Somali refugees Harun and Ali Mohamed, young stars of the Oscar-nominated live-action short "Asad," have overcome all the hurdles and are in the air, flying from South Africa to Los Angeles to attend the Academy Awards on Sunday.

Visas and passports for the brothers (above, with director Bryan Buckley) weren't finalized until Thursday. They will be joining their "Buzkashi Boys" peers Fawad Mohammadi and Jawanmard Paiz — who actually presented, however, nervously at the ICG Publicist Guild Awards today.

"Asad" has also earned praise from Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

"They deserve two Oscars: one for the creative endeavor and the other for contributing to our collective understanding of our dependence on one another,” said Tutu.

-- Kate Aurthur of BuzzFeed writes a wonderful, personal remembrance of attending the 1980 Academy Awards, for which her late father, Bob, had been nominated for co-writing and producing "All That Jazz."

-- That offscreen voice you hear at the Oscars will belong to Cedering Fox, who will be this year's live announcer.  "A big dream of mine came true when I was selected to be the voice of the 2008 Democratic National Convention at Pepsi Center in Denver," Fox said. "After that, there was only one more job I really coveted - the Oscars. I had an out of body experience when my agent called to tell me that I had the job. Live announcing is really fun, and this has to be the coolest job on the planet."

-- An analytical preview of the advertising you'll see on Sunday's long Oscar night comes from Marc Graser of Variety.

 -- Ken Burns might not be headed to this year's Oscars, but as Ted Johnson writes for Variety, his "Central Park Five" has still made a significant impact via its journey through the courts. 

-- At the New Yorker, former Wired editor Nicholas Thompson recalls the journey of Joshuah Bearman's "Argo"-inspiring story to the magazine.

The great unknowns of the Indie Spirit Awards
Piaget Producers Award
Truer Than Fiction Award
Someone to Watch Award

Variety senior film critic Peter Debruge reviewed the Oscar-nominated shorts:

• The Oscar-Nominated Short Films 2013: Live Action
  Wide-eyed children and dying old men once again make up the majority of the Academy's live-action short offerings, making for a solid if disappointingly familiar crop of nominees.

• The Oscar-Nominated Short Films 2013: Documentary
  Even separated into two feature-length programs, this least appealing of Shorts Intl.'s three Oscar shorts programs makes for a long sit.

• The Oscar-Nominated Short Films 2013: Animated
  Without uttering a single word, the five Oscar-nominated toon shorts display a stunning range of ingenuity and emotion, repping yet another first-class lineup in one of the least-seen and most exciting categories the Academy Awards have to offer.

The location's the same, but this is the first year the Oscars will be held at the Dolby Theatre, now that Dolby has taken over sponsorship from Kodak. Here are some stats and such from Dolby:

• -- For the first time in 13 years, audience members and viewers at home will see a new name for the iconic landmark. The Oscars were first held at the Theatre on March 24, 2002, when it was named the Kodak Theatre. This was the same year that Halle Berry and Denzel Washington took home the Oscars for Best Actress and Best Actor in a motion picture.

• -- The Dolby Theatre is 180,000-square-feet with an 86-foot-high-ceiling – that’s over 4 times as large in square footage as its adjacent neighbor, the TCL Chinese Theatre (formerly Grauman's Chinese Theatre), which played home to the Academy Awards in 1944, 1945, and 1946.

•  -- The Dolby Theatre’s transformation is as dramatic as when black and white met color:
  • -- Approximately 200 new speakers installed throughout the Theatre many of which will be used for the Oscars
  • -- A new 60 x 32 foot screen on the stage
  • -- A new Dolby 3D system
  • -- Two Christie 4K digital cinema projectors
  • -- 13 new subwoofers spread throughout the room to control the base

• -- This year, Dolby is giving you a front row seat at the Oscars. With select clips featured in Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound, viewers with home theatre systems will have a truly immersive sound experience from the comfort of their living rooms, remarkably similar to that of their favorite celebrities inside the Dolby Theatre. The night of the show, a team of four people will manage the sound to ensure those watching at home have the very best sound experience.

• -- Once the Oscars are over, the Dolby team is able to convert the Theatre from a live-events venue to a cinema venue in a mere 14 hours. Two of this year’s nominees--“Zero Dark Thirty” best picture and “Brave” for best animated feature film--had their premieres right here, at the Dolby Theatre.

• -- All of the Oscar-nominated films in the Sound Editing and Sound Mixing categories this year were released with Dolby technologies.  Films with Dolby audio have earned Oscars nominations for outstanding sound for 35 consecutive years.

• -- Most standard movie theatres have around 200 seats, but for live presentations like the Oscars, The Dolby Theatre seats up to 3,400 attendees in the house!

• -- On the big night, an estimated 1.2 billion people around the world will get the new Dolby experience.

• -- The screen on-stage during the Oscars is 60 feet wide and 32 feet high; by comparison, the average movie theatre screen is about 52 feet wide and 41 feet high.

In my final print piece before the Oscars, I offered my opinion on the 12 most intriguing categories to be decided Sunday. (No. 2: Will Ang Lee or Steven Spielberg — or neither — still be smiling when it's all over?)

Finishing off this year's presenter-performer announcements, Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson will present awards at the Oscars Sunday. The two have combined for 19 nominations and five wins. 

“Between the two of them, Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman have created more iconic characters than any other pair of actors in the world,” Oscar exec producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron said.  “Their participation in this year’s Oscars completes a list of presenters and performers that truly represents that great breadth and depth of acting talent in film today.”

The full list: Hoffman, Nicholson, Jane Fonda, Jennifer Garner, Kristen Stewart, Kerry Washington, Jennifer Aniston, Michael Douglas, Jamie Foxx, Paul Rudd, Salma Hayek Pinault, Melissa McCarthy, Liam Neeson, John Travolta, Ben Affleck, Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Lawrence, Halle Berry, Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Mark Wahlberg, Ted, Robert Downey Jr., Samuel L. Jackson, Chris Evans, Jeremy Renner, Mark Ruffalo, Jean Dujardin, Christopher Plummer, Octavia Spencer, Meryl Streep; Richard Gere, Queen Latifah, Renee Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Daniel Radcliffe, Channing Tatum, Charlize Theron, Kristin Chenoweth, Jennifer Hudson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Samantha Barks, Aaron Tveit, Helena Bonham Carter, Adele, Dame Shirley Bassey, Norah Jones and Barbra Streisand.

We are barely 72 hours from the start of the Oscars. It's getting real. For you fiesta and fashion fanatics, here's your guide to the stylists, the suites and the parties.