Un­for­tu­nately, this year’s Best Pic­ture fa­vorite The Artist is such an ex­er­cise in pa­tience. The tech­ni­cal mas­tery of the film is un­doubt­edly im­pres­sive, boast­ing the same as­pect ratio as films of the silent era, an au­then­tic and pro­pelling score by Lu­dovic Bource and breath­tak­ing black-and-white cin­e­matog­ra­phy. I spent most of the be­gin­ning won­der­ing how cin­e­matog­ra­pher Guil­lame Schiff­man cre­ated all those ex­pres­sion­is­tic shad­ows. It also con­tains a lot of nice touches, such as evolv­ing cam­era move­ment as the movie tra­verses a five-year pe­riod in cin­ema. But after the nov­elty wore off, the film proved it­self bor­ing and, ul­ti­mately, mean­ing­less.

It’s not hard to imag­ine why The Artist has be­come such a fa­vorite amongst Acad­emy vot­ers (which the LA Times re­cently un­cov­ered as a pri­mar­ily white male de­mo­graphic, un­sur­pris­ingly and crit­ics. In an age in which box of­fice rev­enues are sink­ing (2011 at­ten­dance was at its low­est since 1992) and 3-D films are threat­en­ing the tra­di­tional cin­ema ex­pe­ri­ence, this re­turn to a pi­o­neer­ing cin­ema for­mat cham­pi­ons old-school Hol­ly­wood. If it wins Best Pic­ture, The Artist will be the first silent film to be awarded the Oscar in 80 years. Boosted by awards pow­er­house stu­dio The We­in­stein Co., the film’s pop­u­lar­ity shows Hol­ly­wood self-con­grat­u­la­tion at its worst.

But once you study its story of the Hol­ly­wood tran­si­tion to sound, The Artist fun­da­men­tally lacks emo­tional or the­matic sub­stance. The script just doesn’t give the char­ac­ters enough au­then­tic­ity to do credit to the tech­ni­cal prowess. As a silent star that re­fuses to par­take in talkies and con­se­quently ruins him­self, George Valentin (an un­de­ni­ably charm­ing Jean Du­jardin of OSS 117 fame) only de­picts a stereo­typ­i­cally self-ob­sessed actor. In the mean­time, ac­tress up­start Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) flour­ishes in sound films while prov­ing that her only defin­ing at­tribute is, well, pep­pi­ness. There’s a dra­matic mise-en-scène of George de­scend­ing a stu­dio stair­case as Peppy as­cends — yes, the the­matic el­e­ments are all very sub­tle.

Due to the lack of emo­tional in­vest­ment in the char­ac­ters, when the script at­tempts to take the story into dark places, the viewer can’t take it se­ri­ously. In one piv­otal se­quence, the film in­serts a song from Bernard Her­rmann’s score for Al­fred Hitch­cock’s Ver­tigo (1958). This choice has been under fire ever since Ver­tigo star Kim Novak dra­mat­i­cally protested the bor­row­ing of “Scène d’Amour”.

While I ob­vi­ously wouldn’t go so far as to term it as she did, I agree it was a poor de­ci­sion. In ad­di­tion to the fact that the song is anachro­nis­ti­cally in­serted and the­mat­i­cally un­con­nected to the ac­com­pa­ny­ing scene, a viewer fa­mil­iar with ar­guably the most com­pli­cated of all Hitch­cock’s films will au­to­mat­i­cally per­ceive just how fluffy The Artist re­ally is un­der­neath its en­thu­si­as­tic ex­te­rior. I, for one, spent the rest of the film think­ing how I would much rather be watch­ing Ver­tigo.

Ver­tigo trailer:

So when The Artist wins Best Pic­ture as movie news sources have in­di­cated, don’t go out and rent it just be­cause it won. In­stead, watch a silent clas­sic like The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari(1920), Me­trop­o­lis (1927), Bat­tle­ship Potemkin (1925) or City Lights (1931). To this day, these films are still as­ton­ish­ingly more en­ter­tain­ing than The Artist. Or go watch a wor­thy Best Pic­ture nom­i­nee that re­flects this year in all its depth and con­vo­lu­tion. I sug­gest Tree of Life or Mon­ey­ball.