Best Picture, 2011

Awards presented February 26, 2012

The nominees were ...

• The Artist
• The Descendants 
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close 
• The Help 
• Hugo 
• Midnight in Paris 
• Moneyball 
• The Tree of Life 
• War Horse

... when they should have been ...

• The Artist 
• Beginners 
• Bridesmaids 
• The Descendants 
• Midnight in Paris 
• Moneyball 
• Rango 
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 
• Weekend 

And the Oscar went to ... 
The Artist. It's a perfectly lovely movie, with a dazzling performance by Jean Dujardin and equally dazzling direction from Michel Hazanavicius, who also wrote the screenplay. They also took home Oscars in their respective categories. The only thing that keeps me from agreeing with the Academy is that I think the movie is too clever by half. Singin' in the Rain did the whole silents-to-sound thing sixty years earlier and remains fresh. (The conclusion of The Artist, the dance number by Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo, seems almost an acknowledgement of this movie's debt.)

... when it should have gone to ... 

The Descendants

George Clooney grows as an actor every year, and The Descendants finds him at the peak of his art. It may be because the screenplay by Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash, which deservedly won the Oscar, gives him so much to do -- comedy and pathos. Payne was also nominated as director, as was film editor Kevin Tent. If Jean Dujardin hadn't been such a powerhouse of charm, Clooney would probably have won. Everything about The Descendants rings true: It jerks tears at the right places, but doesn't leave me feeling sodden and manipulated the way a film like Terms of Endearment, for example, does.