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A DEMOCRATIC BEAT

Hosted by Family Guy's Seth MacFarlane with the theme of "Music in the Movies," the nearly four-hour long show featured a number of musical highlights, including Adele's sparkling rendition of "Skyfall," named the evening's Best Original Song, Barbra Streisand's moving "The Way We Were," her tribute to the late Marvin Hamlisch, and Shirley Bassey's "Goldfinger," as part of a James Bond tribute, which prompted a standing ovation.

The evening marked a triumph for Academy-snubbed director/producer Ben Affleck's Argo, which took home Best Picture honors, along with Best Adapted Screenplay (Chris Terrio) and Film Editing (William Goldenberg). Overall winner was Ang Lee's Life of Pi, which earned Best Director honors, along with Original Music Score (Mychael Danna), Cinematography (Claudio Miranda) and Visual Effects.

Lincoln's Daniel Day-Lewis, Silver Linings Playbook's Jennifer Lawrence and Les Miserables' Anne Hathaway won the expected Best Actor, Actress and Supporting Actress awards, with only Django Unchained's Christoph Waltz, winning his second Best Supporting Actor award, defying the prognosticators. The only other upset included Quentin Tarantino's second win for Best Original Screenplay

Starting off with a pair of musical numbers featuring the Oscar-nominated MacFarlane, the show was filled with musical moments. Searching for Sugar Man, the true story of Rodriguez, the forgotten Detroit soul singer who belatedly discovered he was an apartheid superstar in South Africa, earned Best Documentary honors.

There were tributes to movie musicals Chicago (featuring Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Dreamgirls (with Jennifer Hudson reprising her Oscar-winning performance of "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going"), while Norah Jones sang one of the nominated Best Songs, MacFarlane and Walter Murphy's "Everybody Needs a Best Friend," from Ted. Oscar-nominated Hugh Jackman and winner Hathaway also performed a pair of nominated songs from Les Miserables.

Other winners included Amour as Best Foreign Language Film and Brave for Best Animated Feature.

Among the snubs: Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, the top film with 12 nominations, took home but two, one for Best Actor, the other in Production Design, while Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty shared a single award for Sound Editing, tying with Skyfall.