Nostalgia sells. The Artist’s triumph at the Oscars was a victory for the 1920s, but not for 2012. The film has received excessive praise for successfully managing to imitate the style of films made almost a hundred years ago. Great. Why is this something we admire? I love silent films and old Hollywood as much as the next person, but I doubt we’d give somebody a really great prize for succesfully knocking down a skyscraper and building Stonehenge 2. Which essentially is what The Artist is.

The technology and craft behind film has progressed so much in the decades that separate us from the silent era that it seems insane to revere Michael Hazanvicius for doing now what they could do then. I dislike The Artist because it’s reactionary and retrospective, and by winning so many awards it deflected attention from films which aren’t.

When Kim Novak attacked him for recycling Bernard Hermann’s score from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, arguing that the film ought to be able to ‘stand on its own’, Hazanavicius defended The Artist as a ‘love letter to cinema’. Quite. Hazanavicius describes his own film as fan-mail, as a homage and a tribute to older movies, devaluing any claim it may have to be artistically original. In terms of content, the Artist also offers nothing new. A love story and some melodramatic anguish over the transition from silent movies to talkies. This has  been done before – Singin’ in the Rain, Sunset Boulevard, and Veronika Voss... to name just a few. Other than this self-reflexive moping, we have a fairly trite romance and a cute dog. Nothing really that ground-breaking or exciting, and most reviews concerning The Artist can really be summarised to ‘Man, a silent film in 2012? Deep.’

And yet The Artist won Best Picture over The Tree of Life and Hugo, films that take advantage of what cinema can offer us now. 3D. Special effects. Sound. In The Artist George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) listens to Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo) talk (silently) about the expressive power of the voice, and the emotional engagement provided by the talkies, it amazes me that 95% percent of the audience seem to disagree with her.

The biggest problem I have with The Artist is that it doesn’t do anything new, and it doesn’t modernise the silent film. It’s easy to remake things, but its harder to change them and make them better. La Antena (2007), an Argentine silent film by Esteban Sapir, proves that the silent genre can move beyond nostalgia. It’s a different kind of film and it doesn’t belong to the 1920s. Characters speak in subtitles that float up into the air, or shatter in moments of emotional stress. In the same way, the dream scene in The Artist, where Valentin hears sound for the first time, is supremely clever and beautiful. Things like this explore the movement of style and form through time, and make a silent film interesting in the here and now.

I’m not saying the Artist is totally bad. It’s okay. It just didn’t deserve five awards.