Best Picture and Director 1997

1927/28 through 1997

Please make your selections for Best Picture and Director of 1997

As Good As It Gets
2
3%
The Full Monty
1
1%
Good Will Hunting
0
No votes
L.A. Confidential
22
31%
Titanic
10
14%
James Cameron - Titanic
10
14%
Peter Cattaneo - The Full Monty
1
1%
Atom Egoyan - The Sweet Hereafter
15
21%
Curtis Hanson - L.A. Confidential
10
14%
Gus Van Sant - Good Will Hunting
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 71

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Re: Best Picture and Director 1997

Post by SalantBeau »

*Boogie Nights
The Ice Storm
Jackie Brown
L.A. Confidential
Titanic
(alt: The Sweet Hereafter, Good Will Hunting)

*Paul Thomas Anderson, Boogie Nights
James Cameron, Titanic
Curtis Hanson, L.A. Confidential
Ang Lee, The Ice Storm
Quentin Tarantino
(alt: Atom Egoyan, Gus Van Sant)
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1997

Post by ksrymy »

Greg wrote:
Eric wrote:Come the first week of January, I had a full blown Titanic hangover (of the Diana Ross variety, and I didn't want to get over).
Care to explain what this means?

Also, I agree with you about the ending of L. A. Confidential. I absolutely hated it.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1997

Post by Heksagon »

Slipping again...

L.A. Confidential is my co-favourite film of the decade, together with Fight Club, so it gets my votes easily.

I agree that the ending in L.A. Confidential is pretty dumb, standard Hollywood Happy Ending stuff. Even so, I think it works in this film, while it wouldn't work anywhere else. The reason is, in this film, like no other, do I feel that after all the sh*t the characters have gone through, they deserve a happy ending. Besides, the film is structured like a traditional action film, so it really builds up to a happy ending; the ending should, however, be implemented a bit more fluidly.

I can't really make up my mind about rest of the films. The remaining four films are all certainly entertaining film, but they each have some elements I don't like also.

Titanic is a kitch romance, but it has some great, epic stuff also. Furthermore, even if the story is very plain, it is well structured, so the film doesn't feel overlong even if the film's running time is actually quite long.

As Good As It Gets, The Full Monty and Good Will Hunting are all enjoyable efforts, but they are far from being what I'd call "complete" films. They all have good, but fairly thin plots; the characters are appealing, but not as fully drawn as I'd hope; and they all have a lot scenes that don't really contribute to the film, while at the same time, there are few really great, memorable scenes.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1997

Post by Greg »

Eric wrote:Come the first week of January, I had a full blown Titanic hangover (of the Diana Ross variety, and I didn't want to get over).
Care to explain what this means?

Also, I agree with you about the ending of L. A. Confidential. I absolutely hated it.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1997

Post by Eric »

In 1997, such was my unyielding mania for Titanic (the fitting climax to my fascination with the disaster movie genre which kicked off in junior high) that I downgraded everything against it in this category as a matter of protection. I had spent the better part of the year tracking its production, and following the website Countdown To Titanic (at least, I think that's what it was called) represented my first significant moment of checking in on the internet as a daily matter of course. When I found out the movie had been given an early test screening in August at a Twin Cities theater, I felt a genuine sense of betrayal that I didn't get to attend, despite later learning that the version that screened at Centennial Lakes needed a good deal of tightening. Its eventual release fell on my first extended trip home my freshman year at college, and the movie's adolescent melancholy meshed perfectly with my own. Come the first week of January, I had a full blown Titanic hangover (of the Diana Ross variety, and I didn't want to get over). I was also at an age where my peers were old enough to resist the movie's spell and call into question its many failings, so I found myself in the position of defending something whose appeal still felt sort of of-the-elements to me. When I saw the movie again in theaters last year, for the fifth overall time, the flaws were impossible to ignore, but so was the surge of nostalgia.

Even if I'm never going to be totally objective about this movie, well, at least I'm being more objective when I say that its four challengers in this race were no great shakes, either. And none have been more mystifyingly overvalued than L.A. Confidential, at least against the films it aims to emulate. Cut to resemble something it's not, the film basically IS Lynn Bracken. In other words, a cut-rate imitation to be used by an audience that won't sweat the difference (at least not until the ruinous ending). The other three are lesser films (especially The Full Monty, undoubtedly among the biggest nothings the category's seen in my lifetime), but none really offended me as badly as Confidential did.

In any case, the timing of this thread is delicious given Gravity is splitting film fans along lines very similar to the ones Titanic divvied everyone up. Obviously I'm a fan of both, but here's hoping on the detractors' behalf that Gravity at least gets a couple of worthy adversaries in this years best picture race. Because both in the moment and in retrospect, nothing else in 1997's slate measured up.

