'The Artist' schools Hollywood (with pleasure)

The mostly silent French film that was the only big 2011 movie to be filmed entirely in Los Angeles cleaned up tonight at the Oscars. "The Artist" won best picture, best director for Michael Hazanavicius, best actor for Jean Dujardin, costume design for Mark Bridges and original score for Ludovic Bource. "Hugo" also won five awards. Meryl Streep ("The Iron Lady") won the best actress award, Christopher Plummer ("Beginners") won best supporting actor and Octavia Spencer ("The Help") won best supporting actress.

Billy Crystal did an OK job as the host, though the bar mitzvah jokes grow more moldy with every passing decade. The opening homage to the nominated best pictures was mostly pretty good, and Crystal even reprised his Sammy Davis character in the bit about "Midnight in Paris" (with Justin Bieber.) Screenwriters Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, who won for "The Descendants," nicely parodied Angelina Jolie's odd bare-thighed pose when they got to the stage. And the memoriam section got some added drama this year with Crystal's personal tribute to former Oscars show producers Gil Cates and Laura Ziskind, new graphical treatment and musical accompaniment by Esperanza Spalding and the Southern California Children's Chorus.

Outside on the red carpet beforehand, Sacha Baron Cohen showed up in costume as a character from an upcoming film. He appeared to fluster E!'s Ryan Seacrest by dumping powder on Seacrest's black tuxedo during a live on-camera gag. But E! promptly put the clip on YouTube and the Oscars put Cohen on their website, so how pissed could they be.

And who did LA Times reporter Sam Quinones tick off with this tweet: "not sure any job in journalism is more demeaning than cvrng celebs as they walk arnd w/ nice (or not) clothes #oscars #redcarpet"