“The King’s Speech” won the Academy Award for best picture of 2010 Sunday at Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre, thereby ensuring perpetual rebroadcasting of the scene wherein Colin Firth, as the future King George VI, declares: “I have a voice!”
The movie, a huge popular success, netted a modest-but-key four Oscars in all. “Inception” was the evening’s other big-ish winner, also netting four. No “Ben-Hur” or “Titanic” dominator this year.
A bittersweet chronicle of Harvard student and future multibillionaire Mark Zuckerberg and his founding of Facebook, “The Social Network” until recently was considered front-runner for best picture. In the end, the Academy voters — ranking 10 best picture nominees in order of preference — favored a warm, cozy British docudrama about a royal struggling with a speech impediment over a cooler, relentlessly verbal style of cinematic storytelling.
The voters, faced with very different slices of recent history among the privileged classes, backed the more rousing and populist tale of the future king and his efforts to conquer a severe stutter, with the aid and friendship of the Australian-born speech coach played by Geoffrey Rush.
Tom Hooper, who was awarded best director, brought in “The King’s Speech” on a modest $15 million production budget. It has grossed nearly $250 million worldwide to date.
In the surest thing since the sun came up today, Colin Firth won the best actor Oscar for his meticulous portrayal. Not since Daniel Day-Lewis was Oscared for “There Will Be Blood” had there been so little suspense in this category on Oscar night. And coming off the previous year, when Firth won wide acclaim and an Oscar nomination for a bravura turn in “A Single Man,” nothing was going to prevent this actor from receiving this award this year.
For her feverish portrayal of a young ballerina losing her marbles as she dives headlong into the role of her life, Natalie Portman was named best actress of 2010 for director Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan.” Her closest competition was widely considered to be Annette Bening, nominated for her brittle, honest work in “The Kids Are All Right.” But size usually matters at the Oscars, and Portman had the more dominant, attention-grabbing role by far.
With movies under siege from every other form of entertainment, and each new competing platform vying with the multiplex, the film industry’s self-addressed love letters — the Oscars — this year asserted the financial drawing power of spectacle in the technical and design awards. “Alice in Wonderland” won for art direction over the favored “Inception,” handing Morton Grove native Karen O’Hara the award for set decoration alongside Robert Stromberg’s art direction for production design.
“Inception” had a fine night. Last summer, when word of just how tricky a narrative Christopher Nolan had hatched with his fantasy of dream planters, the rumors within its own studio, Warner Bros., were dire. Well, we had to let him make it. Nolan makes us all that money with the “Batman” franchise.
Then “Inception” opened and the guessing games Nolan’s film played ended up playing very, very well with a broad international audience. “Inception’s” director Nolan was not nominated, and “Inception” won none of the major awards.
This was the story of the movie year 2010: guessing games. Look at the popularity of everything from “Shutter Island” to “Black Swan” to “Exit Through the Gift Shop” to “Inception” to “The Social Network.” In different ways, all these varying entertainments required audiences to wonder: Can we believe what we are seeing? Is it the truth? Is it reality?
Amid such games, well-liked ensemble pieces such as “The Fighter” (for which Melissa Leo and Christian Bale won the supporting actress and actor awards) and “The King’s Speech” offered old-fashioned lovely acting and a genuinely stirring sense of triumph.
Last year, for the first time since 1943, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences expanded the best picture nominees to 10, doubling the decadeslong custom of five. Accordingly, the voting rules changed: Academy voting members ranked their best picture preferences from 1 to 10, rather than picking a single favorite.
Oscar pundits such as Steve Zeitchik of the Los Angeles Times have speculated that because of the preferential voting system, this year’s best picture winner, “The King’s Speech,” may not have been the No. 1 pick of the majority of the voters.
“If one film has more than 50 percent of the votes on the first round (unlikely), it will be declared the winner,” Zeitchik wrote earlier this month. One suspects “The Social Network” was a more polarizing title than “The King’s Speech.” “The Social Network” may in fact have garnered more No. 1 votes.
But if enough voters who didn’t like “The Social Network” rated it considerably lower down their scale of 1 to 10, that may well have pushed “The King’s Speech,” presumably many voters’ solid second or even third choice, into a majority position. In the preferential voting system, designed to accommodate 10 nominees, the first film to reach more than 50 percent of the votes was declared the winner.
We’ll never know how this pretzel-logic preferential voting affected the outcome of the best picture race won by “The King’s Speech.” That may be the biggest Oscar guessing game of all.
