Oscars go big time. Photo credit: Kevo Thomson

So, by now most people know who came away with the most Oscars from this year’s Academy Awards – and that it wasn’t Avatar. Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker came away with a stunning six Oscars, out of the nine it was nominated for, including Best Picture and Best Director for Katherine Bigelow.

The film was a critical success but earned far less at the box office than its major competitor, Avatar; some critics are taking its win as a kind of re-affirmation that the Oscars are still relevant and still merit-based. Moreover, in bug Oscar history making fashion, Bigelow, only the fourth woman in the Academy’s history to be nominated for the Best Director award, is the first woman to win it. In The Times’ Veronica Schmidt’s assessment, Bigelow “shattered a glass ceiling” with her win, made all the more sweet by the fact that she did it “with the sort of film women are rarely expected to turn out.”

But what are people saying about the awards show itself, which has long suffered flagging ratings and disappearing audiences?

The Los Angeles Times wrote that while funny and moving at times, the show lacked pacing and seemed to drag itself from gag to gag. Hosts Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin gamely did their best, but some pieces were too long – exiting and entering the stage, film clips of the visual effects nominees, the original score nominees honored through interpretive dance – and others, notably acceptance speeches, were too short. Wrote Mary Macnamara, the paper’s TV critic, “Martin fed the elephant in the room a peanut in his closer, saying that the show had run so long that Avatar ‘now takes place in the past.’ And that did not seem outside the realm of possibility.”

The New York Times’ The TV Watch column writer Alessandra Stanley opined, “The Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday night was one enormous Hollywood stimulus package.” The sheer ponderous weight of the thing – the length, the two hosts, the 10 movies nominated for Best Picture, double recent years – was a “repudiation of last year’s recession-tainted show” which opted for Hugh Jackman performing a one-man cabaret. “This was a supersized celebration of film — an effort to crown crowd-pleasing blockbusters as well as art-house favorites — anything to speed up the recovery,” she wrote.

So, did it work? The Oscars were “fine” – but way too long.

Even Jackie Collins agreed: Tweeting from the show, she said, “The show is getting boring!”