The Artist won five awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, (Michael Hazanavicius) and Best Actor (Jean Dujardin).
Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady) was awarded Best Actress, whilst in the supporting categories Christopher Plummer (Beginners) and Octavia Spencer (The Help) won for their respective roles.
Hugo was the big winner in the technical categories, winning Cinematography, Sound Editing and Mixing, Art Direction and Visual Effects.
The Artist also became the the first silent film to win Best Picture since Wings (1927), which won the same prize at the very first Academy Awards.
So in a year that has seen great changes as cinema shifts from celluloid to digital, there was something appropriate in the big winners being tributes to the silent era and one of its true pioneers, Georges Méliès.
FULL LIST OF WINNERS
- Best Picture: THE ARTIST
- Best Director: MICHEL HAZANAVICIUS – The Artist
- Best Actor: JEAN DUJARDIN – The Artist
- Best Actress: MERYL STREEP – The Iron Lady
- Best Supporting Actor: CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER – Beginners
- Best Supporting Actress: OCTAVIA SPENCER – The Help
- Best Original Screenplay: MIDNIGHT IN PARIS – Woody Allen
- Best Adapted Screenplay: THE DESCENDANTS – Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash from The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings
- Best Animated Feature: RANGO
- Best Art Direction: HUGO – Dante Ferretti
- Best Cinematography: HUGO– Robert Richardson
- Best Costume Design: THE ARTIST – Mark Bridges
- Best Documentary Feature: UNDEFEATED
- Best Documentary Short Subject: SAVING FACE
- Best Film Editing: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO – Kirk Baxter & Angus Wall
- Best Foreign Language Film: A SEPARATION
- Best Makeup: THE IRON LADY
- Best Original Score: THE ARTIST – Ludovic Bource
- Best Original Song: THE MUPPETS – Man or Muppet
- Best Animated Short Film: THE FANTASTIC FLYING BOOKS OF MR MORRIS LESSMORE
- Best Live Action Short Film: THE SHORE
- Best Sound Editing: HUGO – Philip Stockton and Eugene Gearty
- Best Sound Mixing: HUGO – Tom Fleischman and John Midgley
- Best Visual Effects: HUGO – Rob Legato, Joss Williams, Ben Grossmann & Alex Henning
> Official Oscar site
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