Every year, the film that wins Best Picture at the Academy Awards, whether good or bad, always has a compelling narrative accompanying its victory. Obviously, the quality of a movie does not really bear any correlation on its Oscar success, as campaigning and publicity determine more so than anything its chances of taking home the gold. Certain years give us the come-from-behind, underdog win. In recent years, films like Moonlight and Parasite winning Best Picture feel like far-off fantasies until the envelope is opened (in Moonlight's case, the correct envelope). Then there are the cases where early on in the awards race a film emerges as the de facto front runner and holds onto that front runner status until the very end. Generally speaking, these films receive a rapturous response at their first couple of festival screenings. Then, as more and more people see it, the expectation keeps raising, and it continuously does not meet those high expectations, making the most recent viewers befuddled and bewildered about why it has become the phenomenon that takes in awards like they're oxygen. Resentment sets in and the perception of the film dramatically tanks. Recent examples of this would be films like Birdman, The King's Speech, and, if you could not tell by the title of this piece, The Artist.

In a certain light, The Artist, which took home five of its ten nominations at the 84th Academy Awards, looks like an extremely traditional Oscar movie. Stories about Hollywood, particularly those about the magic of movies and how great the industry is, are a natural catnip to those who work in Hollywood. Who does not enjoy being pandered to on some level? Mank, Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, La La Land, and the aforementioned Birdman all tap into these show business narratives and enjoy a bevy of recognition on Oscar nomination morning. While The Artist is probably the most celebratory of Hollywood of the bunch, its origins come from a completely different realm of moviemaking from these other Academy-friendly films. The Artist still is a black and white, silent film made by and starring a collection of French people very few people in the United States had heard of previously that made their names in Europe making spy parodies.

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Image via The Weinstein Company

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As a refresher, Michel Hazanavicius's film follows the crisscrossing lives of silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), struggling to maintain relevance in the transition to sound, and rising star Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), who thrives in the aural Hollywood system. The Artist exists as homage, both in style and story, so plotwise, it basically is Singin' in the Rain and A Star Is Born, two beloved Hollywood classics, thrown into a blender. Hazanavicius's previous two films, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and its sequel Lost in Rio, looked to recreate the visual style of the early Sean Connery James Bond films, and with The Artist, he looked to recreate the light comedies and melodramas of the late 1920s and 1930s, where the story takes place. Guillame Schiffman's cinematography, filled with crisp shadows and glamorous close-ups, and Ludovic Bource's Oscar winning score aid in capturing just about every detail of the filmmaking of the period one would hope for. As purely an exercise in style, The Artist commits and soars.

Though The Artist is about and set in Hollywood, it was a French production, where lead producer Thomas Langmann managed to cobble together the resources to put everything on. Considering the track record of internationally produced films winning Best Picture (which is quite terrible), awards success most likely was far away from the filmmakers' minds while making this. They did not even have American distribution while making it that would qualify it for Academy Awards consideration. Another sure way to not get that kind of attention is casting as your leads two faces mostly unfamiliar to Academy voters. Dujardin and Bejo were stock company players for Hazanavicius (with Bejo even being his wife), and putting their faces on a poster helps sell tickets in France, not so much in America. Then there's the whole element of it being a silent movie, what should be a barrier to entry for so many people as silent films have been out of fashion since a good majority of the voters were even born.

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Image via The Weinstein Company

So how did this happen? How could a film that has so much going against it in terms of currying favor with traditional Academy voters, let alone them actually seeing it in the first place? Well, unfortunately, this is where we have to bring up professional monster Harvey Weinstein, who picked up The Artist for distribution after its glowing reception at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Weinstein, while also being an absolutely abhorrent human being, was a ruthless awards campaigner and made Oscar success stories of so many movies that in other people's hands would probably not be in within the ballpark of awards consideration. He took this quaint Hollywood throwback charmer and turned it into a juggernaut that could not be stopped. Hollywood ate it up, and because a monstrous person successfully rammed it down people's throats, the backlash and resentment for its success could grow even more naturally.

For a film so indebted and seemingly beloved by Hollywood, the fallout of these award-winning talents did not end up in the Hollywood system. Instead of a major, or even indie, studio backing his next project to capitalize on an Oscar win, Michel Hazanavicius went back over to France to direct a remake of the Fred Zinnemann Holocaust drama The Search, which also starred Bérénice Bejo and was quite unfavorably reviewed. Jean Dujardin, after winning Best Actor, could only crack a one-scene turn in The Wolf of Wall Street and a small role in The Monuments Men before going back to just making French films again. Bérénice Bejo's closest brush with Hollywood after The Artist was dubbing the voice of Princess Merida in Pixar's Brave for French audiences. So often, winning a bunch of Oscars at least gets you one swing at some sort of big, splashy production as a follow-up, like Tom Hooper making Les Misérables, but the team behind The Artist were not afforded that opportunity.

The Artist manages a strange feat by being both a total unlikely Best Picture winner yet covers all the Oscar bait material an Academy voter could want. The film was never built to win awards but became a behemoth, even taking in a healthy $44 million at the domestic box office. A black and white, silent film made by little-known French people had people saying, "Obviously it will win Best Picture, and that's annoying." Ten years after its release, The Artist is seen as an afterthought, making most people shrug as they peruse the list of every Best Picture winner. When you really stop and take in the entire context surrounding the film, The Artist is quite an anomalous Oscar success, and imaging a scenario where a stylistically minded, light pastiche from international comedy filmmakers like this dominating the awards conversation seems enormously unlikely.

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