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With regards to the presenters, I would divide the list into the good, the bad and the ugly, but this is Hollywood’s Super Bowl. Nobody ugly is ever going to get a close-up. Instead, what we have are the good, the bad and that special category reserved for the cast of Chicago, Paul Rudd and Melissa McCarthy.

Yes, there was a celebration of Chicago last night. Already, the Academy had lost me in that I thought Chicago was in the bottom half of the releases of 2002. Its winning Best Picture is almost as bad as Crash a couple of years later. Even so, I was perfectly willing to bite my tongue regarding the "All That Jazz" performance. It was the Academy Awards presentation that left me flabbergasted. Queen Latifah, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Richard Gere and Renee Zellweger were asked to present a pair of music Oscars.

What happened next is up for debate. Gere was wearing his reading glasses yet he could not decipher the text contained within the envelope. He asked Zellweger for help. She demonstrated the reaction speed of a drunken tortoise. Down to their third choice to announce the winner, Queen Latifah stepped up and shouted the result. Unbelievably, Zellweger was presented an opportunity to redeem herself and once again failed to read a name. It wasn’t even something complex like Quvenzhané Wallis. The only text was “Adele – Skyfall” yet she couldn’t say the words. I was left to ponder how much elephant tranquilizer Zellweger had snorted.

The bit with Paul Rudd and Melissa McCarthy, two of my favorite thespians, was even worse. Tasked with an ill-advised gag about vocal acting, the duo spent two minutes suffering. It was as if the Academy gods were against the joke from the start. Rudd clumsily jammed his nose into the microphone at the start of the segment, which foreshadowed the disaster to come. I will spare you a reminder of the specific events. I am, however, amused that they were forced to present two awards. It was almost as if the show’s producers left them out on the stage for five minutes as punishment. Had the afore-mentioned Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller appeared, this probably would have been their segment, so they caught a break by being left off the evening’s presenters list.

The Avengers segment was the other failure of the evening. The normally engaging Robert Downey Jr. started off on the wrong foot when he led (most of) the cast in taking a bow over its box office performance. Then, an odd decision was made to poke fun at Samuel L. Jackson and Downey’s history of drug abuse. Jeremy Renner’s heart was not in the dialogue, because he knew on a fundamental level it was a bad idea.

Once the first award was given, Jackson turned heel on the idea of doing another terrible gag. First, Mark Ruffalo tried to point out his mistake and then Downey attempted to espouse the correct dialogue. Jackson basically told his castmates to shut the Hell up and announce the award. The discomfort of the middle three actors - Ruffalo, Chris Evans and Jeremy Renner - is so spectacular that it almost accidentally saves the awkwardness of the moment. If Jackson and Downey are always like this, Joss Whedon is an even better director than I had believed. And then, The Avengers lost the category of Visual Effects to Life of Pi. This was one of two moments during the show that a category loser was left to stand awkwardly as the winner delivered their acceptance speech. Moments like that embody an inexcusable amount of poor planning.

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