Fundamentally, a director is to a film what an author is to a book. Sure, there are actors, cinematographers and assistants to the key grip, but an author has copy editors, researchers and translators. In the end, the book belongs to the author just as the film belongs to the director.

And, thus, it is inherently oxymoronic to declare that the best film of the year and the best-directed film of the year are not one and the same. You can't do it. It should be against the rules. Seriously.

But the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, a group one would think might actually know something about the world of cinema, seems to consider itself above the laws of logic and common sense. The group's voting membership has proudly declared that Ang Lee's helmsmanship of "Brokeback Mountain" was the finest of 2005, and yet "Crash" was the best film of the same year.

Now, this isn't the first time that Oscar has had an identity crisis of sorts. Through the first 75 or so years of the annual kudo-fest, this would happen on rare occasion — normally in a thinly-veiled attempt to offer two equally deserving works a high level of recognition.

But over the past decade, Oscar seems to have gone from being an occasionally kind-hearted gentleman to an outright schizophrenic. In 1998 Steven Spielberg was handed the personal honor while "Shakespeare in Love," a drastically inferior effort, was crowned Best Picture. Two years later, Steven Soderbergh was named Best Director for "Traffic" while "Gladiator" took home the evening's final prize. Then, in 2003, the Academy apparently thought it would be cool to give its highest personal award to a fugitive felon, so Roman Polanski got the kudo for "The Pianist" while "Chicago" claimed the honor of Best Picture.

Fortunately for cinema purists, though, the "Crash" versus "Brokeback Mountain" dichotomy was not Sunday evening's most embarrassing moment for the Academy. In fact, it probably didn't even make the top five.

The night, working chronologically, hit its first serious low point when Three 6 Mafia took to the stage to perform "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp," one of the three ballads nominated for Best Original Song. Working out of a set that looked as though it had been constructed by an over-worked Saturday Night Live stage hand, the crude hip hop group belched out a song that seemed to tug at any pretenses of dignity the tuxedo-clad audience may have hoped to have. The performance was the very foil to the Academy Awards' famed brand of class and an outright disgrace.

And then the unthinkable happened: the song won the award.

So much for dignity; a group of hip-hop artists were approaching the podium in a brand of street clothing that would give Joan Rivers a heart attack. But even that low point was quickly surpassed when the acceptance speech came in a hybrid of English that wouldn't survive the eloquence of a fifth grade classroom.

Of course, things may not have fared much better had Dolly Parton taken the stage to accept the honor for her nominated song. The famed Hollywood diva performed earlier in the evening, wearing a hideous white dress, highlighting her wanton cleavage and horrific lack of a waistline in a manner that would make Barbie envious.

Then again, fashion was not the night's strong point. Nearly all of the female stars in attendance tended toward variations of beige and tan in shocking uniformity. The outfits offered no character and the jewelry was far too sparkle-happy to provide any real relief.

Even the men couldn't get their outfits to work. The evening's theme was supposed to have undertones of a throwback to the golden days of Hollywood and yet long ties replaced bow ties on an excessive number of tuxedos — one might think that Regis Philbin was the new Armani based on the way Hollywood's men assembled their wardrobes.

But that wasn't where the awkwardness ended. In fact, things got much more serious. One of the evening's most tension-driven moments of controversy promised to be the presentation of Best Foreign Film honors as "Paradise Now," a Palestinian production about suicide bombers, threatened to shame the ceremony by winning the award. Fortunately, it didn't. But as the five nominees were announced, the show's producers opted for a visual effect displaying the named works' respective posters on screen such that they would cycle through two columns. When the image for "Paradise Now" came up, it was paired with the poster for Germany's "Sophie Scholl — Die letzten Tage," which happens to feature a massive swastika at its center.

And so went the 78th annual Academy Awards. The show managed to pair Nazis and Palestinians, honor a group of lingually-challenged hip-hop artists, mock the fashion industry, give young girls a reason to whip out their Ken dolls and, perhaps most notably, offend cinema purists by drawing a completely false distinction between a film's direction and a film's quality.

But, hey, at least Jon Stewart was funny.