Adele performs Skyfall at the 2013 Academy Awards

We were told that the conclusions at this year’s Academy Awards were all as foregone as they were in the days when Oscar-winners were announced in the press ahead of a ceremony that existed only to physically distribute statuettes. But there were some surprises.

For many, the first came with the evening's opening award for Best Supporting Actor, which went to Christoph Waltz for his performance as Dr King Schultz in Quentin Tarantino’s slavery-themed Western Django Unchained . It was the second time Waltz had won the award and the second time he had won it in a Tarantino film, following his success as SS Colonel Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds.

His second acceptance speech wasn’t as memorable as his first, but then Schultz didn’t gift him a catchphrase as apt as Landa’s “That’s a bingo!”

There were, however, no surprises in those categories on which Oscarologists had encouraged us to bet our mortgage. Argo took Best Picture despite its director, Ben Affleck, not being nominated for Best Director.

Best Supporting Actress went to Anne Hathaway, who wisely suppressed any instinct to try to look surprised. She is well-loved by the Academy and deservedly so. Her efforts to save the 2011 ceremony from the all-consuming charisma vacuum of her co-presenter, James Franco, deserved an award and in a sense, this was it.

There was no surprise, either, in Daniel Day-Lewis’s win for Best Actor. His portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s recent biopic is one of the most award-laden performances in years. Indeed, Day-Lewis is now the only man to win three Oscars for Best Actor, having also won for his intense turns in My Left Foot and There Will Be Blood.

Just like the speech he gave when accepting the equivalent award at the BAFTAs earlier this month, Day-Lewis’s acceptance was gracious, clear and amusing. His joke about how he only came to play Lincoln after swapping roles with Meryl Streep was one of the best of the night.

It wasn’t a vintage year for funny lines but nor was it a particularly bad one. First time host Seth MacFarlane ? the multi-voiced force behind the crude and iconoclastic animations Family Guy and American Dad! ? was not nearly as crude or iconoclastic as we expected.

Aside from one ill-judged joke about the abusive relationship between pop stars Rihanna and Chris Brown, and a jibe at Mel Gibson’s infamous attitudes to members of other races, his gags were relatively toothless.

MacFarlane’s usual motifs ? sexism, jokes about Nazis and Jewish people, cut away gags, absurd musical numbers and references to the television shows of his youth ? were all present, but nothing like as edgy as they are in his animated sitcoms. And as the night went on his material moved further and further away from the knuckle.

Unusually, this year’s broadcast had a theme. It celebrated “music in the movies” with on-stage recreations of numbers from famous musicals including a remarkable rendition of All That Jazz by Welsh star Catherine Zeta-Jones, who won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress largely for her performance of the song in 2002’s Chicago. Noted film scores also featured prominently throughout the show.

The most prominent of all was from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. It played, and became louder and louder, whenever a winner who isn’t on Hollywood’s A-list made an acceptance speech that overran. This was a funny idea but unfortunately that unmistakable score seemed only to play when a worthy winner was making a worthy point. Its first appearance, for example, came during a heartfelt tribute to the suddenly unemployed.

As the star of Jaws, Richard Dreyfuss , wrote on Twitter: “I always dreamed that the score of one of my films would be used to play people off at the Oscars. We did it, Steven!”

Though a celebration of movie music was the official premise, the true theme of the evening soon emerged. First there was a performance by Dame Shirley Bassey and then one by Adele. They both sang James Bond themes to celebrate half a century of Bond movies.

After this came the annual ‘In Memoriam’ segment, which brought with it a moving number from Hollywood’s diva of divas, Barbra Streisand, who was singing at the ceremony for the first time in 36 years.

And then, via a satellite link direct from the White House, Michelle Obama appeared to announce the winner of Best Picture. For Oscar, this was The Year of Fierce Women.

Read more by Scott Jordan Harris on Telegraph Blogs

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