The King's Speech, an historic epic about King George VI, the stammering ruler of England at the start of the Second World War, was named Sunday as best movie of the year. It also won the awards for best actor and best director. It won four Oscars in total.
The 2011 Academy Awards were a battle of Old and New Hollywood, with some bad words thrown in for spice.
Youth prevailed in the hotly contested race for best actress. The Oscar went to Natalie Portman, 29, playing a ballerina whose persona is slowly shattered when she has to find her dark side to dance Swan Lake. There had been some late momentum for Annette Bening, 52, for her role as a workaholic doctor in The Kids Are All Right.
Colin Firth - representing old Hollywood - was named best actor for his role as King George VI. Firth, 50, who was nominated last year for A Single Man, said, "I have a feeling my career's just peaked." He warned the audience that he might break into dance.
Tom Hooper won the Oscar for best director of the film, and, in keeping with the film's traditional values, paid tribute to his mother, who saw a theatre version of The King's Speech and recommended he make it his next movie. "The moral of the story is, listen to your mother," he said.
The supporting actress award went to Melissa Leo, who started the broadcast on the young and hip foot when she said a Bad Word - "When I watched Kate (Winslet) two years ago, it looked so f----n' easy" - during her acceptance speech. Leo overcame the controversy of putting self-promoting glamour ads into trade publications, but she ignited a new one with her slip of the tongue: The "f-bomb" became a running joke in the broadcast.
Leo won for her excoriating portrait in The Fighter of the mother and manager of "Irish" Micky Ward, the real-life junior welterweight who overcame the odds (and his family) to win a title. Christian Bale, whose portrayal of Micky's crack-addict brother almost overwhelmed the boxing movie, was named best supporting actor.
"It's the young and hip Oscars," said co-host Anne Hathaway - at 28, the youngest-ever host of the Academy Awards show - after Leo's gaffe.
The champion of the New Hollywood - The Social Network, a more modern sort of biopic - told the story of Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook. It was a different kind of watershed event, one that may turn out to be no less earth-shaking than the war.
But while it was an early Oscar favourite, it came away with only three awards. Aaron Sorkin won for adapted screenplay for his smart, fast-moving original screenplay. He paid tribute to legendary screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who won the Oscar "for another movie with Network in the title;" that is, Network (he also won for Hospital and Marty.)
The movie also won the awards for best original score and best editing.
David Seidler, who wrote The King's Speech, won the award for best original screenplay. "My father always said to me I would be a late bloomer," said Seidler, 73. He noted that he is the oldest person to ever win the award, which he accepted "for all the stutterers throughout the world."
It wasn't a great night for Canada. The Danish film In a Better World - a story about friendship between two families - won the Oscar for best foreign-language film, beating the Canadian entry Incendies, Denis Villeneuve's shattering film about a Montreal woman who goes to the Middle East to learn secrets about her family.
The Australian film The Lost Thing won the award for animated short film, beating the favoured Pixar entry, Day & Night. Pixar bounced back by winning the award for best animated feature for Toy Story 3, which also took the Oscar for best original song, Randy Newman's We Belong Together. (Two Canadian animators - Dean DeBlois, co-director of How to Train Your Dragon, and Paul Dutton, animation director of The Illusionist - had been nominated for the feature award.)
Wally Pfister - director Christopher Nolan's favourite cinematographer - won the award for Inception, upsetting the favoured Roger Deakins from True Grit, who has now been nominated nine times without a win. Inception also won for sound editing (Canadian Craig Berkey had been nominated for his work on True Grit), sound mixing and visual effects. The Inception winners all gave special thanks to Nolan, who was snubbed in the best director category, even though the movie itself was nominated for best picture.
The award for best makeup went to The Wolfman (Montreal effects artist Adrien Morot had been nominated for his work on the Canadian film Barney's Version).
Inside Job, the documentary about the economic collapse, won the Oscar for best documentary feature. "Three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by a massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that's wrong," said director Charles Ferguson.
Alice in Wonderland won the Oscars for art direction and costume design. Strangers No More, about a multi-ethnic Israeli school, was named best documentary short, and God of Love, an urban comedy about a modern-day Cupid, won the award as best live-action short.
The broadcast itself also contrasted old and new: Hathaway and co-host James Franco, 32, were part of a concerted effort to attract a younger viewership that included a 99-cent app that took viewers backstage. Meanwhile, older films - such as Gone With the Wind - were featured during the show, and 94-year-old Kirk Douglas came out, cane in hand, to present the supporting actress award. In addition, former host Billy Crystal made a guest appearance to introduce a clip of Bob Hope, who was Oscar host in the years when both Hathaway and Franco were born.
Oscar winners:
-Best Picture: The King's Speech
-Best Actor: Colin Firth, The King's Speech
-Best Actress: Natalie Portman, Black Swan
-Best Director: Tom Hooper, The King's Speech
-Best Original Song: "We Belong Together," Randy Newman
-Film Editing: The Social Network
-Visual Effects: Inception
-Documentary Feature: Inside Job
-Live Action Short: God of Love
-Documentary Short: Strangers No More
-Costume Design: Alice in Wonderland
-Makeup: The Wolfman
-Sound Editing: Inception
-Sound Mixing: Inception
-Original Score: The Social Network
-Supporting Actor: Christian Bale, The Fighter
-Foreign Language Film: In a Better World (Denmark)
-Original Screenplay: David Seidler, The King's Speech
-Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network
-Animated Feature: Toy Story 3
-Animated Short Film: The Lost Thing
-Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo, The Fighter
-Art Direction: Alice in Wonderland
-Cinematography: Inception
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