"The King's Speech" was crowned best picture Sunday at an Academy Awards ceremony as precise as a state coronation
"The King's Speech" was crowned best picture Sunday at an Academy Awards ceremony as precise as a state coronation, the monarchy drama leading as expected with four Oscars and predictable favorites claiming acting honors.
Colin Firth as stammering British ruler George VI in "The King's Speech" earned the best-actor prize, while Natalie Portman won best actress as a delusional ballerina in "Black Swan."
The boxing drama "The Fighter" claimed both supporting-acting honors, for Christian Bale as a boxer-turned-drug-abuser and Melissa Leo as a boxing clan's domineering matriarch.
"The King's Speech" also won the directing prize for Tom Hooper and the original-screenplay Oscar for David Seidler, a boyhood stutterer himself.
"I have a feeling my career's just peaked," Firth said. "I'm afraid I have to warn you that I'm experiencing stirrings somewhere in the upper abdominals which are threatening to form themselves into dance moves."
Among those Portman beat was Annette Bening for "The Kids Are All Right." Bening now has lost all four times she's been nominated.
"Thank you so much. This is insane, and I truly, sincerely wish that the prize tonight was to get to work with my fellow nominees. I'm so in awe of you," Portman said.
Network censors bleeped Leo for dropping the F-word during her speech. Backstage, she jokingly conceded it was "probably a very inappropriate place to use that particular word."
"Those words, I apologize to anyone that they offend. There is a great deal of the English language that is in my vernacular," Leo said.
Read More:"The King's Speech" was crowned best picture Sunday at an Academy Awards ceremony as precise as a state coronation
