Celebrity Buzz: It’s not easy keeping up with Jean Dujardin these days. The French matinee idol has been flying back and forth across the globe doing press for “The Artist,” the black-and-white Valentine to silent movies is up for a clutch of Academy Awards later this month, including Best Picture and Best Actor.
Dujardin’s schedule is so packed with meet-and-greets that he might be going door-to-door in Beverly Hills just to make sure he doesn’t miss any potential Oscar voters. (Harvey Weinstein of The Weinstein Company, which is distributing “The Artist,” has turned Oscar campaigning into a fine art.)
The dashing star picked up an award this past weekend for Best Actor from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). He was on hand to accept—following best actor gongs from the Screen Actor’s Guild and Golden Globes last month—after dashing back across the Atlantic from New York, where he filmed a surprise cameo for “Saturday Night Live.”
“Okay, I surrender,” wrote Caryn James for IndieWire.com, “if not to ‘The Artist,’ to the charming, exuberant ‘SNL’ dance sketch and ‘Artist’ tribute starring Jean Dujardin himself. “The sketch may be a shameless plug for the film at Oscar time, but what can you do except give in?”
Dujardin, 39, was already a popular leading man in European cinema. It remains to be seen whether he will cross over to English-language cinema in the footsteps of Mathieu Almaric, Antonio Banderas, Jean Reno or Christoph Waltz.
Along those lines, the rapscallions at FunnyOrDie.com had some fun with the Hollywood cliché that sees acclaimed European actors inevitably cast as ambiguously accented villains. 
“The running, cynical logic on Jean Dujardin for quite awhile has been that we’ll likely see him and the rest of the crew from ‘The Artist’ fade away after this lightning-capturing season,” writes Kristopher Tapley for HitFlix.com. “If we don’t, well, maybe Dujardin will play a Bond villain or something. FunnyOrDie is always quick to get out in front of a joke like that.”
While he doesn’t have any American films lined up yet, Dujardin recently made some waves with a racy poster for his next French-language film “Les Infideles” (The Players).
CLICK HERE for Dujardin’s Funny Or Die video.
CLICK HERE for the Saturday Night Live sketch.