'The Artist' scores big Spirit Awards

"The Artist" won best picture and three other prizes Saturday at the Spirit Awards honoring independent film, a possible prelude to a big night Sunday at the Academy Awards for the black-and-white silent movie.

The film also won for best director for Michel Hazanavicius and lead actor for Jean Dujardin as a silent-era star whose career crumbles as talking pictures take over in the 1920s. It earned the cinematography prize for Guillaume Schiffman too, The Associated Press reports.

Michelle Williams won best actress as Marilyn Monroe in "My Week with Marilyn." Supporting-acting honors went to Christopher Plummer as an elderly widower who comes out as gay in "Beginners" and Shailene Woodley as a troublesome Hawaiian teenager in "The Descendants." That film also won the screenplay award for director Alexander Payne and his co-writers, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash.

Williams gave the best performance among winners with a speech acknowledging her kinship with low-budget independent filmmakers and recalling her first time at the ceremony a decade ago.

"I wore my own clothes back then, which were not very good, and I cut my own hair, which also was not very good," she said. "And what I thought then and I still feel now is that it's because this room was a room full of misfits, outcasts, loners, dreamers, mumblers, delinquents, dropouts. Just like me."