“Billy Crystal’s welcome to come to New Zealand and make a film any time he wants” — Peter Jackson, director, “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.” Winner of best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay, best song, best art direction, costume design, makeup, score, sound mixing, visual effects.

A telling omission: none of the acting awards went to “Rings.”

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Best pic has to be “Rings.” How can it walk off w/everything else and not win? Near as I can tell it won in every category it was nominated in.

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Best actor: Tough choice. i’m thinking Ben Kingsley. Oops, Sean Penn.
Must be the make-up Oscar for being passed over on “Dead Man Walking.” Classy speech for a reputed bad boy.

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Best actress: Charlize Theron gets the nod. God, these women are all hsyterical.
What a tan she has. Charlize, give it up, girl!

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Tom Cruise gets to give one away but never gets one himself. Wow, he seems to have shaved for the first time since 1999. Best director: why even name anybody besides Peter Jackson?

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Hey, it’s the Tim and Susan show. For some reason I knew it was going to be Sofia Coppola for original screenplay. Any question that the Coppolas are a film dynasty?

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The Coppolas. Sofia’s on drugs, I swear. I’m rooting for “American Splendor” for best adapted screenplay but alas, it’s “Rings” again. Peter looks like Belushi with a beard.

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Three hours and counting. Lordy.

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Cinematography: Might as well give it to “Rings.” Wait, it’s not even nominated. “Master & Commander” takes it. A well-photographed film. The DP sounded a bit blotto.

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Charlize: Is she as beautiful as Catherine Zeta-Jones? Melissa gives the nod to Z-J. Best foreign-language film winner: “We’re so thankful Lord of the Rings did not qualify in this category.”

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Wow: Jack Black is really short. This “you’re boring” bit is pretty funny — the real “best song.” “Rings” taking another statuette makes me want to gag, though it’s good to see Annie Lennox up there.

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Woo-hoo, it’s Mitch and Mickey from “A Mighty Wind.” Won’t win but it should. A rare outbreak of humor from the Academy. The Kiss: A hoot in any language.

Hmm, this French song is pretty entertaining. Those “Cold Mountain” songs are seeming stronger than ever.

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“People are moving to New Zealand just to be thanked.”

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Editing: A topic dear to my heart. Might as well be “Rings” again. How about we just give all the rest to “Rings” and we can all go home?

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Best score: “Rings” again. They’re going have to start thanking people in Papua New Guinea next. Suggestion for future years: Couldn’t they do the thank yous in private? Think how much more meaningful it would be.

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Not many categories left. Thank God.

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Gregory Peck: From Atticus Finch to Dr. Mengele. RIP.

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Best documentary: “Fog of War,” Errol Morris’ first win. Haven’t seen it, wonder if he’s getting it more for his career. “I fear we’re going down a rabbit hole once again.” Billy: “I can’t wait for his tax audit.”

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Kate Hepburn. True classic. A great one has to die so they can show some real entertainment on Oscar night.

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“It’s official, there’s now nobody left in New Zealand to thank.”

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Do I give a flip whose sound mixing was best? Take a guess. I thought it might go to “Master & Commander,” which had wonderful sound. But no: another “Rings” win. This is getting tedious. Now, clue me in: why a separate Oscar for editing and mixing? Hey, Master & Commander wins sound editing — see, I was half right.

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Almost two hours in … my butt’s getting tired. circulation in my legs is going. Good thing this laptop is so warm.

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Best Makeup: Another “Rings” lock? Well, that was a surprise.

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Inspector Clouseau! “That’s a Priceless Steinway.” “Not anymore.” Blake Edwards looks 300 years old. All that hard Hollywood living.

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Jennifer Garner’s dress: impressive. Safe bet the stars are all sneaking out for bathroom breaks about now.

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Visual effects: Another “Rings” lock. (Note Will & Jada, the odd Hollywood combination of tall man and short woman.)

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Three songs in and no crap to be found. Amazing.

Annie Lennox sings the “Rings” song. Not bad, but not the equal of the Krauss songs.

Alison Krauss — haunting voice, haunting tune. Probably too gloomy to win. Wow, two songs from the same movie, Cold Mountain. Nice showcase for Krauss — it’ll be a crime if her songs don’t win.

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Liv: Lose those glasses.

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Best live-action short: (where’s Danny DeVito?) “Two Soldiers.” Best animated short: “Harvie Krumpet.”
I wonder how many people have seen these movies and if they could fill a city bus. The Starsky/Hutch thing was mildly amusing.

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Bob Hope’s best “I didn’t get it” gags: “Or as it’s called around my house.. Passover”; “Or, as it’s called around my house: The Fugitive.” OK, it’s funnier when he says it.

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Best supporting actress: Another impossible name… I’m guessing nobody portraying an Iranian will win, though. Ooh, Renee’s back up there again. Kind of an embarrassment to be taking it for best-supporting …. I mean, she’s a major star and everything. But it’s one more Oscar than Tom Cruise has gotten. How’s that for justice?

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Costume design: “Rings” again. You’d get one too if you had to find costumes for all those orcs. (Renee: it looks like you’ve had a boob job!).

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Best animated feature: “Finding Nemo” is a lock. Robin Williams needs to turn it off for once. The guy telling his wife he loves her in front of a billion people was a nice touch.

