The Academy Awards faced its biggest upset in years with Crash taking the Oscar for best picture, writes Michael Dwyer.

With a single word, delivered with an unerring sense of drama, Jack Nicholson sent shockwaves through the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, and around the world, when he announced the biggest upset in years at an Academy Awards ceremony. As the most boring and predictable Oscars show in a long time crawled to an end, Nicholson dramatically declared the winner of the most coveted award, Best Picture, as Crash.

For the second year in a row, the most hotly fancied film lost at the final hurdle, confirming speculation that Brokeback Mountain had broken too soon and finally lost the momentum it had built over the past six months. Martin Scorsese's The Aviator suffered a similar fate last year, when it entered the ceremony as the front-runner and lost out to Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, which was scripted by Crash director Paul Haggis.

The crucial difference is that Eastwood's film was far more deserving of the major award than The Aviator, whereas Crash, for all its many merits, cannot compare with Brokeback Mountain as a film-making achievement. And while Million Dollar Baby took the awards for Best Picture and Best Director last year, along with two of the four acting awards, the victory for Crash is undermined by its failure to take the Best Director award, which went to Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain.

Crash won just two other Oscars, Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing, while Brokeback Mountain also won two others, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Musical Score.

Winning the Best Picture Oscar can add many millions to a movie's box-office returns, as Million Dollar Baby proved again last year, but cinema owners will be dismayed at the victory for Crash, which has been on DVD release for some time and consequently has minimal prospects of a successful re-release in cinemas.

Brokeback Mountain had a virtually unbroken record throughout the long-drawn-out awards season, collecting a succession of prizes with the exception of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) award for best ensemble cast, which went to Crash. That was not surprising, given that Crash offers so many rich opportunities to so many actors, only one of whom had ever been nominated for an Oscar in the past (Don Cheadle for Hotel Rwanda last year), while Brokeback Mountain is a smaller, more intimate film, revolving around just four principal characters.

THE SAG AWARD for Crash was the signal that Brokeback Mountain would not have it quite so easy in claiming the major Oscar, given that the SAG electorate consists solely of actors, who also happen to constitute the largest voting bloc for the Oscars. In a concerted Oscar campaign, Lionsgate, the US distributors of Crash, sent out an unprecedented 130,000 DVDs of the film to voters for all the recent awards ceremonies.

Crash had another advantage, being the only one of the five Best Picture nominees to have a contemporary setting - the other four happen primarily over the period 1953-1972. It is set in Los Angeles, where the great majority of the Oscar voters live, and it tackles head-on the uneasy racial mix that constitutes the city's population.

The only other surprise during the course of this year's Oscars was that the voters chose a self-pitying song about the pressures of being a pimp as the winner of the Best Original Song award. That song, It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp, features in the vastly overrated Hustle & Flow, a banal raps-to-riches tale redeemed only by Terrence Howard's Oscar-nominated portrayal of a misogynistic Memphis pimp and drug dealer who dreams of finding rap stardom.

The expletive-littered song had to be toned down for the Oscar ceremony because the show was carried live on the mainstream ABC TV network in the US, deleting its offensive references to "hoes", for example. Howard reportedly gave into pressure from other African-American actors - among them, Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington and Will Smith - not to perform it on the Oscars show because of its negative image of black people.

Apart from the shock victories for that song and for Crash as Best Picture, the Oscar ceremony was numbingly tedious. In every other section, the favourites won, beginning with George Clooney, the first winner of the night and on his first time attending the awards, as Best Supporting Actor for Syriana, a neat example of strategic positioning given that he plays the leading role in the film.

Nor were there any surprises in the other acting categories when Philip Seymour Hoffman was named Best Actor for Capote, when 29-year-old Reese Witherspoon continued the recent tradition of young women winning the Best Actress award, as country singer June Carter in Walk the Line, and when Rachel Weisz was voted Best Supporting Actress for The Constant Gardener.

UNUSUALLY, ALL FOUR of the acting award winners were first-time Oscar nominees.

In marked contrast to the tear-swept acceptance speeches from Halle Berry, Gwyneth Paltrow and other recent winners, all four were composed, gracious and dignified. There was a rare hint of passion when Gavin Hood triumphantly collected the Best Foreign Language Film award for the gritty South African drama, Tsotsi.

And there was some welcome humour when co-directors Nick Park and Steve Box wore outsized bowties as they received the Best Animated Feature award for Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and they slipped matching bows around the necks of their Oscars.

Among the films that went home empty-handed from the ceremony were Munich, Cinderella Man, Transamerica, Pride & Prejudice, North Country, Match Point, Mrs Henderson Presents, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Batman Begins, War of the Worlds, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and Good Night, and Good Luck.

Although this year's awards were spread across four films in particular - Crash, Brokeback Mountain, King Kong and Memoirs of a Geisha taking three each - the ceremony was at least as dull and predictable as the 1997 and 2003 awards shows when Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, respectively, swept the board, taking 11 Oscars each.

One of the biggest disappointments of the night was the stiff, uncomfortable presentation by first-time compere Jon Stewart, exhibiting little of the edgy humour that characterises his US cable programme, The Daily Show, which is shown here on the More 4 channel on weekday nights. His gags were mostly obvious and tired, and often tasteless in the worst possible sense, as when he poked fun at Steven Spielberg's preoccupation with Jewish themes and at Angelina Jolie's adoption of orphans.

Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin were much more entertaining as they introduced Robert Altman, now 81 and nominated five times as Best Director without ever winning, who received an honorary Oscar. Riffing on Altman's penchant for overlapping dialogue, they hit precisely the right note before Altman came on stage to the Suicide is Painless music from M*A*S*H and to the night's only standing ovation.

The show itself had an attractive retro set modelled on a cinema front from a bygone era, with the names of the presenters and winners appearing on the ornate canopy overhead.

But those of us who stayed up very late to watch the show on Sky Movies had to endure a hideous set, with what looked like a 1960s psychedelic rug in the centre, while Mariella Frostrup went through the motions of chatting to people from Empire and Heat magazines.

Us late-night viewers had to tolerate far worse in Sky's sloppy, time-delayed broadcast. Sky ineptly cut to one of many interminable ad breaks - mostly incessant plugs for a "very irresistible" scent that was the show's sponsor - in the middle of one of compositions nominated for Best Original Score.

Not being a fashionista, I wouldn't dare to comment on the frocks at the ceremony, beyond noting that they seemed excessively huge and fussy, and designed to display décolletage.

As for the men, I can only second one of the makers of March of the Penguins, the safe choice on the night for Best Documentary Feature, when he observed, "Looking out at all those tuxedos, tonight is like watching the movie again."