Mirren, Whitaker & Scorsese Win The Oscars You Thought They Might

Hear that relieved sigh? That means that awards season is finally over - ending with everyone you expected to win an Oscar winning an Oscar last night in a ceremony that was so long that conventional stopwatches actually melted under the strain.

In the least surprising Oscars for longer than we care to remember, Dame Helen Mirren won the Best Actress Oscar for The Queen, meaning that she finally has enough awards to use them to spell out "Who's the best Dame now?" in her garden so that Judi Dench can see it next time she's on Google Earth; Forest Whitaker won the Best Actor Oscar for The Last King Of Scotland and Martin Scorsese won Best Director and Best Picture for The Departed. But the Oscars really only belonged to one man - Jack Nicholson, who didn't win anything but had shaved off all his hair, presumably in some kind of warped tribute to Britney Spears.

The Oscars have been so long coming this year that a part of us just assumed that all this Oscar hype would stretch on forever just to annoy us, but last night The Oscars finally managed to happen. All the trepidation was there beforehand - would there be a Crash-style upset like last year? Would Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres tell any funny jokes like Chris Rock and Jon Stewart, or would she just warmheartedly burble on and get invited back in a couple of years? (answers: 'no' and 'burble,' by the way) - but deep in everybody's heart, they knew how the Oscars were going to pan out.

Just like our spookily prophetic Oscars betting odds foretold, Forest Whitaker won the Best Actor Oscar for his powerhouse portrayal of Idi Amin in The Last King Of Scotland and Helen Mirren won the Best Actress Oscar for playing The Queen in The Queen, with her Oscar presumably going to the same place that her Venice Film Festival award, her Bafta, her SAG award, her Film Critics award, her Golden Globe and her Most Unnecessarily Censored In-Flight Movie award. Helen Mirren's Oscar win was so expected that her fellow Best Actress Oscar nominee Judi Dench smashed up her leg on purpose just so she wouldn't have to watch it.

But the night's biggest winner was Martin Scorsese, who finally ended his drought of Oscars with The Departed - an old Hong Kong movie remade to fit more scenes of Mark Wahlberg swearing in it. All in all Martin Scorsese's The Departed won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Editing. And thanks to Jack Nicholson's strangely Britney-esque bald head, all mentions of the strap-on cock he wore for The Departed were removed in case it turns out he's got Leukaemia or something.

Actually, the Oscars did throw up one surprise - Eddie Murphy, hot favourite to win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing someone who's a bit like James Brown in Dreamgirls, lost out to Little Miss Sunshine's Alan Arkin, who was so touched that he lost the ability to speak spontaneously and had to read from a piece of paper instead. Well, we say that it was a surprise, but we get that's what happens if you dick about in a female fatsuit a fortnight before the Oscars. Perhaps the fact that only one Oscar winner - Dreamgirls' Jennifer Hudson - made herself look like a moron by weeping and prattling on about Jesus was a surprise too.

Oh, and Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio took great delight in telling everyone that this is the year that the Oscars went green, despite the fact that J-Lo's hairspray alone must have ripped a hole in the ozone layer bigger than Greenland. Here's a full list of this year's Oscar winners:

Documentary Feature Film - An Inconvenient Truth

Foreign Language Film - The Lives of Others

Animated Feature Film - Happy Feet

Original Score - Babel

Original Song - I Need to Wake Up, Melissa Etheridge (from An Inconvenient Truth)

Animated Short Film - The Danish Poet

Art Direction - Pan's Labyrinth

Cinematography - Pan's Labyrinth

Costume Design - Marie Antoinette

Documentary Short Film - The Blood of Yingzhou District

Film Editing - The Departed, Thelma Schoonmaker

Live Action Short Film - West Bank Story

Makeup - Pan's Labyrinth

Sound Editing - Letters From Iwo Jima

Sound Mixing - Dreamgirls

Visual Effects - Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

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Scorsese Finally Wins An Oscar - Reuters