LOS ANGELES — The King’s Speech was crowned best picture Sunday at an Academy Awards ceremony as precise as a state coronation, the monarchy drama leading as expected with four Oscars and predictable favorites claiming acting honors.
Colin Firth as stammering British ruler George VI in The King’s Speech earned the best-actor prize, while Natalie Portman won best actress as a delusional ballerina in Black Swan.
The boxing drama The Fighter claimed both supporting-acting honors, for Christian Bale as a boxer-turneddrug-abuser and Melissa Leo as a boxing clan’s domineering matriarch.
The King’s Speech also won the directing prize for Tom Hooper and the original screenplay Oscar for David Seidler, a boyhood stutterer himself.
“I have a feeling my career’s just peaked,” Firth said. “I’m afraid I have to warn you that I’m experiencing stirrings somewhere in the upper abdominals which are threatening to form themselves into dance moves.”
Among those Portman beat was Annette Bening for The Kids Are All Right. Bening now has lost all four times she’s been nominated.
“Thank you so much. This is insane, and I truly, sincerely wish that the prize tonight was to get to work with my fellow nominees. I’m so in awe of you,” Portman said.
Network censors bleeped Leo for cursing during her speech. Backstage, she jokingly conceded it was “probably a very inappropriate place to use that particular word.”
“Those words, I apologize to anyone that they offend. There is a great deal of the English language that is in my vernacular,” Leo said.
Bale joked that he was keeping his language clean. “I’m not going to drop the F-bomb like she did,” he said. “I’ve done that plenty of times before.”
http://www.arkansas…">Hollywood honors best in film
Hooper, a relative bigscreen newcomer best known for classy TV drama, took the industry’s top filmmaking prize over Hollywood veteran David Fincher, who had been a strong prospect for his Facebook drama The SocialNetwork.
“Thank you to my wonderful actors, the triangle of man love which is Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and me. I’m only here because of you guys,” Hooper said, referring to his film’s male stars.
The screenplay win capped a lifelong dream for The King’s Speech writer Seidler, a boyhood stutterer born in London in 1937, a year after George took the throne. Seidler, who overcame his own stutter at age 16, had long vowed to oneday write about the monarch whose fortitude set an example for him in childhood.
The Oscar for adapted screenplay went to Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network, a chronicle of the birth of Facebook based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires. The Social Network also won for musical score for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and for film editing.
The sci-fi blockbuster Inception, which came in with eight nominations, tied with The King’s Speech with four Oscars, all in technical categories: visual effects, cinematography, sound editing and sound mixing.
Inside Job, an exploration of the 2008 economic meltdown, won for best documentary, which proved an uncommonly lively category this time.
The Oscar buildup featured speculation about whether Banksy, a mystery man of the street-art world, might show up for his awards entry, Exit Through the Gift Shop. If he was at the Oscars, he did not declare himself.
Toy Story 3, last year’s top grossing release and a contender for best picture, won the fourth-straight animated feature Oscar for Disney’s Pixar Animation unit. Pixar has produced six of the 10 Oscar recipients for animation since the category was added, including Finding Nemo, WALLE and last year’s winner, Up.
The Oscar for foreign-language film went to Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier’s In a Better World, a saga of two broken families that centerson two teenage boys struggling with violence at school and plotting revenge.
The Lewis Carroll update Alice in Wonderland won the first prize of the night, claiming the art direction Oscar. It also won for costume design.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 02/28/2011