Oscars - Best Picture Milestones
Year of Awards (No.) Production Company
Best Picture Winner/Year and Director
Number of Awards/Nominations and Milestones Film Poster 2010 (83rd)
Weinstein Company
The King's Speech (2010)
d. Tom Hooper
Awards: 4
Nominations: 12
A speech therapist helps insecure monarch King George VI control his stuttering.
- the Best Picture winner was just shy one award from winning the Big Five; it won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay (David Seidler), and Best Actor (Colin Firth), and was only lacking a Best Actress nomination/win.
- it was the seventh film in Academy history to win three Guild prizes: Directors, Producers, and Screen Actors. In six of those seven cases, the film went on to win Best Picture. The only exception was Apollo 13 (1995) which was also lacking a Best Director nomination
- the MPAA had given The King's Speech (2010) a restrictive 'R' rating for its abundant profanity - basically, for its repeated use of the F-word, although the British Ratings Board had given the film a much milder '12A' rating, on appeal.
As a result of the MPAA's firm decision to not alter the original R rating, an alternate, sanitized or muted version of the film (without the F-word profanity, replaced with the S-word) was released by the Weinstein Company on 1, 000 screens after the Best Picture win, to expand its potential audience. The studio received a waiver to immediately release the new version, and did not have to wait 90 days from the time the R-rated version was pulled. The short-lived PG-13 version grossed only $3.3 million, while the R-rated version grossed $135.4 million. - in the same year, Toy Story 3 (2010), the most-recent Best Picture nominee with a G rating
- in the same year, Toy Story 3 (2010), the only sequel to be nominated for Best Picture without any of its predecessors being nominated
Weinstein Company
The Artist (2011)
d. Michel Hazanavicius
Awards: 5
Nominations: 10
Declining, handsome silent film star George Valentin struggles with the coming of the talkies.
- it was the second 'silent' Best Picture winner in Oscar history, the first was Wings (1927). [The soundtrack for The Artist was non-diegetic.]
- it was the first black and white film to win Best Picture since Schindler's List (1993) (although Spielberg's film contained a few spots of color), and it was filmed in the older 4:3 aspect ratio; it remains the most recent B/W film to win Best Picture
- it was the first silent (almost) to be nominated for Best Picture since Ernst Lubitsch's The Patriot (1928/1929).
- with its Best Picture win, it went from the most Oscar-nominated French film in history to being the first to win the top prize
- the Weinstein Company began another streak of Best Picture nominees (with some wins), beginning in 2008: The Reader (2008), Inglourious Basterds (2009), The King's Speech (2010), and The Artist (2011).
Warner Bros.
Argo (2012)
d. Ben Affleck (un-nominated for Best Director)
Awards: 3
Nominations: 7
CIA agents in the Middle East in the 1970s team up with filmmakers to create a fake movie production to help free embassy workers (during the Iran hostage crisis).
- the most-recent film to win Best Picture without being nominated for Best Director
- the last film to win Best Picture without a director nomination was Bruce Beresford's Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and the previous victors before that were Wings (1927/28) and Grand Hotel (1931/32).
- a possible sympathy vote and backlash in...
