I was chatting with a friend of mine yesterday before heading out to the movies. Our conversation partly went like this:
Me: I'm going to see The King's Speech today.
Friend: That looks good.
Me: It looks like Oscar bait to me.
Friend: Granted.
Let's get this out of the way: The King's Speech (2010, directed by Tom Hooper) is totally Oscar bait. It's the kind of movie the members of the Academy LOVE. High-minded, pedigreed, slightly irreverent, historical, "significant." It's all of these things. It's also middlebrow, cinematically conservative, and uncontroversial. Hell, it features a lead character dealing with a disability. If that's not Oscar bait, nothing is. If I had to guess, it'll take six of the twelve Oscars for which it's nominated, including Best Picture. But I don't really care. Oscar has never been a benchmark of excellence. Just ask Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick.
In spite of all of this, The King's Speech is a pretty good movie. As I say, it's totally middlebrow, but that doesn't mean it's bad. In fact, it's fun to watch. John Ford once said that the most interesting thing in the world was the human face, and that's something that this movie understands implicitly. It helps that it has a sterling cast of British (and Australian) worthies and it spends its running time looking them in the eye. It's effective.