Ben Affleck’s Iran hostage thriller cum Hollywood satire Argo has won the Best Picture award at the Oscars – the first film to do so without a Best Director nomination since Driving Miss Daisy in 1990. It also picked up the honours for the Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Editing. With a total of three Academy Awards, Argo had the fewest Oscars of any Best Picture winner since Crash in 2006.

The acting awards were largely as predicted, with each winner having previously collected trophies at many of the other ceremonies since the Golden Globes. Best Actor went to Daniel-Day Lewis for Lincoln, making him the first to win the honour three times. Jennifer Lawrence was the Best Actress for her role in Silver Linings Playbook, Django Unchained’s Christoph Waltz was the Best Supporting Actress and Anne Hathaway’s rendition of I Dreamed a Dream in Les Miserables earned her the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

Quentin Tarantino won his second writing Oscar – Best Original Screenplay for Django Unchained, to add to his Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Pulp Fiction.

With four wins, Life of Pi took the most awards of the night, chief among them, Ang Lee took the hotly contested Best Director Oscar, in a race heated up by the absence of Ben Affleck, Kathryn Bigelow and Tom Hooper. It also won Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects and Best Score.

In the other technical awards, Best Sound Mixing went to Les Miserables and Best Sound Editing was won by Skyfall, whose theme song, sung by Adele, collected the Oscar for Best Original Song.

The artistic awards saw Lincoln winning Best Production Design, against tough competition from Les Miserables, which won Best Make-Up and Hair and Anna Karenina, which took Best Costume.

In the specialist film competitions, Michael Haneke’s Amour was voted the Best Foreign Language Film, Searching for Sugar Man won the Best Documentary Feature and the Best Documentary Short went to Inocente.

In the other short competitions, New York actor-director Shawn Christensen won Best Live Action for Curfew and the Disney-backed Paperman was the Best Short Animation. The Best Animated Feature went to Pixar’s Brave.