10:04 p.m.:  Seriously, director George Miller, a winner for Happy Feet, is wearing a great-looking penguin suit.

10:05 p.m.:  "I never thought I'd be holding an Oscar for animation," Miller says, and, well, neither did this viewer of Mad Max.

10:06 p.m.:  And, no, you weren't alone—Miller didn't think Happy Feet would upset Cars, either.

10:07 p.m.:  "It was really nice," Miller says, explaining the perks of becoming an Oscar winner. "It was given to me by Cameron Diaz. I was standing next to George Clooney, so I feel pretty good."

10:13 p.m:  How is The Departed's Oscar-winning screenwriter William Monahan doing? "Very well."

10:14 p.m.:  Monahan's getting a lot of questions from Bostonians about Boston. I feel left out. I want to talk about rats.

10:19 p.m.:  So sorry, it is announced, but the Academy presently needs Alan Arkin in his seat at the Kodak.

10:20 p.m.:  Translation: You have more time to think of all those questions about whether Eddie Murphy gave Arkin the evil eye after he accepted Murphy's award.

10:31 p.m.:  There's a jolt of "oohs." What just happened? Pan's Labyrinth finally didn't win something, I'm told.

10:37 p.m.:  What was it like to see Pan's Labyrinth not win everything? "It was hard," Guillermo Navarro, the movie's Oscar-winning cinematographer, tells me, "because [it's] the Foreign-Language Film that really represents that it's the work of all of us, and we feel that we did a very powerful movie."

10:38 p.m.:  By the way, since Navarro's not a sound mixer, he has nothing but nice things to say about the film that did win Best Foreign-Language Film, The Lives of Others.

10:40 p.m.:  Sherry Lansing apparently doesn't read any blogs. She says she had no idea Tom Cruise was going to present her with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

10:41 p.m.:  "This is an honor," Lansing says old pal Cruise whispered in her ear onstage. "You know how much I love you."

10:43 p.m.:  Lansing is extolling the virtues of being born in Chicago. "Part of Midwest values is giving back," she says, "not being pretentious"—which is great to hear, because out here in Los Angeles we're raised to take things away from people while being really obnoxious about it.

10:46 p.m.:  If you looked like Sherry Lansing, you wouldn't be shy about telling an entire room of reporters that you were 62, either.

10:49 p.m.:  "Who just won? Who just won?" Lansing asks as the room breaks out with various "oohs" and "aahs." (The answer: An Inconvenient Truth, for Best Documentary Feature.)

11:01 p.m.:  Why did Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the filmmaker behind Foreign-Language Film winner The Lives of Others, reference Arnold Schwarzenegger in his acceptance speech? Because "he really inspired me as a child," the German-born von Donnersmarck says of the Austrian-born California governor. "I hope you understood that in the right way, and not [as] an endorsement of the death penalty."

11:15 p.m.:  "I was president of the Senate, so that's okay," says the quip machine who is now Al Gore to a reporter who addresses the former West Wing worker as "Mr. President."

11:18 p.m.:  Gore's addressed as "Mr. President" again, and I'm starting to think this room is either shy of Florida vote counters or packed with people who really know which way the chads hung.

11:20 p.m.:  Gore makes it plain: He has no plans to seek office again. Why would he? He's having too good a time as a comic.

11:25 p.m.:  Shecky Gore's at it again: "William Hung is a rock star. I just have a slideshow."

11:30 p.m.:  The former vice president of the United States just went "Whooo!"

11:31 p.m.:  Gore's watching Melissa Etheridge, Original Song winner for An Inconvenient Truth's "I Need to Wake Up," thank Gore.

11:32 p.m.:  No offense, but even when Al Gore goes "Whooo!" he's still not limber enough to go "WHOOO!"

11:33 p.m.:  The man who wrote the world's most famous gunfightin' music for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one mild-mannered-looking gentleman.

11:34 p.m.:  Fortunately, there's no bad dubbing in an Ennio Morricone press conference. He speaks in Italian, and then his translator translates.

11:42 p.m.:  "We didn't want it to sound like a National Geographic documentary," composer Gustavo Santaolalla says, on the secret to his Oscar-winning Babel score.