Angelina Jolie’s awkwardly exhibited right leg rapidly acquired its own Twitter handle, whose jokes were (at least in the moment) funnier than anything that actually happened inside the theater on Oscar night. Honestly, that sums it up. Was this worse than the James Franco-Anne Hathaway wannabe-hip debacle of last year? Perhaps not; almost nothing could be. But from Angie’s jambe droite — c’est pour toi, Jean Dujardin! — to Cameron Diaz and J.Lo’s derrières to Crystal’s quadruply warmed-over Borscht Belt gags to the fact that the best actor can’t speak English and nobody can pronounce the best director’s name, this was a monumentally awkward Oscar telecast. Most of the big moments felt weirdly off, and so did a lot of the little ones: Robert Downey Jr. trying to be funny and failing, the women from “Bridesmaids” likewise, Tom Hanks rocking a gray beard that made him look like a doubly-douchey guy who listens to jam-band music but works on Wall Street. It was the Off-scars. The Awk-scars.

Maybe the Squawk-scars. What in God’s name was that tinny, high-pitched, icepick-to-the-brain feedback noise that seemed to accompany all the live sounds from the stage? Was the sound-board being run by my ninth-grade drama teacher?  I didn’t think the Ellen De Generes commercials were all that funny or effective, necessarily — right now, writing at 2 a.m., I have no idea what she was advertising — but holy cats, that was professional-grade entertainment compared to the show.

No, I know — the Oscars are still a big event, and this year was no exception. But the event-ness of it had very little to do with the actual telecast aired by ABC, which possessed the strange quality of seeming devoid of content and yet taking forever. (The supporting actor and actress awards weren’t handed out until about 45 minutes into the show.) As usual, it had even less to do with the movies being honored, which most viewers probably hadn’t seen and didn’t care about. It’s been true for years that getting together with your friends to ooh-and-ah and crack jokes and then momentarily get swept away by it all has been at least half the fun of Oscar night. But in the age of social media, we’ve reached the point of all tail and no dog. The torrent of electronic commentary has expanded to fill the entire space, leaving the awards show as a Potemkin village that doesn’t even try to look solid, a pseudo-event that makes no pretense of meaning anything.

I had the feeling on more than one occasion that the show itself was an afterthought, a distraction from what seemed really important — reading the outraged or joyous or ridiculously funny things that friends and acquaintances and total strangers were saying about it. Sure, Twitter is an evanescent literary form, one vanishing thought at a time flowing out of the spigot and down the drain. But at least nobody on Twitter was trying to compel me to listen to Adam Sandler talk earnestly, in a black-and-white video clip, about truth and beauty. (Here’s a thought, Adam: Make a silent movie.) Nobody on Twitter is responsible for the fact that neither Angelina Jolie nor her gams can adequately read a Teleprompter, or the fact that Clooney’s “Descendants” co-star Shailene Woodley said “under-exaggerated” in an interview and nobody cared enough to edit it out so she wouldn’t look like an ass.

It was nearly impossible to find a viable online feed of the Oscar telecast this year, which may just be a by-product of the recent crackdown on illegal live streaming. But it also feels like a way of trying to pump up ratings, to turn back the clock to some year when Billy Crystal was famous and less pickled-looking, and generally cram the genie back into the bottle. At least the dude Dujardin plays in “The Artist” ultimately has no choice but to deal with the massive social and technological change that has transformed the movie industry. The Academy’s approach, to this point, appears to involve two things. First, pretending that there’s no problem with this fast-sinking awards show or the industry it represents, and that the audience is just as fascinated by movie-star glamour as ever. And second, producing a really lackluster and mediocre television program.

As far as the actual, y’know, Academy Awards, here’s my summary: Christopher Plummer, “A Separation,” and all those technical and design awards for “Hugo.” (And the big zero for “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.”) Those were the right prizes won for the right reasons. Oh, and I guess Octavia Spencer for “The Help,” although all the women in that category were terrific and there was no way to get it wrong. (Well, Crystal still managed to get it wrong, cracking that after seeing “The Help” he wanted to hug the first black woman he saw, “which in Beverly Hills is about a 45-minute drive.”) Even with Spencer and Plummer, there was more than a hint of Offscar-ness and Awkscar-ness. Both got standing ovations, which in the latter case could be justified as paying tribute to a life’s work, but jointly it all started to look like special circumstances. She’s black and he’s old, and isn’t it amazing of us to give major awards to people like that?