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Production designer: (Angelina, we can see your nippies!). Goes to “Return of the King.” Pretty much a slam dunk. I was rooting for “Master & Commander,” because it was one of the first movies in which I actually made an effort to find out who the production director was. But the “Rings” stuff is so colossal in scale, no shame in losing out to it.

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Best male supporting: (C. Zeta-Jones: too gorgeous for her own good). I hope it goes to somebody whose name I can spell. Tim Robbins! Cool. All the others are better actors, of course. The crowd holds its breath as Tim says, “I’ve got just one more thing to say.” Sighs of relief as he tells abuse survivors to get help.

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He’s really going to keep this up for all five best-picture nominees. For once the rich, beautiful people of the movie industry pay the price of fame: no way to avoid Billy’s opening sequence. Please, bring on the awards for technical merit.

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Make him stop… Billy’s singing again. He’s got some nerve telling Clint Eastwood not to sing again.

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Cool, Michael Moore just got squished.

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Naked Billy Crystal. Scary.

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Opening sequence: Sean Connery being stentorian.

There’s a scene in “American Splendor,” the story of underground comics hero Harvey Pekar, where Pekar is standing on one of those caged pedestrian bridges high above a big expressway. Pekar’s life and his outlook are so wretched that the first reaction is to think: why doesn’t he just jump? He can’t, of course, because of the chain-link enclosure, which roughly symbolizes his life: Pekar sees a world that should be his, but he can’t get there because he’s stuck behind this fence.

Critics and film festival fans gushed over “American Splendor” last year, when the film raked in major prizes at Sundance and Cannes. It’s out on DVD now, which in a way is a much better way to experience the movie because all the DVD extras — the comments track in particular — tell so much more of the story than shows up in the actual movie.

I have my own biases for watching the movie: I wondered if Pekar’s story could shed some light on why people keep buying comic books after, say, age 12. The older I get the more I wonder why a small fraction of the population — geeky, antisocial guys mostly — never outgrows these things.

The movie’s directors, Shari Springer and Berman Robert Pulcini, explain this phenomenon by going straight to the source: part of the movie is the real Harvey Pekar explaining what’s happening in the fictionalized part of the movie, where Paul Giamatti portrays the young Pekar (“He doesn’t look like me,” notes the real Harvey, whose raspy voice bears the burden of a life whiled away in a sterile Veterans Hospital file room). He’s part crank, part genius — a comic voice of authority on the subject he knows best: his own strange self.

The real Pekar lives in Cleveland with no prospects beyond his job as a hospital file clerk. As the movie opens his second wife is leaving him. His throat has a polyp that makes speaking painful. In a hilarious grocery store scene, Pekar has a revelation while waiting in line to pay for his Spaghetti-O’s: It’s time to do something with his life.

Pekar decides to start a comic book about the odd interludes in his life. Problem is: he can’t draw. His life may be a wreck, but he has one good fortune: an old friend is Robert Crumb (James Urbaniak), creator of the “Mr. Natural” comic book character. Pekar scribbles his words on pages, illustrates them with stick figures and hands them over to Crumb, who says, “these are good.”

From thus springs the comic book “American Splendor,” which ironically exposes the splendor-free existence of Harvey Pekar. He writes about the everyday annoyances of his life in the hospital file room, and his colorful coworkers. Over time the comic develops a following; one of its fans is Joyce Brabner (Hope Davis), a woman working in a comic book shop in Delaware. Her whirlwind romance with Pekar is one of the funniest sequences in the film — she’s just as neurotic as he is, but unlike all the other women he’s known, she won’t toss up her hands and toss Harvey out of her life. As the real Harvey notes, “I met my match in Joyce.”

Another of Pekar’s fans is David Letterman, whose cast of recurring oddballs made his “Late Night” one of the funniest things on TV in the mid- to late ’80s. Dave invites Harry on the show, where his condescending tone comes across as more disturbing than humorous. By this far along in the film we’ve come to identity with Harvey’s endearing weirdness, and it’s obvious that Dave is exploiting it for easy laughs. Later the real Harvey seals the deal: None of the appearances helped his comic book sales; Letterman’s fans weren’t laughing with Harvey, they were laughing at him. Creepy.

In the commentary on the DVD, though, Harvey reveals himself as a far more savvy media player than the movie portrays. He says, sure, he was there for comic relief and he was doing a shtick — which culminates with Harvey unleashing a profanity-laced screed against Letterman and his show’s corporate sponsors. Harvey might’ve seemed like a useful idiot, but he got the last laugh on his last “Late Show” appearance.

I admit I was charmed by how “American Splendor” neatly integrates comic book imagery into scenes, and by how the real Harvey deftly narrates the fake Harvey’s cinematic adventures. And I was amazed at how Giamatti seemed to nail Pekar’s quirks. That stuff brings goodness to the movie, but the greatness comes from Harvey himself. By the end of the DVD, which tacks on accounts of Harvey getting his just due on the film festival circuit, I was thinking of that scene on the pedestrian bridge and how Harry explained what keeps him going: If you hang around long enough, something’ll turn up.

Harry becomes a forgotten American who wins in the end. That spirit of against-all-odds optimism — Harry’s got deep, deep problems but he soldiers on — says something about the splendor in all of us, and not just Americans.