Year:  2011
Genre:  Drama, Comedy, Romance, Silent
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, John Goodman, Penelope Ann Miller, James Cromwell, Missi Pyle
Director:  Michel Hazanavicius
Run time:  100 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     I think that if the Oscars are ever going to retire, now is the time.  The Artist has given the Oscars the perfect out.  The movie awards are now perfectly bookended.  The silent movie Wings, a vapid but expensive action flick, won the first ever Best Picture Oscar in 1927.  The second silent movie to win Best Picture – The Artist, a deep and powerful low-budget movie about the end of the silent film era.

     In the 84 years of the Oscars, we’ve gone from a German actor, Emil Jannings, winning Best Actor, to France’s Jean Dujardin winning this year for The Artist.  We’ve gone from Americans of Austrian Hungarian and Russian descent to a French Lithuanian (Michel Hazanavicius) as Best Director, when The Artist took that one as well.

     So now, the Oscars have covered pretty much every country in the world, they’ve gone from silent films to talkies and back to silent films, they still love their black and white movies, and they still love artsy dramatic indie romance movies far more than blockbusters.

     And so I suggest to the Academy that NOW is the time to shut it down.  Before the Oscars become the Grammys.  Before the box office results of a movie makes it an automatic contender. Before The Avengers and The Hunger Games and the new Transformers battle it out for Best Picture the way Adele and Usher and Beyonce do every year for Best Album.  The Artist, on DVD and Blu-Ray June 26^th from Alliance Films, is not the best movie ever to win an Oscar. But it’s the best opportunity for the whole ceremony to walk away while it’s still at the top of its game.