The King's Speech
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.

The Artist
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 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).

Argo
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 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 support of un-nominated director Ben Affleck may have had some impact and possibly accounted for the Best Picture win.
• the last film to win Best Picture without winning the Oscar for Best Director was Crash (2005).
• Argo won numerous awards pre-Oscars, including AFI Movie of the Year, BAFTA's Best Film honors, Cesar Award's Best Foreign Film, Critics Choice Best Picture, the Golden Globes Best Motion Picture - Drama, and Producers Guild of America Best Picture, among others.
• to date, it ties Gigi (1958) for the Best Picture winner with the shortest title of 4 letters.
• the film's title referred to the name of the fake movie being filmed, and in Greek mythology, it was also the name of the ship sailed by Jason and his Argonauts to retrieve the Golden Fleece.
• at the time of the awards, Argo was only the fourth highest-grossing (domestic) film among the Best Picture nominees.