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‘Argo’ victory a step in the right ‘direction’

Jennifer Lawrence gives photographers the middle finger after winning the Oscar for Best Actress.

Jennifer Lawrence gives photographers the middle finger after winning the Oscar for Best Actress. (FilmMagic)

The Oscars rewrote the rules last night.

“Argo’’ became only the second film in the past 80 years to win Best Picture without its director, Ben Affleck, being nominated. The last time that happened was “Driving Miss Daisy’’ in 1989.

When nominations came out six weeks ago, Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln’’ looked unstoppable. None of the three films considered its strongest competitors — “Argo,’’ “Zero Dark Thirty’’ and “Les Misérables’’ — scored the crucial director nods.

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But then something unusual happened. The night of the nominations, “Argo’’ won at the Critics Choice Awards. Three days later, it upset “Lincoln’’ at the Golden Globes.

“Argo’’ and Affleck kept on a winning streak after that, edging out “Lincoln’’ in awards given by the actors, producers, directors and writers guilds.

How did this highly unusual turn of events happen?

At least partly, it seemed like a reaction to the shocking snub of Affleck by the motion picture academy’s relatively small director’s branch, which votes on nominations in its area. (The entire membership votes on the winners in almost all categories).

Affleck, who’s managed one of the most spectacular comebacks in Hollywood history, handled this with grace and humility when accepting these other awards, leaving his co-producer George Clooney to express disappointment over the snub.

“Argo’’ had, by far, the best-run campaign for Best Picture. Early complaints that the film minimized the role of Canadians in rescuing trapped American Embassy employees in Iran during the 1979 revolution were answered by adding explanatory text to the end of the movie.

“Lincoln,’’ meanwhile, had a very heavy-handed campaign that overstressed the film’s importance — symbolized by the decision to recruit former President Bill Clinton to introduce a clip at the Golden Globes (where the film embarrassingly lost).

In the end, the strong historic link between Best Picture and Best Director probably worked against “Lincoln.”

If he had won last night, Spielberg would only become the third three-time winner of the Best Director award, and the first since William Wyler won his third for “Ben Hur” in 1960.

There were nagging complaints about the length of “Lincoln” and somewhat dry approach to history. In the end, it seemed like “Lincoln” aroused more admiration — accounting for those 12 nominations, which resulted in 2 wins — than passion.

The film’s only win in a major category came for Daniel Day-Lewis, who richly deserved to become the first-ever three-time winner of the Best Actor Oscar for his masterful performance as the Great Emancipator.

Another Best Picture contender with a Best Director nomination, “Silver Linings Playbook,” had its fans — but a vocal minority accused it of trivializing mental illness.

There were also mixed feelings about “Life of Pi” — but pretty much everyone agreed that it was one of the most gorgeous-looking movies so far this century, and a real breakthrough in 3-D and special effects.

So Ang Lee won the Best Director award over Spielberg — the second time, after “Brokeback Mountain,” that Lee won for directing a film that failed to capture Best Picture (Spielberg was nominated six years ago, too, for “Munich.”)

And “Argo”? Besides the Affleck snub factor, in the end it may have won for being the least objectionable of the nine Best Picture nominees — just like “The Artist” last year.

The two films have another thing in common: both are basically love letters to Hollywood, a town that never tires of saluting itself.