Oscars 2012: "The Artist"

Though "The Artist" has virtually no dialogue, it IS filled with wall-to-wall music, courtesy of Oscar-nominated composer Ludovic Bource.

The pastiche of musical styles - from flapper-era swing to lush Golden Age Hollywood film scoring - garnered some controversy by liberally quoting from Bernard Herrmann's music for Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" in a key dramatic scene.

More controversial was a full-page ad in the trades placed by "Vertigo" star Kim Novak, who called the filmmakers' appropriation of the music tantamount to "rape."

Hazanavicius responded by calling his film "a love letter to cinema . . . I love Bernard Herrmann and his music has been used in many different films and I'm very pleased to have it in mine. I respect Kim Novak greatly and I'm sorry to hear she disagrees."

Credit: Weinstein Company