01. Taste of Cherry
02. Jackie Brown
03. Waiting For Guffman [*mistakenly listed this in the 1996 thread]
04. Lost Highway
05. Happy Together
06. The River
07. Starship Troopers
08. Titanic
09. Live Flesh
10. Cure
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1997

Post by The Original BJ »

I was in the middle of writing my post when Mister Tee posted -- I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this point that we made a lot of the same points, though I wasn't trying to be repetitive!
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1997

Post by The Original BJ »

This year marked the beginning of my interest in this whole affair -- although I had watched the Oscars in the four years preceding, in those cases it was mainly because my parents were watching and I happened to be in the same room. This was the first year I actually paid attention, mostly due to my obsession with that sinking boat movie, which at the time I rooted for overwhelmingly in every category, despite having seen very little of its competition.

On the whole, I think 1997 is a bit of a top-heavy year. I like my core group of favorites quite a lot, but I'd struggle to fill out the last few spots on a top ten list. Of the films that missed Best Picture, I'd bump up The Sweet Hereafter without a second's hesitation. And in both categories, I'd absolutely have included the year's two great depictions of the 1970's: Boogie Nights and The Ice Storm, the latter a curious total Oscar flame-out.

My second tier of films I admire would include The Wings of the Dove, Jackie Brown, and, for something totally unique, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control.

I think The Full Monty is a perfectly enjoyable comedy. It's got a good bit of heart, and some pretty decent laughs. (I can't ever hear "Hot Stuff" without thinking fondly of that scene in which the guys are waiting in line and marking their choreography.) But it's an exceedingly minor thing, and though I guess I'd rather have a nominee that seems the result of genuine enthusiasm (rather than a by-rote vote for Amistad), a nomination for Best Picture severely overstates the movie's merits. And as for Peter Cattaneo's nomination...WHAAAAAAAAAA?

As Good As It Gets is a much meatier comedic effort, though I think, like Jerry Maguire, there's quite a bit stuffed into the plot, and at some point it starts to feel a little unwieldy. I also think the concept on the whole is pretty weak -- to borrow an offensive phrase from one of its protagonist's insults, it basically amounts to "Melvin the asshole, Carol the waitress, and Simon the fag go on a road trip and learn stuff!" And the movie never really seems to figure out what's wrong with Jack Nicholson's character -- does he have OCD, or is he just a big jerk? And yet, I think a lot of the writing from scene to scene is quite funny and human, with a lot of sensitive moments in which troubled people struggle to connect with each other, and the cast across the board is very winning. Ultimately I enjoyed the movie, but I think it feels less like a fully formed James Brooks success and more like a Brooks rewrite of someone else's flimsy first draft...which, upon doing some research, I learn that it was!

Come to think of it, Good Will Hunting has some of the same weaknesses and strengths. The premise is pretty generic, but even beyond that, there aren't really that many plot surprises along the way. (When Affleck gives Damon that speech about how one day he wants to come over to his house and Damon won't be there anymore, you virtually start counting down the seconds until that moment comes.) But take a traditional script, cast it with the right actors, and hand it to an auteur director, and you can still end up with a pretty solid movie. I think Gus Van Sant, especially, is a real key to the movie's success -- although the material is far less edgy than his earlier films, Van Sant keeps things feeling real, with a lot of pleasingly relaxed moments, and scenes full of seemingly spontaneous interaction between the characters. And by the end, it's hard not to feel emotionally moved by the journeys the film's characters have taken. Still, it would be hard for me to pick an iconoclast like Van Sant for something this restrained, and I pass on his movie pretty easily too.

Titanic was a pretty major milestone in my film-watching life. I remember going with my dad to the big one-screen theater in town (where all the blockbusters played) to see Titanic that December -- the line to buy tickets was around the block, unlike anything I had ever seen before. I ran into plenty of friends in line, many of whom were seeing the movie for the sixth or seventh time. It was the first time I was aware that a movie could also be a cultural event, and that I was living through a film phenomenon that would earn a place in the history books the way so many classic movies before my time had. (My dad even remarked that he first saw The Godfather at this theater, and the swarms of crowds weren't so different twenty-five years earlier.) And then the movie unfolded on screen, and I was completely overwhelmed by its spectacle and power. It instantly became my favorite film, and in many ways it was the movie that made me start getting really excited about movies. Of course, to be in junior high in 1997 was to be obsessed with the thing, and it was all anyone I knew could talk about around that time. And then there was that goddamn song, which played everywhere, and made the movie feel like it had permeated daily life to a degree that I never would have imagined a movie could, and which thrilled me completely. For me, that Oscar night felt like a celebration of MY beloved movie, and every prize it won left me totally overjoyed.

