It’s about freaking time they won.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences took too long to give The Lord of the Rings trilogy an Oscar for Best Picture.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was nominated for 11 Oscars by the Academy.

What was amazing about the 76th annual Academy Awards Feb. 29 is the fact the movie ruled over all the other nominations, taking 11 Oscars for the night.

According to the Oscars database Web site at awardsdatabase.oscars.org, the movie tied with Ben-Hur and Titanic for number of Oscar wins.

Most likely, there were a bunch of ecstatic fans just waiting for the movie to finally win Best Picture.

In 2002, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was nominated for six Oscars and only took awards for Sound Editing and Visual Effects. It was nominated for Best Picture, but Chicago brought home the gold statue.

In 2001, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was nominated for 12 awards and only won four – Cinematography, Makeup, Music (original score) and Visual Effects. A Beautiful Mind stole the show for Best Picture.

Ian McKellen was up for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, but did not win. Denzel Washington did.

Tear.

It was amazing LOTR did not end up losing one award. There is always one category a movie is nominated for in which it does not end up winning. You always want to know why.

Throughout the entire night, Billy Crystal, host of the awards show, kept making funny comments about the number of times New Zealand was thanked. Well, considering most of the crew from LOTR is from New Zealand and Australia, there was a reason to thank them.

At the beginning of the show, Crystal did a hilarious spoof of several movies, some of which were up for awards. His face was superimposed into the characters from the different movies, and at times his whole body, like when he depicted a hobbit. But, it was completely wrong to see him as Legolas from LOTR. He might as well have been a Vulcan rather than an elf.

For Best Actor, Sean Penn should not have won. Not having seen all the movies that had nominations for Best Actor except Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the only actor to root for was Johnny Depp.

Not only is he the coolest actor in the entire world, it was his first nomination ever. He played the role of Capt. Jack Sparrow in such a way that he was the only one who could have actually pulled it off. Depp has that spunk and attitude of playing weird characters.

Such characters like Edward Scissorhands and Gilbert Grape should have been nominated for Oscars. Why did the academy wait until now to give him a nomination?

Why didn’t Pirates of the Caribbean win anything? The movie was up for five awards and was in some of the same categories as LOTR. Both movies were good in their own ways, but at least one of the awards like Visual Effects or Makeup should have gone to Pirates of the Caribbean.

The Academy Awards were fun to watch, especially this year with who won.

This year it’s all about one Oscar to rule them all.

We love the “precious.”

The gold statue, that is.