Some thoughts on Sunday night’s Academy Awards telecast.

Jennifer Lawrence

My rooting interests prevailed: In the only two categories that really mattered to me, Jennifer Lawrence won Best Actress and “Skyfall” won for Best Original Song.

Love that chick: Lawrence has to be the coolest young starlet to come along in years, as anyone who has seen her on a plethora of talk shows can attest. At the Oscars, it was on display from her trip on the stairs, to her graceful recovery at the mike, to her engaging answers at the news conference and her impromptu flirting with Jack Nicholson.

Have the Oscars been Globified? Like Ricky Gervais at the 2011 and 2012 Golden Globes, Oscar host Seth MacFarlane had to know going in that many would be watching to see whether he crossed the thresholds of taste and maturity – and that he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. His solution was clever, maybe too clever by a half.

Capt. James T. Kirk (William Shatner) from Star Trek drops in on the Oscars to redirect host Seth MacFarlane.

He had the incomparable William Shatner appear on a giant video screen as Star Trek’s Capt. James T. Kirk, appearing from the future to prevent MacFarlane from becoming the worst Oscar host ever. “You’re jokes are tasteless and inappropriate,” Kirk says, “and everyone ends up hating you.” That enabled MacFarlane to frame the riskier bits – “We Saw Your Boobs,” Flight parody with sock puppets – as Kirk’s examples of mistakes MacFarlane would have made, while substituting classier song and dance pieces to improve his reputation in the future. In an overt nod to this year’s Globes, Kirk mutters: “Why couldn’t they just get Tina [Fey] and Amy [Poehler] to host the show? Why can’t Tina and Amy host everything?”

Continuing mission: Shatner wasn’t the only Star Trek actor to appear on the show. He wasn’t even the only Kirk. Chris Pine, who played Kirk in the 2009 movie Star Trek, was a presenter. Also presenting was Christopher Plummer, who played Klingon Gen. Chang in the 1991 film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

Trek meets the Tonys: As the Oscar telecast proceeded with enough musical numbers to rival Broadway’s Tony Awards, one of those commenting on Twitter was Star Trek actor George Takei, who appeared as Hikaru Sulu with Shatner in the original TV series and several movies (including the one with Plummer). Takei, known more recently as a gay-marriage activist, tweeted: “The only thing that could make the Oscars gayer, @SethMacFarlane, is if I hosted them.”

Bondless at 50: The Oscars included a lengthy segment honoring the 50th anniversary of the James Bond movie franchise. While I embraced the idea of honoring Agent 007, it was, as Robert Bianco of USA Today put it, a “truncated and sadly Bondless tribute to James Bond.” Though Daniel Craig was at the Golden Globes – notably high fiving Adele when she won the Globe for Best Original Song – not one of the six actors who have portrayed 007 appeared at the Oscars. All six had better places to be last night? Even George Lazenby? It was left to past Oscar-winner Halle Berry (Monster’s Ball), the Bond girl in Die Another Day (the last and least film of the Pierce Brosnan era), to introduce the tribute.

Divas to the rescue: What heft there was to the Bond tribute came from the music. An uninspiring montage of 007 clips was rescued when Dame Shirley Bassey emerged from the darkness on stage to sing “Goldfinger,” one of her three Bond theme songs. (The others were “Diamonds Are Forever” and “Moonraker.”) At age 76, she still has the pipes. “BASSEY-BOOOM! Now THAT’s live singing,” tweeted CNN’s Piers Morgan. Fellow TV host Tom Bergeron agreed, tweeting: “Wow! Shirley Bassey hit that last note like it was still 1964!” Later in the show, when Adele came out to perform “Skyfall,” viewers could see how its lineage traces back to Bassey’s “Goldfinger.”

Meme team:  By comparison, Barbra Streisand seemed tired when she took the stage sing “The Way We Were” in honor of Marvin Hamlisch at the end of the In Memoriam segment. There could have been a convergence of themes here, because Hamlisch himself wrote a Bond theme, “Nobody Does It Better,” performed by Carly Simon for the The Spy Who Loved Me. The film also included a Hamlisch update of the James Bond theme titled “Bond 77.” But Streisand is a past Oscar winner and probably has a larger fan base than Simon.

Memorial picks: Actors were vastly outnumbered by behind-the-scenes folks in the In Memoriam segment. Honestly, the disparity was noticeable.

You’re going to need a bigger stage: A new wrinkle in this year’s Academy Awards, which I thought was hilarious but others found disrespectful, was the orchestra’s use of the theme music from Jaws to “play off” Oscar winners whose acceptance speeches went too long.

Cutting the fat: As expected, the show itself ran long. Perhaps it was the sheer number of jokes about the show being so long. But the Bond montage could have been shorter. And I get that the theme was movie musicals, but there was no good reason for performances by cast members of Chicago and Dreamgirls other than to up the diva quotient for the night. I could’ve done without MacFarlane’s uncomfortable skit with Sally Field as well.

The last word: Takei summed up the evening in fewer than 140 characters, tweeting: “Bill Shatner, Seth MacFarlane, the Gay Men’s Chorus of LA and musical number about boobs. This is epic.”

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Tags: 007, Adele, Amy Poehler, Barbra Streisand, Bond 77, Carly Simon, Chicago, Chris Pine, Christopher Plummer, Diamonds Are Forever, Dreamgirls, Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles, George Takei, Golden Globes, Goldfinger, Halle Berry, Jack Nicholson, James Bond, Jennifer Lawrence, Les Miserables, Marvin Hamlisch, Monster's Ball, Moonraker, Nobody Does It Better, Piers Morgan, Ricky Gervais, Robert Bianco, Seth MacFarlane, Shirley Bassey, Skyfall, Star Trek, The Spy Who Loved Me, The Way We Were, Tina Fey, Tom Bergeron, Tony Awards, USA Today, William Shatner