Tag Archives: Academy Awards

An Oscar for Flow: The dialogue-free animation of Gints Zilbalodis

Last night, the fantasy adventure Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024) won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. This dialogue-free drama follows a cat, forced to travel far from home in unfamiliar company when an ecological disaster submerges the earth in flood waters.

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!

Gints Zilbalodis (@gintszilbalodis.bsky.social) 2025-03-03T07:50:57.922Z

At the start of the film it appears that the cat lives with a besotted artist who pays tribute to the feline with sculptures of diverse sizes. But even this ailurophile human has abandoned the home, and their pet. As the waters rise and rise, our formerly cosseted hero must learn to survive and make common cause with a ragtag crew comprising a capybara, a secretary bird, a dog and a ring-tailed lemur. Against the odds, the animals have to save themselves from a manmade catastrophe.

Continue reading An Oscar for Flow: The dialogue-free animation of Gints Zilbalodis

The Artist and Hugo clean up at the “silent Oscars”

An-Oscar-statue
It's Oscar!

Well, I think we can allow ourselves to enjoy the moment. Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist has become the first silent film to win the best picture Oscar since Wings. It also carried away best actor (for Jean Dujardin), best director, best score and best costumes. Martin Scorsese’s not-quite biopic of Georges Méliès, Hugo, was the other big story of the night, winning the same number of awards, including heavyweight gongs for cinematography and art direction as well as three technical awards: best sound mixing, best sound editing, visual effects. I’d like to think it doesn’t take anything away from Scorsese to suggest that his awards were also a tribute to Méliès himself, in recognition of his beautiful, magic films.

We all know that Hollywood loves films about the movies, and there are those who love silent film who don’t necessarily love these two films – but there is no doubt that last night was a triumphant one for fans of the silent era. Let’s not forget that the Buster Keaton-inspired The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore triumphed in the best animated short category too. And the 2012 Academy Awards capped a joyous year in which early cinema was talked about more than it had been for years.

Here’s a quick look back at how it was reported on Silent London:

The Artist is announced for Cannes

The Cannes critics fall for The Artist

The Hugo trailer lands

The Artist: London film festival review

Hugo: review

I meet Uggie, star of The Artist

The Artist triumphs at the Baftas

What to watch when you have watched The Artist