I have nothing against “The Artist,” which is a charming love letter to old Hollywood, executed with considerable craft. But in a year or two it’s going to look like an obvious fluke, the oddball film that Harvey Weinstein wizarded to five awards amid a weak field. Jean Dujardin is a delightful performer who pulled off an improbable feat, but I’m beginning to wonder whether he’ll ever be heard of again on this side of the pond. And for the second year in a row, after Tom Hooper of “The King’s Speech,” the directing Oscar goes to the least qualified of the five nominees. (Michel Hazanavicius — and by the way, the name is Lithuanian — over Woody Allen, Terrence Malick, Alexander Payne and Martin Scorsese. Please.) I’m sure the French nation is delirious right now, but eventually a moment of clarity will arrive: All the films we’ve made since the days of the Lumière brothers, and this one conquers Hollywood?

“The Artist’s” big awards were 100 percent expected, whereas we’d all talked ourselves into thinking that Meryl Streep wouldn’t win best actress for “The Iron Lady.” I definitely wanted to see and hear the crackerjack speech Viola Davis would have delivered, and there’s no point consoling ourselves with “oh, she’ll get her chance,” because we all know she probably won’t. As for Streep, yeah, on merit she absolutely deserves it, and she had a real moment up there, a moment of being tremendously moved and maybe something else too. Pissed, possibly? Deflated? Halfway wishing that she weren’t such a trouper, and had just stayed home like Woody Allen? She said herself that she knows she’ll never be on that stage again; she was turning a page in her life and in movie history. She wins her first Oscar in 28 years, and quite possibly her last, and it’s an Awk-scar.

In a striking kickoff to the two actresses’ back-and-forth awards-season competition, Davis paid a warm tribute to the woman she described as an idol, a mentor and a friend. She spoke openly about the loneliness of being an ambitious African-American actress with very few role models to follow, who had seen talented forerunners like Cicely Tyson and Dorothy Dandridge essentially kicked to the curb by Hollywood. She hadn’t been looking for a Caucasian role model, she said, but the craft and range of Streep’s work on stage and screen had always impressed her, and when they worked together on the 2008 film “Doubt” (for which both were Oscar-nominated) they became good friends. Streep’s example had demonstrated a fearlessness and generosity, Davis told us, that had opened new pathways in her personal and professional life.

Streep then took the stage to deliver a dry comic monologue in which she claimed — incorrectly, I believe — that only a minority of the critics in the room had voted for her. (I’m a member of the group, and I don’t understand its voting procedures, but Critics Circle chair John Anderson has said that Streep won a first-ballot majority.) But before she moved on to that, Streep thanked Davis for her introduction: “How remarkable, and how generous, for you to do that. This is your year.”

That was a heck of a lot of high-class dames in less than five minutes, and we were all appropriately dazzled. But looking back on that event, and Davis’ remarkable speech, I think that Meryl Streep saw what was coming more clearly than the rest of us did. (Furthermore, I think she’s 100 percent fine with it.) At that moment, she looked like the prohibitive favorite to win the best actress Oscar, both because she had given a dominating performance as a major historical figure in a big holiday-season movie, and also because she has been nominated an unbelievable 13 times since her last win (for “Sophie’s Choice,” in 1983) and at age 62 is probably close to the end of her leading-lady career. She went on from the New York critics’ award to win several other prominent critics’ groups, along with the BAFTA Award and the Golden Globe. A shoo-in, right?

Not exactly. Of course I could be proven wrong, but along with virtually everybody else who pays attention to this circus, I’m betting that Viola Davis ends up clutching one of those little gold statues on Sunday night — as much because everybody watching wants to hear her acceptance speech as because of anything she did on-screen in “The Help.” People talk about all the backstage hoodoo that goes into an Oscar campaign, and Harvey Weinstein’s admittedly amazing powers to bend the minds of Academy voters to his will. But I’m not sure we’ve ever seen an actor go out and claim an Oscar during the campaign in quite the forthright and dramatic way that Davis has.

