this whole Time article is good:
For the first time in 49 years, and only the third time in Oscar's 78-year history, the top six awards (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress) went to six different films. So it was a night with something for everyone, except Steven Spielberg, whose Munich was shut out in the five categories (including Best Picture and Best Director) for which it had secured nominations. The other four Best Picture nominees all found something to take home—Clooney through a side door, since he won as an actor in Syriana, not as a director or screenwriter of Good Night, and Good Luck. “All right,” he fake-sulked when he accepted his trophy, “so I’m not winning Director.” But he did serve, with handsome grace, as Hollywood’s poster boy for glamour, taking a few genial shots from Stewart (“I kid because I envy”) and hearing a female winner of the Short Subject Oscar “thank the Academy for seating me next to George Clooney at the nominees’ luncheon.” (The star, who knew a camera was trained on him throughout the ceremony, flashed a look of mild chagrin.)
There were even door prizes for movies that hadn’t fulfilled their original promise. As late as October, the Oscar favorites were two imminent, unseen films by recent winners of Best Picture: Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha (exotic, elevated, epic) and Peter Jackson’s King Kong (a super-sophisticated remake of a beloved antique). Once those films opened, they fell to the back of the pack, disappointing their investors and the critics, and earned no major Academy nominations. Yet in the absence of old-style epic films among the top contenders, Geisha and Kong aced the technical categories. Each finished the night with three Oscars—not the biggies their makers had once hoped for, but as many as Crash, and one more than Brokeback.
If there was an explosive surprise, it came with the awarding of Best Song to a rap anthem in praise of a flesh peddler. Old-timers may look at the Best Song category and see a dreadful devolution over the decades, from the Gershwin and Kern winners of the 1930s to “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” this year. But, hell, the competition comprised of a woozy liturgical ballad from Crash and an uptempo number from the bottom of the Dolly Parton song trunk. And the winners, three exponents of Memphis hiphop, expressed more astonished delight than anyone except the Crash crowd.
I’m no fashion expert, but I’ll vote for Supporting Actress nominee Amy Adams, the downhome gal from Junebug looking uptown resplendent... I’ll also hand out an Oscar for golden perkiness to Witherspoon, who looked lovely in a spangled dress, and sparkled indefatigably on her own. If Clooney was the evening’s (and Hollywood’s) epitome of intelligent hunkitude, Witherspoon was Oscar’s darling, Hollywood’s homecoming queen. She presented one prize, accepted another.
She was also the subject of one of the show’s very funny “attack ads” (voiced by Stewart’s old Daily Showcrony, now cable TV’s favorite mock-scold, Stephen Colbert) against every Actress nominee but good old American Reese.
I’d give Stewart’s 10-minute opening monologue a gentleman’s B—intermittently funny, but not what I’d expected from the current god of comedy. The audience received his jokes indulgently but not warmly. He wasn’t David Letterman (another TV outsider who bombed as an Oscar host in 1995), but he wasn’t Steve Martin or Billy Crystal. There were moments when the usually unflappable Stewart, gauging the tepid response, made the flop-sweat asides of a bombing standup comic. (“Work with me.” “I’m a loser.”) And part of his problem was that he was working against the prejudices of the room rather than toadying to them. By which I mean, this New Jersey liberal offered a few mild gibes at Hollywood liberalism. He called the Oscar show “the one night of the year when you could see all your favorite stars without having to donate any money to the Democratic Party.” He told the audience that, to many people, Hollywood was “a moral black hole, where innocence is obliterated in an endless orgy of sexual gratification and greed.” (Pause for gentle laughter.) “I don’t really have a joke here. I just thought you should know a lot of people are sayin’ that.”
Leave it to Clooney, winner of the night’s first award, to address the question whether Hollywood was out of touch. “I’m proud to be part of this Academy,” he said as the applause cresecendoed, “proud to be part of the community, and proud to be out of touch.” He exited to cheers. Clooney is too big a star to consider it, but already Hollywood is thinking aloud—and the thoughts must have percolated further after his performance last night as a winner, a stud emblem and a defender of liberal values—George Clooney for Best Supporting Actor? Maybe. George Clooney for President—!