For many, the fact that The Artist’s Michel Hazanavicius recently triumphed over Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris) and Martin Scorsese (Hugo) at the Directors Guild Awards officially locked in its frontrunner status in the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars race. But certain naysayers wonder if a silent film that has only made $12 million in ticket sales can pull off a win.
“We can always relate to the story of a man who is up and then falls and then gets replaced by new technology,” Harvey Weinstein recently told Mike Fleming at Deadline. “It’s how I feel every day; I still can’t even operate my Blackberry and my kids laugh at me. This story deals with what’s happening to all of us, facing a world that is changing too fast, as his world is changing too fast. And it’s deeply emotional and a love story, and you feel fabulous at the end of it. Great stories never go away.”
And as for it being a silent film? While he admits that it has made it “an incredibly difficult movie to market,” Weinstein actually sees it as a selling point: “I think you get more out of this movie without dialogue… Maureen Dowd said when you see the movie and then you walk out, that all of a sudden sounds feel different. I had that experience. I walked out of the rough cut when I was in Paris and heard the sounds of the cars, the traffic. For the first time in my life I appreciated the street sounds.”