Davis evidently decided that this was her opportunity, after a long career of stage roles and oddball supporting parts and runs on “United States of Tara” and “Law & Order: SVU,” to come out with guns blazing and let the world know who she was and what she thought. It may have been a calculated decision on some level, but she’s a ferocious, intelligent and independent-minded woman as well as an outstanding actor, and there’s nothing strategic about that. She has spoken directly about all the racial and social discomfort caused by “The Help,” and about the yearning for positive role models that sometimes limits the choices of African-American artists.

Most notably, when PBS talk-show host Tavis Smiley told Davis and costar Octavia Spencer (who is also likely to win, for best supporting actress) that he felt ambivalent about the prospect of them winning Academy Awards for playing servants, six decades after Hattie McDaniel, Davis delivered a dressing-down that violated the happy-friendly norms of chat TV. “That very mind-set that you have and that a lot of African-Americans have is absolutely destroying the black artist,” she told Smiley. “The black artist cannot live in a place — in a revisionist place. A black artist can only tell the truth about humanity, and humanity is messy, people are messy.” Smiley was clearly startled — but he was standing on the track in front of the Viola Davis Oscar Express. One can only pity the fool.

Davis has talked openly, but without a hint of self-pity, about the difficulties of being a black actress in an industry that still relies heavily on caricature and stereotype, and even about being a dark-skinned black actress at a time when, as she recently put it, “Halle Berry is having a hard time.” After she brought this up, during a Newsweek panel discussion featuring various Oscar candidates, Charlize Theron jumped in to assure Davis she was “hot as shit,” which was a nice thing to say and all but (as many commentators have observed) massively misses the point. Win or lose at this year’s Oscars, Davis won’t get offered Theron’s wide-ranging dramatic roles, from serial killer to narcissistic sexpot, and won’t get the Vogue covers or Dior endorsement deals either. If it’s any consolation — and it probably is — Theron’s “Young Adult” was a dud, and she was not nominated this year.

As far-fetched as this seems now, when Davis delivered that Manhattan introduction for Streep, she was a long way from being a for-sure nominee herself. She had appeared in a pulpy, controversial hit that had opened well before Oscar season and was aimed 100 percent at female audiences (two doses of poison for the guy-centric Academy), a movie that made a lot of money and ignited a sharply polarized debate on the history of race in America. That’s at least three strikes, maybe four — and then there was the question of whether Aibileen Clark, Davis’ character in “The Help,” even qualified as a leading role. Emma Stone’s crusading white journalist, Skeeter Phelan, is clearly the protagonist, and Aibileen is pretty much the stoical, even-tempered Robin to Skeeter’s hotheaded Batman. On the other hand, while Stone and Spencer and Jessica Chastain and Bryce Dallas Howard and all the other women in the movie chew up the scenery (and often enjoyably so), Davis delivers a performance of tremendous dignity and quiet, almost stillness. Amid all the histrionics and violence and poop-eating, Aibileen is like a Zen monk contemplating the essential emptiness of everything. She knows a great deal more than she says, and Davis communicates that nonverbally, through her carriage, her measured movements, the long pauses before she speaks.

Everything the Academy ever does can, and probably should, be viewed through a cynical lens. Nominating Davis for best actress — along with the supporting nods for Chastain and Spencer — was a way of honoring “The Help” as one of the year’s cultural touchstones while navigating around the racial controversy sparked by the film’s release. The Oscar-season script, a few weeks ago, looked something like this: African-American viewers got a rooting interest in the best actress campaign (while still being permitted, like Tavis Smiley, to deplore “The Help” on various levels), Davis got a major notch in her career belt, and Streep would go on to collect a career-spanning Oscar after a tour de force performance and many years as a bridesmaid.

