2012 Oscar Winners: 'The Artist' is Named Oscar's Best Picture

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The season has finally come to an end. The 2012 Oscars have come to a close and things went pretty much as expected with a few hitches in the technical awards and what some may look at as a surprise win for Meryl Streep for Best Actress over Viola Davis, but even if you had Davis there (as I did) you most likely had Streep as your number two so you weren’t exactly blown away.

Getting the expected out of the way, The Artist took home a total of five Oscars including Best Picture, Director (Michel Hazanavicius), Actor (Jean Dujardin), Original Score (Ludovic Bource) and Costumes (Mark Bridges), the latter of which is really the only “surprise” win. I had The Artist winning five Oscars but instead of Costumes, I expected that fifth Oscar to come for Film Editing, which went to last year’s winners in Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Tied with The Artist with five Oscars was Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, which had a field day in the technical categories and started the night off with two wins in a row for Cinemtography and Art Direction. It also won for both Sound Editing and Mixing and also edged out Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 for Visual Effects.

Going into the night, the only other film I expected to go home with multiple Oscar wins was The Help and while Octavia Spencer won for Best Supporting Actress it just wasn’t meant to be for Viola Davis. For Best Actress Meryl Streep heard her name called for her work in The Iron Lady, which became the only other film to win more than one Oscar, winning for Best Makeup earlier in the evening.

Looking back at my predictions, I ended up 19 for 24 as I was saved by my predictions in the shorts categories, pulling off the unlikely task of predicting all three correctly. Outside of Streep’s win for Best Actress my misses came early beginning with Cinematography where I thought The Tree of Life would take it, I had Hugo for Costumes, The Artist for Editing and Rise of the Apes for Effects. Oh well, you can’t win ’em all.

As for the show itself, it got off to a rocky start as the opening montage of movie clips mashed up with Billy Crystal inserted for “comedic” effect didn’t really play too well and neither did his opening song and dance number. However, presenters such as Chris Rock, Emma Stone, Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis won me over late in the game and in the end the night sailed by rather smoothly. Crystal even had a few solid one-liners, appearing to take a page out of Golden Globes presenter Ricky Gervais‘ book.

Looking at the speeches I’d have to say Octavia Spencer gave what I perceived to be the most heartfelt and Jean Dujardin is just so damned charismatic it’s hard not to like that guy even if you are among the group of The Artist haters. As I said during the live blog, if you haven’t done so yet, go watch Dujardin and Hazanavicius’ OSS 117 films. They are streaming on Netflix Instant, you have no excuses… well, unless you don’t have Netflix.

I would also like to add that during the In Memoriam section of the night, a segment I normally tune out, I thought Esperanza Spalding did a wonderful rendition of “What A Wonderful World” and I really liked the presentation as it was largely dominated by elegant black-and-white images of those we lost over the year, leading up to the final look at Elizabeth Taylor. For once I really thought they nailed that portion of the show.

So overall, not a bad night. Of course, we can complain about the winners until we’re blue in the face, but it is what it is. People are celebrating movies and I guess, in the end, that’s what it’s all about. Just below are all the winners highlighted in bold and red along with the final Oscar tally.

If you missed my live blog of the event with Laremy Legel you can click here for our second-by-second rundown of the show. And with that said, look for my list of next year’s contenders very, very soon. That’s right, no rest for the weary!

2012 OSCARS: Photos from the Show (53 and more coming) | Live Blog | Oscar History

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