You can see the results of this year’s Oscars on its own nifty award page here, but, to offer our own brief two cents on the evening, here are MovieRetriever’s top ten favorite moments from the 2008 Oscar Awards:

• 10. Even with the Writers Strike cutting into their prep time, the producers were never able to talk Jon Stewart into singing a cute musical number about this year’s nominees. Good work, Jon. That would’ve been a disaster of Smoochie proportions.
• 9. OK, fine, America didn’t exactly flock to The Golden Compass, but thank god that it at least took the visual effects award away from Transformers. Michael Bay makes guilty pleasure movies and, if you start giving him awards for it, his head will swell up, he’ll start considering himself a serious filmmaker, and that’s how we ended up with Pearl Harbor.
• 8. Ben Affleck now has a reason to get into a fight with Gary Busey. (Admit it. That’d be hilarious.)
• 7. That Jon Stewart openly mocked Norbit, Eddie Murphy’s Razzie-sweeping dud, even though it was nominated for best make-up and the make-up crew was sitting in the audience. (Awkward!)
• 6. There were plenty of great supporting actress nominees this year – we were quietly rooting for Amy Ryan – but Tilda Swinton is fantastic, and Michael Clayton deserved the recognition.
• 5. That the Coen Brothers, even while winning best director and best picture trophies, looked like they were laughing about a private joke the whole time they were on stage.
• 4. We didn’t understand most of what Javier Bardem had to say during his acceptance speech, but, after scaring us so bad in No Country for Old Men, we listened with rapt attention.
• 3. That somehow Jerry Seinfeld was able to talk the producers into letting him appear as a CGI bee from his not-Oscar-nominated Bee Movie, instead of, you know, having an appearance by an animated character from a film that was actually up for an award. Yeah, it’s a total sell-out, but it was so blatant and terrible that we’re still laughing about it.
• 2. This has to be the first year ever that an ex-stripper (Juno’s Diablo Cody) won an Oscar. Unless there’s something about Dame Judi Dench’s past we don’t know about.
• 1. Our favorite moment had to be when the beyond-deserving Once, one of the best music films of the past decade, triumphed over the Disney uber-naut Enchanted and its three nominations to win the best song award for its beautiful anthem “Falling Slowly.” Plus Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova’s performance rocked, and we just about cheered when Stewart brought Irglova back on stage after the orchestra and a commercial break cut off her acceptance speech. THOSE are the kind of moments that make the Oscars worth watching.