Instead, Viola Davis has seized the opportunity. Not just the opportunity to stage an unlikely upset and win an Oscar, although she’s probably done that. More important, she has seized the chance to remind us that she is an immensely underutilized and underappreciated actress and one of the most outspoken free thinkers in the closed-mouthed, cliché-spouting world of Hollywood stardom. Should she be playing bigger and better parts than Aibileen Clark? Of course. Was that really the best screen acting performance of the year? Almost certainly not. But the Oscar is always about much more than that, like it or not, and someone with Meryl Streep’s social conscience and sense of drama understands that well. We’ll likely never know what Streep may have told her friend in private, but what she said in public was enough: “This is your year.” She was right.

Streep is so powerful as Margaret Thatcher in director Phyllida Lloyd’s “The Iron Lady” that she made me believe I understood the legendary and ferocious former British prime minister much better than I had before. That may be an illusion, of course; Streep does not know Thatcher personally, and neither do you or I. But it’s really all you can ask from an actor playing a historical personage, especially one whose significance is so immense and whose legacy is so disputed. This Maggie Thatcher — played by Streep as the mature politician and by Alexandra Roach as the young Maggie Roberts, a grocer’s daughter from Lincolnshire — is in many ways a sympathetic and admirable character, a woman of indomitable will, enormous ambition and profound personal convictions. Those qualities are also shown as driving her to sociopathic extremes, and to a megalomaniacal conception of herself as embodying all the noblest British qualities and single-handedly saving the British nation from socialist doom.

I find that a highly plausible interpretation of Thatcher as an individual, who had to overcome both the inherent sexism of British politics and society and also the ingrained snobbishness of her beloved Conservative Party. (Tory politicians customarily came from the landed gentry and the titans of industry, not the lower-middle shopkeeping bourgeoisie.) She could be as dismissive of any womanly talk about emotions and feelings as she was with pinko abstractions like “society” (although her assertion that there is no such thing does not appear in Abi Morgan’s screenplay). The film’s present tense is around 2009, when the widowed Baroness Thatcher, in her mid-80s, is struggling with senile dementia but has lost none of her flinty intelligence. When some faintly patronizing younger woman comes down to Thatcher’s level, schoolteacher-style, and thanks her for creating opportunities for other women, Maggie does not appear interested in the gender-studies claptrap. “It used to be about trying to do something,” she says disdainfully.

If I enjoyed “The Iron Lady” more than Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar,” that’s not to say it’s necessarily a better film. It’s largely about how much more charismatic and enjoyable Streep is than the woefully miscast Leonardo DiCaprio. Both pictures adhere closely to standard biopic formula, turning contentious historical figures into the subjects of routine domestic melodrama while playing a highlight reel of major 20th-century events in the background: strikes, riots, bombings, hunger strikes, the Berlin Wall. It’s massively ironic that Streep’s Thatcher tells another interlocutor that no one seems to care about ideas anymore, since “The Iron Lady” is entirely bereft of them.

Oh, we get that young Maggie Roberts inherited her belief in individual effort and limited government from her upstanding dad — who was a local politician for the centrist Liberal Party, in its waning years — but no mention is made, for instance, of her encounter with Friedrich von Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” as a 20-year-old Oxford student, which marked her conversion to what was then the Tory far right. No politician, including Ronald Reagan, has ever gone further than Thatcher did in trying to implement Hayek’s free-market ideology (and that of his principal disciple, Milton Friedman) on a grand scale. I can understand why Lloyd and Morgan concluded that fundamental questions of economic theory didn’t belong in a movie for general audiences, but I’d like to believe that if Lady Thatcher is sufficiently compos mentis to watch it, she will snort in derision at its sentimental narrative mode: There she is as a girl, dewy-eyed and dish-scrubbing, as her pa extols the British spirit; there she is as elected leader of the United Kingdom, telling the miners’ unions to stuff it: “The medicine is painful, but the patient requires it!”

