Oscars: Every Best Picture Nominee Of The 2010s - Ranked Worst To Best

8. The Artist

You've got to admire anyone with the temerity to set out to make a silent, black and white movie in 2011 about the advent of the talkies that doesn't include the safety net of being a biopic or an animation or has some secondary hook. So confused were some audiences by that audacity that they simply rejected it, ignoring the fact that The Artist was what it was and storming out of the cinema bemoaning the lack of colour and words. This was not a film made for the casual crowd of Gateshead cineplexes, that's for sure.

And far beyond the "gimmick" of its format, The Artist is exactly what the Academy loves - a love letter to cinema with a chaser of genuine emotional goodness. Buoyed by the performance of Jean Dujardin, who spends the whole film looking like he's literally tumbled out of the 1920s and the zippy charm of Bérénice Bejo, it's also testament to no frills film-making and a lesson in how to do a hell of a lot with very little.

At the end of the day, it's a love story with a compelling riches to rags plot and some of the most inventive, infectious sequences in any film outside of the golden age before technology took over and sucked away just a little of the pure magic. If you've not seen it, see it. It'll change everything.

Can I really recommend it that much? With pleasure.

SG