83rd Academy Awards

Tom Hooper, Best Director winner

Colin Firth, Best Actor winner

Natalie Portman, Best Actress winner

Christian Bale, Best Supporting Actor winner

Melissa Leo, Best Supporting Actress winner

Aaron Sorkin, Best Adapted Screenplay winner

Lee Unkrich, Best Animated Feature winner

Susanne Bier, Best Foreign Language Film winner

Charles Ferguson, Best Documentary Feature co-winner

Randy Newman, Best Original Song winner

Rick Baker, Best Makeup co-winner

Winners[26] are listed first, highlighted in boldface, and indicated with a double-dagger ().

The Academy held its Second Annual Governors Awards ceremony on November 13, 2010, during which the following awards were presented.[27][28][29]

• Kevin Brownlow — For the wise and devoted chronicling of the cinematic parade.
• Jean-Luc Godard — For passion. For confrontation. For a new kind of cinema.
• Eli Wallach — For a lifetime's worth of indelible screen characters.

• Francis Ford Coppola

For the second consecutive year, the field of major nominees included at least one blockbuster at the American and Canadian box offices. However, only three of the nominees had grossed over $100 million before the nominations were announced, compared with five from the previous year.[48] The combined gross of the ten Best Picture nominees when the Oscars were announced was $1.2 billion, the second-highest ever behind 2009. The average gross was $119.3 million.[49]

Two of the ten Best Picture nominees were among the top ten releases in box office during the nominations. At the time of the announcement of nominations on January 25, Toy Story 3 was the highest-grossing film among the Best Picture nominees with $414.9 million in domestic box office receipts.[50] The only other top ten box office hit to receive a nomination was Inception which earned $292.5 million. Among the remaining eight nominees, True Grit was the next-highest-grossing film with $137.9 million followed by The Social Network ($95.4  million), Black Swan $83.2 million, The Fighter ($72.6 million), The King's Speech ($57.3 million), The Kids Are All Right ($20.8 million), 127 Hours ($11.2 million), and finally Winter's Bone ($6.2 million).[50]

Of the top 50 grossing movies of the year, 55 nominations went to 15 films on the list. Only Toy Story 3 (1st), Inception (5th), How to Train Your Dragon (9th), True Grit (17th), The Social Network (29th), The Town (32nd), Black Swan (38th), and The Fighter (45th) were nominated for directing, acting, screenwriting, Best Picture or Animated Feature.[51] The other top-50 box office hits that earned nominations were Alice in Wonderland (2nd), Iron Man 2 (3rd), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1 (6th), Tangled (10th), Tron: Legacy (12th), Salt (21st), and Unstoppable (39th).[51]

The show received a negative reception from most media publications. Film critic Roger Ebert said, "Despite the many worthy nominated films, the Oscarcast was painfully dull, slow, witless, and hosted by the ill-matched James Franco and Anne Hathaway. She might have made a delightful foil for another partner, but Franco had a deer-in-the-headlights manner and read his lines robotically." He went on to praise the winners of the night, but he ended his review with the words, "Dead. In. The. Water."[52] Television critic Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter commented, "In what could go down as one of the worst Oscar telecasts in history, a bad and risky idea — letting two actors host — played out in spectacularly unwatchable fashion on the biggest of all nights for the film world." He also added, "These Oscars were a bore-fest that seemed to drag on relentlessly but listlessly."[53] Gail Pennington of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote that the ceremony "felt a little like a bad night on Saturday Night Live — awkward, slow and not particularly entertaining." Regarding the hosts, she quipped that Hathaway "at least tried", but she remarked, "Franco seemed half asleep, or possibly stoned."[54]

Some media outlets received the broadcast more positively. Entertainment Weekly television critic Ken Tucker stated that the show was "Funny, poised, relaxed, and smart, Anne Hathaway and James Franco made for marvelous Oscar hosts. Their combination of respect and informality struck the right tone for the night, a happily surprising production that had its share of fine moments both planned and ad-libbed." On the overall aspect of the ceremony, they concluded "all in all, it was a fun, briskly paced night."[55] Mary McNamara from the Los Angeles Times commented, "The two seemed to be following the directive to "first do no harm," as if they knew they couldn't score as big as Jimmy Fallon did with the Emmy Awards, but were determined to avoid becoming morning show fodder like Ricky Gervais was after this year's Golden Globes. The result was a show that moved along, with a few draggy bits and high notes, like precisely what it was: a very long and fancy awards show." Her review further said "Overall, the evening had an oddly business-like feel, a mind-numbing evenness that was exacerbated by the relentless predictability of the winners, and the fact that none of the acting winners were played off no matter how long their "thank-yous" went."[56]

The American telecast on ABC drew in an average of 37.9 million people over its length, which was a 9% decrease from the previous year's ceremony.[57][58] An estimated 71.3 million total viewers watched all or part of the awards.[59] The show also drew lower Nielsen ratings compared to the two previous ceremonies, with 21.2% of households watching over a 33 share.[5] In addition, the program scored an 11.8 rating over a 30 share among the 18–49 demographic, which was a 12 percent decrease over last year's demographic numbers.[60][61]