'The Artist' gives Oscars a French accent

The accent was French all the way at Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre on Sunday although the film that scooped up five statuettes had only stray spoken words.

On a night of many historic breakthroughs, The Artist trumped Hugo and The Descendants at the 84th annual Academy Awards to become the first-ever French-produced film to win the Best Picture Oscar.

It was also a particularly special night for Pakistan. Karachi-born and raised filmmaker-journalist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, co-director of the searing documentary short, Saving Face, took home her embattled country’s first Oscar.

She shared the directing credit with Daniel Junge on the film, which showcases the work of a plastic surgeon working to rehabilitate victims of acid attacks in Pakistan.

Obaid-Chinoy dedicated the Oscar to “all the women in Pakistan who are working for change”. “This is for you,” she said.

Besides the top prize of the evening, Michel Hazanavicius’s sleeper hit bagged Oscars in four more categories – Director, Actor, Costumes, and Musical Score.

The silent black and white film had ten nominations in all, second only to Hugo’s haul of 11.

The Artist made history on several counts, not the least being the fact that no silent film had ever won the Best Picture Oscar since Wings did in the very first Academy Awards ceremony that was held in 1929 for the 1927/28 season.

Among the winners for The Artist was Jean Dujardin, the first French Best Actor nominee to take home a statuette.

Dujardin shook off competition from Hollywood A-listers George Clooney and Brad Pitt to achieve what the earlier Oscar-nominated French actors – Maurice Chevalier, Charles Boyer and Gerard Depardieu – had failed to do.

Also up on the Kodak Theatre stage on Hollywood’s biggest night was French composer Ludovic Bource, Hazanavicius’ long-time collaborator, to receive the Oscar for Best Original Score.

Meryl Streep, described by Colin Firth as “unreasonably talented”, grabbed her third Oscar for her sterling star turn in The Iron Lady. This was Streep’s 17th nomination in what she herself described as “an inexplicably wonderful career”.

The other big winner of the evening was Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, a 3D children’s fantasy woven around the origins of cinema and set in a 1930s Paris train station.

Hugo swept the technical categories winning Oscars for cinematography, art direction, sound editing, sound mixing and visual effects.

The Iron Lady’s Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland won best make-up for turning Meryl Streep into Margaret Thatcher on screen.

Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation bagged the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. The writer-director said the award was “for his country and for everyone who resents hostility and war”. A Separation is the first film from Iran to win an Oscar.

Octavia Spencer won the Best Supporting Actress prize for her performance as a spunky Black housemaid in The Help, an exploration of the racial divide in 1960s Mississippi.

Among the most anticipated contests of the night was in the Best Supporting Actor category.  Canadian veteran Christopher Plummer (82) won for Beginners, becoming the oldest actor ever to bag an Oscar.
He was up against, among others, iconic Swedish actor and Ingmar Bergman alter ego Max von Sydow, who was born in the same year as Plummer – 1929.

The Descendants, which had five nominations, had to be content with a single win – Best Adapted Screenplay, authored by director Alexander  Payne with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash.

Woody Allen won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Midnight in Paris but, characteristically, wasn’t present to receive the award in person.