One of the oddities of Morgan’s screenplay lies in the fact that Thatcher is a living person who still owns the right to her own public utterances, so that everything we see in the movie is a paraphrase rather than a direct quote. But that’s not nearly as strange as the fact that so much of “The Iron Lady” consists of the present-day Thatcher’s extended conversations with her husband Denis (Jim Broadbent), who died in 2003. It’s not unusual for elderly people to believe, or half-believe, that deceased spouses are still with them, of course, and such may be the case with Thatcher. But Broadbent’s semi-belligerent, semi-affectionate Denis is too obviously a writer’s gimmick, a key to unlock Thatcher’s memories and a symbol of the way she conflates past and present.

“The Iron Lady” begins with a delicious scene of the aged Thatcher buying milk at a corner grocery, a completely unnoticed old lady surrounded by the new world she made (fast-talking, suit-wearing jerks attached to their cellphones) and the new world she could not resist (a London street awash in bhangra music and South Asian comestibles). Most of what follows is straightforward, brightly photographed TV drama in the BBC style, both mildly entertaining and somewhat interesting to those who remember that era. There’s John Sessions as the early-’70s prime minister Edward Heath, whose compromises with the left persuaded Thatcher to skew ever more sharply in the other direction; and Nicholas Farrell as Thatcher’s mentor Airey Neave, whose assassination by the IRA hardened her on the Irish question. Anthony Head plays the shuffling, stammering Geoffrey Howe, and Richard E. Grant plays the suave Michael Heseltine, two influential Tories who would eventually betray Thatcher, ending her political career. If you’re really a Brit-politics wonk, you’ll be glad to see Michael Pennington as the beloved Labour leader Michael Foot, who would lead the left-wing opposition to its 1983 Armageddon.

I suppose what you’ll get from “The Iron Lady” is the sense that Thatcher was a female pioneer who relished a fight, made tough decisions she thought would return Britain to prosperity, and was hated by many people. (We repeatedly see a lazy synecdoche: Thatcher’s limo pushing through a crowd, with some angry working-class yob with bad hair pounding on her window.) That’s fine as far as it goes, but listen: Speaking as someone who despises almost every aspect of the Thatcherite social-economic consensus that has defined the capitalist world for 30 years, and almost every aspect of Thatcher’s actual policies, she deserves more than this. Streep has captured Thatcher wonderfully as a plausible human being, but “The Iron Lady” explains nothing about her thoroughgoing rejection of Britain’s postwar social-democratic consensus, or about the way she helped create a new class of the Anglo-American super-rich, or about her immense influence on the Cold War as a pragmatic intellectual influence on the Reagan administration. (She saw, much earlier than the Americans did, that Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascendancy meant the end of old-line communism.)

Maggie Thatcher contains multitudes; she is rife with contradictions you can barely glimpse in this modestly affecting movie. American conservatives who profess to worship her probably don’t know that she was pro-choice and pro-gay rights (although she was against the liberalization of divorce). She was one of the least popular prime ministers in British history yet was elected three times, partly thanks to the hopeless divisions within the Labour Party and partly because British elections are, at least arguably, less dominated by questions of personality. (As Lloyd and Morgan make clear, if she hadn’t fought and won the Falklands war in 1982, Thatcher’s premiership might easily have ended after three or four years.) As a starting point for Meryl Streep’s 17th Oscar nomination — and perhaps her third win — “The Iron Lady” is exemplary. As a starter course in Thatcher studies and a post-”King’s Speech,” Brit-history melodrama, it’s only barely acceptable.

“The Iron Lady” opens Dec. 30 in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to begin Jan. 13.

To watch more, visit tag

The trailer scene refers to the political makeover Thatcher underwent at the hands of image advisor Gordon Reece in the run-up to her election as Prime Minister. Before she was counseled to avoid wearing conspicuous hats in public, Thatcher frequently sported over-the-top, even candy-like creations; you can hear a 1971 BBC radio broadcast about the stereotypes associated with “Tory Ladies” and their hats — in which Thatcher herself is featured — here.

“Things are changing now,” Streep told the Barnard graduates. “And it’s in your generation that we’re seeing this. Men are adapting. They are adapting consciously and also without realizing it for the better of the whole group. They are changing their deepest prejudices to accept and to regard as normal things that their fathers would have found very very difficult and that their grandfathers would have abhorred.”

