81st Oscars Highlighted by Hugh Jackman's Musical Number with Beyonce, Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens

In an Oscar ceremony that will undoubtedly stand out its own simply for being one of the best in years, there were many wonderful moments. Hugh Jackman was arguably one of the best hosts that dear old Oscar has had hosting his party in a long time what with his charismatic demeanor and charm. He helped to make the show enjoyable with his wit as well as his personality. One of the things he did to help make the show so enjoyable was to take the audience and the viewers on a verbal journey on the process of how a movie is created from an idea on a piece of paper to the visual masterpiece we the viewers see. While this may sound boring in theory, his enthusiasm about the entire process helped to make peak the interest of everyone watching.

In this Oscars there seemed to some well decided changes to help the pace of the show itself. First instead of having a different presenter for each award, the presenter or presenters stayed to give out the award for everything in their category. For example, the always impressive Will Smith presented the awards for Visual Effects, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Film Editing. While the show still ran three and a half hours, this seemed to help the pace of the show a little as you didn't have the usual hustle and bustle to get the presenter and winner off stage only to have the next presenter come up. They were also inventive in the way that they presented the awards for Best Supporting and Best Actor and Actress. After a montage of acceptance speeches from yesteryear, five past winners would come up on stage and talk about the five nominated and their place in movie history. I enjoyed this because it paid honor to all the other winners and had previous winners there to accept the newest winner into the fold.

One of the best moments to me was the musical number in the middle of the show. Jackman along with Beyonce, Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens of High School Musical fame as well as Amanda Seyfried and Dominic Cooper from Mamma Mia! came on stage to do a melody mix of songs from classic musicals such as Grease, West Side Story, Chicago, as well as bits and pieces from the new musicals that the four young stars had been apart of. This was pre-empted by Jackman's statement that the musical was back with Mamma Mia!having beaten Titanic in ticket sales last summer. While this part of the show will draw criticism from harsh judges, it cannot be denied that there has been a re surge of interest in musicals in the last decade thanks largely in part to HSM and Jackman's optimism about the revival was apparent. Hopefully this trend in Hollywood making good musicals will continue in the years to come.

While this was probably not the best Oscar ceremony ever it has been one of the best ones in the last few years. With writer's strikes and hosts who seemed out of their element in the last few years Jackman was like a breath of fresh air to what had become a stalemate in the Hollywood ceremony. Here's to the Oscars only getting better as the years pass.