"The Artist" won Best Picture honors, George Clooney and Viola Davis nabbed Best Actor and Actress awards and "The Help" won three acting awards as the 2012 Critics' Choice Movie Awards were broadcast live on VH1 from the Hollywood Palladium.
Comedians Paul Scheer and Rob Huebel hosted the festivities, which they called "the ninth most exciting night in Hollywood." The movie about movies -- "The Artist" -- won top honors in the picture and director categories, while "The Help" took CCMA for Best Actress (Davis), Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer) and Best Acting Ensemble.
That latter film also won an onstage shout-out from George Clooney, who said, "It seems like 'The Help' table is having the most fun" when he took the stage to present an award.
Christopher Plummer won the Supporting Actor award for "Beginners," and said "being honored by the critics is like being on a three-week binge with the enemy ... but I'm cool with it."
Although "The Help" won three awards and "The Artist" won four, the voters spread the wealth around. Overall, the 24 categories resulted in awards to 19 different films. One category, cinematography, resulted in a tie between "The Tree of Life" and "War Horse."
Another sign of how open the field was: the night's two top winners both lost in the writing categories to films that won no other awards. "The Artist" was beaten in the Original Screenplay category by Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," while "The Help" lost to "Moneyball" in the Adapted Screenplay race.
Thomas Horn from "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," meanwhile, was named Best Young Actor/Actress, even though another nominee in his category, Shailene Woodley for "The Descendants," had received a (non-age-dependent) Supporting Actress nomination. And "Bridesmaids," a comedy that did not receive a screenplay nomination, beat "Midnight in Paris" as Best Comedy, despite the fact that the latter film won the screenplay award.
In other awards, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2" won for both makeup and sound, while "The Muppets" did not split its vote by having three of the five nominees in the Best Song category. The film's music supervisor, Flight of the Conchords singer-songwriter Bret McKenzie, won for "Life's a Happy Song."
"Rango" was named Best Animated Film, "A Separation" took the Foreign-Language Film prize, and Martin Scorsese's two-part HBO documentary "George Harrison: Living in the Material World" was named Best Documentary.
Scorsese was also given an honorary award, the Music + Film Award, for the way he has used music in his films. Leonardo DiCaprio and Olivia Harrison (the widow of Harrison) presented the award to Scorsese after Bob Dylan performed a slow, emphatic version of his mid-'80s song "Blind Willie McTell."
"The Artist" director Michel Hazanavicius was named Best Director shortly after the Scorsese presentation, and began his speech by saying that he didn't know what the phrase "best director" meant.
