.

Arguably one of the funniest moments of the night was when Ben Stiller came out in Avatar attire, looking like one of the Na’vi, complete with striking yellow contacts, a long black wig with braids and a fishing pole-controlled tale. This is the second year in a row Stiller has strangely dressed up for the Oscars. (Last year he put on a huge beard, impersonating Joaquin Phoenix’s infamous David Letterman visit.) Appropriately, he presented the award for Best Achievement in Makeup, which went to Star Trek.

Unlike previous years, this year the singers of the Best Original Song nominees did not give single performances throughout the night, leading up to the announcement of the award. This was a disappointment, mostly because it would have been great to see the Irish Colin Farrell sing country live.

But the producers almost made up for it by having The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers and other street dancers give an awesome performance to the Best Original Score nominees. Up also won for Score (by Michael Giacchino), while “The Weary Kind” from Crazy Heart was honored with Best Original Song.

Other great moments of the night included Mo’Nique winning for Best Supporting Actress and the Academy’s tributes to horror movies and late writer/director John Hughes.

As predicted, Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock won the Best Lead Actor/Actress awards for Crazy Heart and The Blindside, respectively. Although Bridges has been nominated five times, this was the first win for both.

History was made when The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow became the first female director ever to win an Academy Award. She beat ex-husband James Cameron for the award.

With nine nominations and six wins, The Hurt Locker was the big winner of the night. In addition to Bigelow’s Best Director award, the film also brought home Best Achievements in Editing, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Best Original Screenplay and the coveted Best Picture. The movie beat out its biggest competition — Avatar, which was also nominated for nine awards but only won three.

Roger Ebert said that he couldn’t think of a year when it was easier to predict the big five categories. And he was right. Ebert was not the only one to correctly say that The Hurt Locker, Bigelow, Bridges, Bullock, Waltz and Mo’Nique would all win. Hopefully next year’s awards will be a little more unexpected.

Overall, the show was nice; fun to watch but nothing compared to last year. Surprisingly, last year’s host Hugh Jackman set the bar high for Martin and Baldwin, not the other way around. This is mainly because the two seemed to show up less throughout the show and also because Jackman sang not just one but two musical numbers, the second a movie-musical medley with Beyonce. Martin’s and Baldwin’s jokes were funny, but not especially funny coming from those two.

Martin did have a great joke to end the show, though.

“This show is so long that Avatar takes place in the past!” Martin said.

Here’s the final list of the nominations and wins for each Best Picture nominee:

-The Hurt Locker: Nine nominations, six wins

-Avatar: Nine nominations, three wins

-Inglorious Basterds: Eight nominations, one win

-Precious: Six nominations, two wins

-Up in the Air: Six nominations, no wins

-Up: Five nominations, two wins

-District 9: Four nominations, no wins

-An Education: Three nominations, no wins

-The Blind Side: Two nominations, one win

-A Serious Man: Two nominations, no wins

The ones who should have (or could have) been nominated, based on the fact that most of these were better than one or more of the actual nominees:

Best Picture: The Road, (500) Days of Summer

Best Actor: Viggo Mortensen for The Road, Brad Pitt for Inglorious Basterds, Tobey Maguire for Brothers, Robert Downey, Jr. for Sherlock Holmes, Joseph Gordon-Levitt for (500) Days of Summer

Best Supporting Actor: Colin Farrell for Crazy Heart

Best Supporting Actress: Zoe Saldana for Avatar

Best Original Screenplay: (500) Days of Summer

Best Adapted Screenplay: The Road