This information is already past relevant, it being the evening, but here are my impressions of last night’s Oscar telecast:

-I fall more in love with Anne Hathaway every time she does anything. If I can be 15 about it, she’s already in that exclusive middle section of the interlocking, overlapping circles of cute, pretty, and hot (think John Bonham’s logo). But the way she supported an apparently drugged-up James Franco steered her through and beyond the schoolboy crush stuff straight to Marriageable. (As if no one knew this already.)

-Letterman has to have James Franco on, just so they can laugh it off.

-I kind of missed Will Smith being interviewed on the Red Carpet, giggling through the questions like a maniac.

-Christian Bale is now the second Batman to win an Oscar.

-Speaking of Clooney, it took me a while to realize, but I missed him and Jack Nicholson. Both had their names dropped but were not shown on camera, at least I don’t think. Probably not there. As such, there was not much of that older presence. Maybe those two were not invited – not “hip” enough. While Jeff Bridges has taken the reins the last couple of years, I’d say the mantle also fell, and somewhat strangely, to Kevin Spacey, whose own name I still hope to drop one day but who spends most of his time in London and doesn’t fill the same kind of space.

-Come to think of it, I also sort of missed Johnny Depp and John Cusack. And speaking of Cusack, I haven’t seen him around much recently. Hell, I’ve been following the guy for years, like a baseball team. And like with a baseball player, there comes a time after which you see him less and less. Not that Cusack’s about to retire, but I’m aware of the fact that there will come a day when one player on one of the many baseball cards I collected will be the last guy of them all to retire, like the last living soldier from World War I. Sea change.

-I tweeted about it: Oscar Night is reflective of the past, the recent and the not-so-much. One of the few forward-looking components of the evening was the microphone that was raised to the precise level of each particular speaker. I don’t know the technology involved, if it was more mechanical or more electronic, but that small touch hints at a future I want to live in.

-The guy with the mustache behind Jennifer Lawrence was not the ghost of Rudolph Valentino but Darren Aronofsky.

-Justin Timberlake is not as unbearable as I once thought. Seems like a nice guy, actually. I think it’s because he less and less resembles Derek Jeter. I don’t know why I linked the two in my mind. Golden children, I guess.

-Tim Burton and Joel Coen fought to the death after the show. There could be only one.

-Francis Ford Coppola has been riding to shore the same brief yet powerful wave of achievements for thirty years. His long-past successes were honored again last night. His 1970s compares favorably to any decade of any director ever. But he hasn’t been close to transcendent since – tough, when you make some of the greatest movies in history – and I wonder if his latter-day sins should be held against him, or at least his reputation.

-Even their Charlie Sheen joke didn’t work.

-It’s true, the acting awards were pretty predictable. No real surprises, no real disappointments.

-Fincher was absolutely robbed and The Social Network will be watched and praised and rewatched more than The King’s Speech. The latter is a charming movie, an excellent one that I enjoyed very, very much, but one that could have been made five years ago or five years from now, or further in either direction. Generations ago, not that I can remember, movies had a certain timeliness – especially when they took far less time to make than they do currently – but it seems rarer now. So when a great movie is also at all timely, it should be doubly credited for being so lucky in its relevance.

-Trent Reznor’s win might have been the most personally gratifying since Eminem’s in 2003. I actually did one (1) fist pump in unforeseen celebration.

-Of all the movies mentioned and nominated, I want to rewatch Toy Story 3 first.

-The British generally give wonderful speeches. Self-deprecation, done right, is an art form.

-Too few of these winners thanked the fucking writers.