Hollywood may be obsessed with youth, but two veteran actors took the early awards in the 71st annual Oscar awards last night.
In the first awards to be presented, which occurred at about 3 a.m. Irish time, the award for best actor in a supporting role went to James Coburn, who won his first award at the age of 70 for his role in Affliction, despite a film career spanning 40 years and 70 films.
"For my beautiful wife Paula, she finally got to come to Academy Awards.
This is for you baby!" Coburn said.
Next, Judi Dench won for her supporting role in Shakespeare in Love, a role that Dench acknowledged took all of eight minutes on film.
"The best bit about the Academy Awards is being nominated," Ms Dench said.
The Oscar awards are traditionally a time of complaint in Hollywood - there are not enough good roles for women, only big-budget movies can get made, the television broadcast is too long and boring.
But perhaps it was emblematic that this year the biggest complaint was the moving of the 71st annual ceremony to Sunday instead of Monday night, thus ruining many plans for weekend parties.
Barely keeping pace with that quarrel was the controversy over the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences planned Lifetime Achievement Award to director Elia Kazan.
One of the leading directors of the 1950s and 1960s, he directed such important films as On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire.
But to many in Hollywood, Kazan is remembered as the man who named 11 of his colleagues in Hollywood as Communist Party sympathisers before the House Un-American Activities Committee on the afternoon of April 10th, 1952.
That dark period in US history resulted in many writers and directors being blacklisted, unable to work in Hollywood, and resulted in a number of tragic ends.
A number of those still alive and their supporters protested outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Sunday night. Members of the group were urging those attending the ceremony to support the protest by sitting in their seats and refusing to applaud when Kazan's name was announced.
"This is not an attempt to keep people from going in," said Bernard Gordon, a 79-year-old writer who was blacklisted. He added that Kazan's career was so successful that he didn't need to name names.
Oscar host Whoopi Goldberg referred to the controversy in her opening remarks.
She insisted the Oscars were simply about honoring this year's best films.
"I thought the blacklist was about me and Hattie McDaniels," Goldberg said to laughs, referring to the black actress who portrayed the maid in the film Gone With Wind.