“It came true.” Thus the whispery realization of the dream she dreamed. The Twitterverse was split on the justice of Anne Hathaway’s Best Supporting Actress win for Les Miz, but the voters had spoken.
Maybe the music-in-the-movies theme of the evening’s ceremony should have been a clue. There was so much belting and hoofing you could have mistaken the Oscars for the Tonys: Seth MacFarlane calling in the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles for his opening shtick; Barbra Streisand paying tribute to the late composer Marvin Hamlisch; and the triple whammy of Catherine Zeta-Jones returning to vamp through “All That Jazz” from Chicago, Jennifer Hudson telling us, again, that she was not going, and the cast of Les Misérables turning the stage into barricaded Paris for a monster medley of show tunes.
But of course, the Tonys don’t get dresses like this. The red carpet was an embarrassment of riches. Jennifer Lawrence squared off with Charlize Theron for Best Dior Couture. Hathaway earned mostly good reviews—but also the night’s novelty Twitter account—for her petal pink Prada. Many of the night’s most-watched women opted for flowing, train-trailing gowns in pastel shades: Amanda Seyfried in a lavender Alexander McQueen, Amy Adams in a frilly Oscar de la Renta, Kristen Stewart in a beaded Reem Acra.
They weren’t all winners. There are slipups on Oscar night, figurative and otherwise. Lawrence literally slipped up the Oscar staircase as she went to collect her Best Actress trophy. (The silver lining: It quickly became the evening’s crowning GIF.) As she and Daniel Day-Lewis, front-runners both, collected their awards, it seemed that this would be a night without surprises. Not quite. Beamed in to present Argo its Best Picture award was practically the only fashion favorite not otherwise accounted for in the evening’s long parade: Michelle Obama, glittering in Naeem Khan. Oscar, it seemed, wished to go out with a bang. It came true.
