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Kim Hollis: What are your thoughts on the Oscar ceremony? What were your favorite parts? What did the Academy get right (and wrong)?

Michael Lynderey: Pretty solid, and fairly long, but since the Oscars are once a year it's disappointing if they don't go overboard. Neil Patrick Harris was a fun host who didn't rock the boat or spend excessive amounts of time on unsuccessful humor. I wasn't surprised by much tonight. As someone who follows the Oscar season, the surprises this year were really cumulative, like how Boyhood went from a year-long shoe-in frontrunner that no one thought could lose Best Picture to a movie that, during the last couple of weeks, few expected to win. Or how Michael Keaton's comeback story was truncated mid-January; for months and months, Keaton was polling ahead of his film (Birdman), its director, and its screenplay. In a turnabout, Birdman ended up winning in all those categories tonight, but Keaton didn't carry his. It's the equivalent of when, in a parliamentary electoral system, a party does extremely well while its leader loses his own seat.

Some interesting speeches (Patricia Arquette, Graham Moore), a few odd moments (Terrence Howard), and one real crowd-pleaser (Idina Menzel and John Travolta, my favorite moment of the night; kudos to whoever came up with this satisfying bit of redemption and closure).

One sociological fact that few seem to have noticed: 33-year-old Eddie Redmayne is the first person born in the 1980s to win either Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor (I'm not talking about Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress, awards that several actresses born in the 1980s, and one in the 1990s, have won). As such, I consider Eddie a surprising glass ceiling shatterer of sorts for my generation.

One odd prediction: Eddie wins again next year, for The Danish Girl. Look up the plot summary and tell me I'm wrong.

Edwin Davies: Overall I enjoyed and was interested in the ceremony, even if I thought that some of the wins, like The Imitation Game winning for Screenplay, were nuts. Still, Graham Moore's speech, which was wonderful, highlighted what was great about the night overall, which was that people came up and by and large gave speeches that were more often than not passionate and even political.

I thought that Neil Patrick Harris started strongly with the opening number, then spent the rest of the show being undercut by bad writing, the predictions box running joke - which was beaten into the ground then failed to deliver on the punchline, and the general bloat and scale of the event. He was game for anything and tried his best, but I thought that somberness of occasion meant that his more caustic one-liners fell flat in the room, even the ones which weren't horribly ill-advised (like the "for some treason" joke immediately after Citizenfour won, or making a joke about the winner for best documentary short's dress immediately after she talked about her son committing suicide). He tried to keep it going until the very end, but I don't think that the material was up to the performer.

More than anything, this year demonstrated why it's a great idea to include performances of all the nominees for Best Song when they put effort and thought into the presentation. They've been minimized in previous years, but the sheer fun of the "Everything is Awesome" performance or the power of "Glory" really showed how that can be brilliant, especially compared to the interpretative dance numbers that were all the rage a few years ago.

Michael Lynderey: I thought "for some treason" was practically the best joke of the night! In so much as it even was a joke.

David Mumpower: I'm in a zen place about The Academy Awards. 2014 was a solid year for cinema even if it lacked that one dominant film. I thought it was very cool to see every nominee for Best Picture win something, and I was absolutely thrilled that BOP's favorite, Whiplash, won three Academy Awards.

I felt that Birdman's victories in Best Picture and Best Director were maddening, as the film lives or dies with Michael Keaton, who lost Best Actor to an inferior performance. As I've said multiple times, The Theory of Everything is much more Felicity Jones's film. If someone should have won, it was her rather than him. As silly as the votes in those categories may be, it's the Academy Awards and that sort of nonsense happens every year.

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