Amen. And, as Streep also joked in the middle of this observation: “‘Bout time.”

But if, too much of the time, I find Streep predictably mannered and actressy, there are also times when I fully succumb to adoring her, when all my conflicted and annoyed feelings about her are temporarily erased. I felt that way about her performance, as one-half of a sister-sister singing duo (opposite Lily Tomlin), in Robert Altman’s final film, “A Prairie Home Companion.” And I feel that way about her rendering of Julia Child in Nora Ephron’s “Julie & Julia,” which is my favorite of the Oscar-nominated actresses’ performances this year.

It’s easy to think you know a person when you’ve seen her often on TV, particularly if it’s someone you grew up watching. In “Julie & Julia,” Streep builds on that familiarity: In some ways I think her performance riffs on the idea that we don’t know the real Julia Child, even if we think we do. Streep creates her version of Julia Child from a magpie’s collection of bits and bobs: She captures Child’s trilling vocal mannerisms and her habit of resting her hands on her hips like a jolly fishwife, which are so familiar from Child’s TV appearances over the years. She captures Child’s easygoing affection for her husband, Paul (here played, beautifully, by Stanley Tucci, who was clearly nominated this year for the wrong role), in a manner that mirrors the way Child herself wrote about their marriage in her wonderful posthumously published 2006 memoir, “My Life in France.” And, most thrilling of all, she slips right into the embrace of Child’s big-gal sense of humor. When Streep re-creates the famous broadcast in which Child nearly flipped an omelet right out of the pan, she pauses awkwardly at the wonder of her own clumsiness, and then goes on to explain the mishap with the sensible approach of a good-natured scientist: In that split-second when the omelet is supposed to take momentary flight, she just didn’t have the courage of her convictions. But, she assures her audience, such a mishap is hardly the end of the world: “You can just sort of — put it together,” she says, nudging some stray bits of broken omelet back into the pan. Child gave her audience permission to be imperfect, a quality Streep channels beautifully.

In my review of “Julie & Julia,” I wrote, “Streep isn’t playing Julia Child here, but something both more elusive and more truthful — she’s playing our idea of Julia Child.” And in some ways, it may be harder to play the idea than the person. That’s partly because Child is so easy to impersonate. (Exhibit A is Dan Ackroyd’s “SNL” “Save the liver!” skit.) But Streep goes beyond impersonation into a realm of pure affection and openheartedness. I don’t think you can successfully play Julia Child — and you certainly can’t play the idea of Julia Child — just by learning a specific accent or physical mannerism. Streep gives shape and dimension to that abstract quality we call joy. When she tucks into a piece of fish sautéed in butter, the smile that lights up her face is one of pure, sensuous pleasure; when she proves, after much practice, that she can chop an onion faster and more meticulously than her snooty male cooking-school compatriots, she radiates pride along with just a touch of understandably human “I showed you guys, didn’t I?” self-satisfaction.

Streep also has a great deal of fun with the role’s physicality. Child was a tall, strapping woman who, in the late ’40s, found herself living with her new husband in France, the land of tiny girls in ballet slippers. In showing that contrast, Streep is helped along here by clever production design: At one point Child stretches out on a French bed, her big American feet dangling off the end. But Streep also makes Child’s stature a metaphor for her outsize capacity for delight. Her Julia strides through Paris with a sense of wonder: Being a giantess, as well as a gleeful and enthusiastic mangler of Français, makes her an outsider. But it also gives her license to explore and discover, to appreciate aloud things that blasé Parisians might take for granted, and she does so without hesitating or second-guessing. Streep’s performance in “Julie & Julia” is among the best she’s ever given, a turn so flirtatious and light that some might be tempted to dismiss it as being less than serious. But Streep — who is wonderful, and underrated, as a comic actress — may be at her best when she’s freed from the constraints of proving how serious and worthy she is. She doesn’t earn our love and admiration in “Julie & Julia.” She instead shapes a character we find ourselves falling in love with, just as Julia herself found the second love of her life — after Paul — in the nation and the food of France.