A few surprises in the mix of winners

Alan Arkin got emotional in accepting his trophy.
ORLANDO SENTINEL
Maybe it wasn't so cut and dried after all.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & amp; Sciences didn't honor "the usual suspects" this awards season after all. Well, not all of them.
Sure, Helen Mirren won for "The Queen." And Jennifer Hudson won best supporting actress for "Dreamgirls." "An Inconvenient Truth" triumphed, as expected. William Monahan won, again, for writing the (adapted) screenplay to "The Departed."
But "Happy Feet" beat "Cars." Pixar's summer talking cars blockbuster lost the best animated film Academy Award to winter's smaller blockbuster about singing, dancing penguins. Director George Miller thanked the audience -- the men, anyway -- for wearing their "penguin suits."
And "Pan's Labyrinth" wasn't the "only" best foreign film contender after all, winning several prizes, but losing the big one -- best foreign-language film.
Without a clear, runaway critical and commercial success to back, the Academy spread the Oscars around. And not everybody who got a Golden Globe or a Screen Actor's Guild Award won at the 79th Academy Awards.
Arkin beats Murphy
An emotional Alan Arkin had to carefully place his Oscar at his feet on the stage and fish into his pocket as the first big surprise of Sunday night. The supporting-actor winner from "Little Miss Sunshine," taking the award Eddie Murphy supposedly had in the bag for "Dreamgirls," said he was "deeply moved by the recognition our small film has received, which in these fragmented times speaks so openly of the possibility of innocence, growth and connection."
Murphy probably showed too little "growth" when he released his umpteenth fat-suit comedy, "Norbit," in the middle of Oscar voting, just little too close to the Academy Awards to take home a trophy.
DeGeneres
What hostess Ellen DeGeneres called "most international Oscars ever" and "the most diverse Oscars in history," showed lots of love to "Pan's Labyrinth." The Mexican-made Spanish Civil War fantasy won Oscars for cinematography, art direction and makeup.
But it didn't win best foreign-language film. The German domestic spying melodrama "The Lives of Others" took that, and probably won wider American distribution in the process.
Awards for "Dreamgirls," "Letters from Iwo Jima," "Little Miss Sunshine" and even "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" and "Marie Antoinette" popped up throughout the evening.
It was the least political Oscars in recent memory. Even a promised "Draft Al Gore" movement in the liberal Hollywood studio audience actually was only played for laughs, as co-presenter and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio failed to tease him into announcing for president.
"I'm just here for the movies, Leo," Gore, the "star" of the enviro-documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," cracked. And when his film (directed by Davis Guggenheim) won, he simply gave a short pitch for fighting global climate change that echoed the message he said again and again in the film.
DeGeneres was loose, offhand and family-friendly-funny for the show, tipping the Academy that maybe "edgy" was not the way to go for an Oscar host -- as it did with Jon Stewart and Chris Rock in previous years. She worked the audience, quipped with ease, made a fake backstage faux pas, and "directed" Oscar winning tech geek Steven Spielberg in taking a picture with her camera of her and Clint Eastwood for her MySpace site.
"Uhhh, make sure we're both in there, Steven."