The Fate of the Big Winners: Uncovering Their Destiny –

From the return of perennial Oscar host favorite Billy Crystal, to the award winners in general seemingly taking a trip back to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ perception of better days, the 84th Annual Academy Awards managed to annoy just about everyone in 2012.

That’s not entirely true. Many critics at the time reviewed the show positively, with Roger Ebert considering the show to be “an unqualified improvement” over the prior year. Still, the iconic awards show continued a decline in general viewer interest that has been slowly chipping away at the event for a while now. It was roundly criticized for emphasizing movies that seemingly suited the tastes of the Academy over the general will of the people.

At least as far as the nominations were concerned, the 2012 Oscar ballot offered a good range of movies that were popular with both audiences and critics, and films that were arguably at least a little more popular with the actual voters.

In 2012, perhaps more than in any other year in recent memory, except maybe this one coming up on Sunday, March 27th, the show tried to find a compromise between being an industry event that should be allowed to do whatever it wants and being something that exists as popular entertainment wrapped in a yearly cultural zeitgeist.

Did they succeed? Let’s examine the “Big 5” Oscar winners for 2012. This covers Best Actor and Actress, both Best Screenplay awards, Best Director, and Best Picture. We’re going to look at whether or not the work itself has held up, but we’re also going to see where the winners have been since.

 

Best Adapted Screenplay  – The Descendants, Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash

Best Original Screenplay – Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen

Because the specific Best Screenplay category included in the Big 5 can change from year to year, it’s easier to just look at both. One thing to note is that neither of these films won Best Picture, although both were nominated.

The Descendants isn’t terribly well-remembered at this point, but the film then as now is an affable, well-written dramedy about a father (George Clooney) trying to make sense of his wife’s coma, which forces him to deal with a serious potential loss and the complete disarray it’s already causing to his life. The film was successful with critics and audiences. Its screenwriters, including director Alexander Payne, all continue to work prolifically in film and television. Payne would go on to direct Nebraska and Downsizing. The writing team of Nat Faxon & Jim Rash in particular have separately been successful as actors, writers, and directors. The two would collaborate most notably in 2013 on The Way Way Back.

Best Original Screenplay winner Woody Allen entered his fifth decade of Oscar relevance under growing attention to the allegations of sexually assaulting his daughter in the 1990s. Midnight in Paris was popular enough to downplay those claims one more time. By the 86th Annual Academy Awards in 2014, with Cate Blanchett’s win for Blue Jasmine, the shadow of Dylan Farrow’s account had finally eclipsed the larger public’s perception of Allen’s work.

Regardless of how you feel about those charges, that shadow is such that it’s entirely up to you to decide how Midnight in Paris has aged. Allen continues to work to diminishing critical returns and hasn’t been near an Oscar in almost a decade at this point.

 

Best Actress – Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady

One of the worst-reviewed movies to score a major Oscar nomination in the past decade, you can attribute that fact entirely to a generally universal love of all things Meryl Streep. That enduring popularity didn’t quite make it to The Iron Lady.

Although most seem to agree that Streep was fine in the role, her performance as Margaret Thatcher generally falls at the bottom of any ranking of the Best Actress winners for the 2000s. Streep’s win was not received well then, and the film is generally remembered only in the context of listing off her many Oscars.

No stranger to playing famous people, Streep is game to take the same deep emotional dive into the motivations of a woman some might call complex. Unfortunately, the script and much of the rest of the film just doesn’t have anything for her to really do. We’re left with a long, weird caricature. Reviews at the time reflected the struggle to admit that while Streep was admirable, the film itself was abysmal. This assertion is still held by most today, albeit by considerably less people.

Obviously, none of this really matters in the long run. Although virtually no one discusses The Iron Lady today, except to wish someone else had won instead, Streep is still putting away rave reviews and awards.

 

Best Actor – Jean Dujardin for The Artist

While people generally agreed in 2011 that Jean Dujardin was a good choice for both the humor and timing essential to the entertaining-but-pretentious silent film throwback The Artist.

A French actor with a background particularly focused on comedy, Dujardin was a successful actor in at least France by the time he appeared in what remains his most successful film appearance to date. His performance drives the movie nicely, and if the Academy was going to heap awards upon the movie, it made sense that Dujardin would be part of that.

With the odds favoring him, Dujardin came out ahead in a category with no clear standout favorite. Some hoped to see Gary Oldman win for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, or Brad Pitt for Moneyball, but neither of these films or their performances were seen as overwhelming favorites. None of the actors nominated gave performances that are still widely discussed a decade later.

As for Dujardin, he’s appeared in everything from French films, to stuff like The Wolf of Wall Street and The Monuments Men. Nothing has come close to the accolades of The Artist, although his work in the 2019 An Officer and a Spy did receive some international awards attention.

 

Best Director – Michael Hazanavicius for The Artist

The problem a lot of people seem to have with The Artist doesn’t concern its quality. “Crowd-pleaser” is thrown around a lot with this movie, and it fits that term nicely.

Director Michael Hazanavicius was prior to the film’s monumental success a popular director in his native France of comedies. His collaborations with Dujardin represents part of why The Artist works so well. Ostentatious or not, the movie’s pacing, comedic elements, and devotion to the silent era cannot be denied. Those qualities come from both men understanding exactly what they wanted from one another.

Still, much like his star, Hazanavicius has struggled to find a winner with audiences and critics even halfway to what The Artist achieved. The film has faded somewhat over time, although the timelessness of its overall tone and best qualities remains intact. Hazanavicius has directed several films since The Artist, though they’ve largely failed both critically and commercially. Unfortunate for a director who has shown ample talent before.

 

Best Picture – The Artist

As far as the Academy was concerned, The Artist was the best picture of the year. Competing against a range consisting of such films as Hugo, The Tree of Life, The Help, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Moneyball, and several others, its win could be seen as another example of a field that didn’t offer a clear winner.

This used to happen only sporadically at the Oscars, but as the monoculture crumbles, particularly in the country Hollywood inhabits, referring to that period of time in which most people saw the same movies, it has become increasingly frequent to have several films filling the slots with as good a chance of swaying the voters as the rest of them.

A lot of people were unhappy with the film’s win, and that might be why it doesn’t show up in discussions of great contemporary films very often. It didn’t even really indicate any Oscar-related trend more elaborate than the increasingly apparent fact that no one over there really knows what they’re doing.

The Academy Awards probably won’t disappear anytime soon, but if this year’s show continues a lackluster trend, expect even more scrambling for answers. To put it another way, you can watch and enjoy The Artist as much as you please, but you can’t actually go backwards.

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