chi-oscars-2015-20150222Preshow overkill — and a lot of other movie-related awards ceremonies — almost always make the Academy Awards ultimately disappointing.

This year’s event is full of fully predictable wins for people who already got similar prizes and gave similar speeches at a handful of other event including, just the day before, the Independent Film Awards. And yet they kill time somehow such that it’s past midnight and they still haven’t announced a couple of prizes.

Maybe it’s things like Lady Gaga performing a salute to a 50 year old movie (OK, fine, but at some other awards show) or the pressure on Neil Patrick Harris to do for the Oscars what he had previously done at the Tonys.

Harris lost his golden touch somehow, performing an adequate opening number about the love for movies that was otherwise overrun by special effects (like much of Hollywood’s top grossing product today), and was left to do terrible puns and jokes off the top of his head while introducing presenters. After a winner ended her speech by mentioning a son who was a suicide victim, he cracked something about her dress. I spent a lot of the night tweeting the event, and saw an awful lot of funnier off the top of the head comments as the night went on. I also thought of some terrible tweets that on second thought I didn’t send. Harris had no such filter, and out went his blurts to billions.

Maybe less than billions. Early reports have ratings down as much as 14 percent from last year. This may be because a lot of the biggest moneymakers weren’t among the nominees or if they were (“American Sniper”), they had no shot at winning (although, speaking of shots, it did win best sound).

In most cases, it was up to winners themselves to make the show emotional and relevant by bringing up important issues nobody else was going to mention. Patricia Arquette talked gender pay equality; Common, in easily the most eloquent speech of the night, talked about way to go in racial inequality, following a performance of “Glory” from “Selma” that was easily the night’s best.

Close behind for me was the big goofy number for “Everything is Awesome” that used so many good people from Tegan & Sara to Lonely Island to Questlove and Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo. At that point it didn’t matter that the film from which it came, “The Lego Movie” wasn’t among the animated film nominees.

“Birdman” was great, I loved it, and was glad to see it win a lot of stuff, though it sapped the show of much of the drama. Some people were mad “Boyhood” didn’t win (although Arquette’s win for supporting role was big). Even without the statue, though, I’m sure the work stands on its own. It doesn’t need one of those little s