The Artist

Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist swept the 2012 Academy Awards with five wins from ten nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Jean Dujardin) and Best Original Score (Ludovic Bource). It was the first French production ever to win Best Picture and the first majority-silent film to do so since Wings at the very first Academy Awards in 1929. Dujardin had also won the Best Actor prize at Cannes the previous year.

The film was financed by the French production company La Petite Reine and shot in Los Angeles in 2010, a deliberate decision to shoot the silent-Hollywood story on the actual sites where 1920s silent cinema was made, including the Bradbury Building, the Mary Pickford Studio and Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House. Cinematography is by Guillaume Schiffman, Hazanavicius' regular collaborator since the OSS 117 spoof films, working in Academy ratio black-and-white at deliberately period-correct frame rates.

The cast pairs Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo (Hazanavicius' wife and frequent collaborator) with John Goodman, Penelope Ann Miller, James Cromwell and Malcolm McDowell, and the dog Uggie, who became one of the most-discussed performers of the year. The film was a remarkable commercial success for an essentially silent black-and-white feature, grossing over $133 million worldwide. It is now widely cited as the high point of contemporary cinema's nostalgic engagement with the silent era, alongside Hugo Chaplin biopics and the long pastiche tradition the OSS 117 films sit within.