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).