Casual Friday mood on Fancy Sunday

Aim lower,” Ellen DeGeneres joked about her unexalted childhood ambitions, and last night the Oscars did.

Aim lower,” Ellen DeGeneres joked about her unexalted childhood ambitions, and last night the Oscars did. She was dressed semiformally in an open collar and red velvet suit on a night that usually commands black tie or white. As she sometimes does on her daytime talk show, DeGeneres cruised the aisle with a microphone, chatting idly with Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood — bringing a casual Friday mood to Fancy Sunday.

DeGeneres quipped that Judi Dench couldn’t be there because she was having her breasts done. But mostly she was cheeky but good-natured, far less barbed and sardonic than Jon Stewart last year or Chris Rock in 2005. And for all the red carpet gowns and glitter, inside the Kodak Theater the evening was molded to DeGeneres’s low-key comic style, starting with the opening short by Errol Morris, a montage of the nominees talking off the cuff against a stark white backdrop. The film was supposed to look pared down and avant-garde, but looked like a dot-com ad.

The Academy Awards are the one night when Hollywood struts and preens as if nothing is bigger or more powerful than the movie business. Yet the selection of DeGeneres, the first daytime talk-show host to serve as the master of ceremonies, was a reaffirmation of television as the dominant water-cooler medium — for the moment. The Internet is breathing down its neck, with red-carpet blogger coverage and sites that whittled down the evening into 30-second nuggets. It took quite a while to get to the meatier categories, and DeGeneres’s aisle routine got a little old. Martin Scorsese received a standing ovation for winning his Oscar, but there were few surprises among the winners.

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Al Gore, whose star turn in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth won the film an Oscar, took the stage early in the evening to announce that, for the first time, the Oscars were “green,” and pretended to announce his candidacy for the Democratic nomination.

And like the Democratic Party the night was notable for its diversity: not just race or gender or sexual preference, but nationality. DeGeneres noted how many foreigners were nominated. “I see a few Americans,” she said. “Of course I’m talking about the seat fillers.”