It all looked very familiar, which is perhaps necessary when so few of the nominated films are. The Academy Awards are about competition, but it’s less about winners and losers than it is about the ceremony’s struggle to stay on top in a television landscape cluttered with award shows, notably ones that ignore tedious technical awards and combine television and movies, like the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Awards. (People still watch a lot of television; movie attendance in 2011 was at a 16-year low.)

Previous efforts to rejuvenate the Oscars mostly flopped, including last year’s event, which paired an ill-prepared, disaffected James Franco with a hypereager Anne Hathaway and had them try to amuse youth with lame jokes about text messages, Twitter and iPhone apps.

Sunday’s event tried to return to tradition, but it didn’t do itself any favors by starting with some of the least interesting awards. The first acting award wasn’t announced until 45 minutes into the show. Even the montage of clips from classics, from “Star Wars” to “When Harry Met Sally,” was mostly a reminder of the many movies we liked better than this year’s nominees. A taped skit, imagining a focus group’s reaction to “The Wizard of Oz,” was more imaginative. So was a Cirque du Soleil homage to classic cinema.

There were other signs of Hollywood of yesteryear, though a few seemed less retro than regressive. For all of Hollywood’s supposed political correctness, some of the bigger awards went to movies with an oddly atavistic way of righting social wrongs. “The Help” rues racial wrongdoing but put a white heroine in the foreground — a little like the 1967 movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”