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As lovely as Ke Huy Quan's reunion with Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg was, and as glad as everyone is that biopics and love letters to cinema have loosened their chokehold on the Academy, last night's Oscars were light on extracurricular incident.
Nobody wanted another slap. But just a little bit of something unexpected would have been nice. The closest we got, though, was the latest stop on Hugh Grant's continuing journey to becoming Hollywood's favourite campy villain.
Model Ashley Graham was on red carpet (or, this year, champagne carpet) duties for the official Oscars feed, and tried a few innocuous underarm pitches to Grant when he passed by. Standard stuff. But Grant did not play ball.
What are you wearing? "My suit." You were in Glass Onion, weren't you? You just turned up, had fun? "Erm, almost." Misunderstood reference to William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, massive eye-roll, see ya later.
Even Grant's Paddington 2 thesp-gone-bad Phoenix Buchanan might have thought twice about being so blunt. You can see Grant's eyes glaze over as soon as he's described as "a veteran of the Oscars," and it's downhill from there.
(Just for the record, Ashley Graham is blameless in all this. She's doing what the red carpet chat demands you do: ask fun, light questions while scanning the horizon for other celebs to hove into view.)
On a night when few of the wins were much of a cause for controversy, Grant's interview became the closest thing to a proper row. Rolling Stone magazine summed up the American response in a tweet: "Why stop to do an interview on the red carpet if you’re going to be a dick on live TV?"
David Baddiel, on the other hand, said that "those on here having a go at Hugh Grant for being rude on the Oscars red carpet have perhaps mixed up the word rude with the word real".
Now, this is by no means a hard border in the Atlantic ocean. There are a fair few Americans who thought it was funny, and a fair few Brits who thought Grant was being a prig. But, broadly speaking, the way it's shaken out is the Americans are more likely to be offended by it, and Brits think it was pretty funny.
What to read into that? On the one hand: not a lot. It's not much of a surprise that there was an instinctive move to protect one of the most conspicuously English Englishmen around – a defender of the oh-crikey-blimey school of Englishness – against being dragged just for calling a vacuous moment out for being vacuous. We don't have many things to be proud of currently. Our precious sarcasm is our only remaining export. Please, don't take it away from us.
And on the other: a couple of things. The idea that Britain is the blasé older brother to America's extremely earnest younger sibling is one we like over here. It means never having to stress about doing anything impressive or useful, for one thing, because doing things which are impressive and useful is needy showboating of the kind that blasé older brothers don't do.
Not long ago at the Baftas we saw the beauty that American unreality can add to workaday British life, when Ariana DeBose reminded us that Angela Bassett did the thing. When the shoe is on the other foot we like to see ourselves not as party-poopers as such, but a dose of reality in unreal scenarios. That can land well, like Olivia Colman whoopsy-daisying her way through her Best Actress winner's speech a couple of years back. No composure, all charm. Lovely.
But Grant's dry approach might land slightly differently when you're not from a strange island where reflexively making jokes about how rubbish you are as an employee/cook/friend/partner/person is the main way people make friends. It's what makes the whole thing so enticing.
The first KFC in the UK opened in Preston in 1965, but even after six decades of cultural bleed from America there is, still, some kind of fundamental difference between the way Britons and Americans inhabit and make gentle fun of the world. Sometimes it's best to just wrap things up.