I've seen the movie many times since 1997 (including its most recent 3-D conversion), and though I have downgraded my opinion so that I no longer think it's near the best movie ever, I still have a lot of affection for it. As Eric has often said, the film's sincerity and commitment to an unabashed sense of romanticism sets it apart from a lot of snarkier blockbusters whose utter facetiousness make them virtually evaporate in front of your eyes. (This allowed many of the film's best moments to become immediate targets of derision -- most prominently the "I'm flying" sequence, which for me remains a stirringly beautiful combination of performance, James Horner's wondrous score, and filmmaking, at which I could never laugh.) No, James Cameron does not have the world's greatest ear for dialogue, and no, Billy Zane can't act. But this was the one time in which Cameron took his considerable visual and visceral filmmaking talent and applied it to a film with a genuine depth of feeling. Many of the film's most memorable images never cease to put a lump in my throat -- the real-life footage of the ship's passengers waving goodbye in Southampton, the artifacts in the Titanic wreckage fathoms below, the aforementioned ship bow scene, the mother telling her children one last bedtime story, the elderly couple embracing one another in bed, Rose leaping back onto the sinking ship knowing she isn't interested in a life without Jack, the lifeboats wading through the sea of frozen victims, Rose looking up at the Statue of Liberty, old Rose dropping the diamond into the depths of the ocean, and the final dream in which Rose is reunited with all those who left her so many years ago. And once the ship starts to sink, Cameron flexes his action movie muscles to superb effect, combining massive production design with still-eye popping visual effects, in a sequence that is both breathtakingly suspenseful and full of great power. (It's also filmed with tremendous clarity -- unlike so many big-budget spectacles, you really have a very clear understanding of how the ship is sinking, and where all the characters are in relation to one another and the space.) Today, the movie wouldn't get my vote in either category -- my two favorites on the year are in a different class entirely, most especially at the script level -- but I still find Titanic to be an amazing technical feat that still sweeps me away emotionally every time.

The Sweet Hereafter is an amazing movie. Structurally, it's incredibly inventive -- the way Atom Egoyan weaves his story between past and present allows the two threads to comment on one another in fascinating ways -- and even moreso for being organized so differently than Russell Banks's novel. And, to borrow an argument from Mike D'Angelo, Egoyan makes a brilliant choice to bury the bus accident in the middle of the movie, so that it comes seemingly out of nowhere, making it feel far more sudden and horrific a tragedy than it might have as a prologue or climax to the film. (That's also a departure from the novel, as the bus accident is never really described in the book). It's a film that's both unbelievably powerful on a gut level, due to the overwhelming subject matter, but also complex on an ethical level, as it explores issues of how people deal with assigning blame -- personally and legally -- in the face of a horrible accident. It's beautifully photographed, hauntingly scored, and full of wonderful performances -- most of all by Ian Holm as the lawyer with his own baggage, but also by Sarah Polley as the teen stricken by survivor's guilt, Gabrielle Rose as the guilt-wracked bus driver, and Bruce Greenwood as a gruff grieving father. And it's the kind of adaptation that feels less like a translation of the book than a filmmaker using the source material as a jumping off point for his own thematic and stylistic interests. Partly to split the prizes between two films I love, but also to recognize the singular stamp Egoyan puts on this material, I give The Sweet Hereafter my vote for Best Director.

But even if The Sweet Hereafter had been an option in Best Picture, I still would have given my top vote to L.A. Confidential. I think it's one of the crowning achievements of the decade, a glorious depiction of a time and place that's at once gorgeous and intoxicating as well as gritty and grisly. (And I love that the period detail isn't late-40's specific...characters still have cars and clothes left over from earlier decades as well.) And on a narrative level, it's world class. I wasn't familiar with James Ellroy's novel before seeing the movie, so I watched the earlier section of the movie assuming this was simply a story with two parallel plot lines. The moment when the big reveal came -- and the intersection between the two narratives became clear -- was one of the most pleasing plot turns in any movie I've ever seen. Full of great black humor ("She IS Lana Turner"), wonderful performances (Spacey the MVP but everyone across the board works terrifically together), some of the most noirish Technicolor photography this side of Chinatown, and a rollicking pace that makes the film an utterly engrossing breeze of an experience, L.A. Confidential is just a complete package of sensational moviemaking. Curtis Hanson does a wonderful job at the sheer craft level -- I could have just as easily chosen him as Best Director -- though I think in some ways the movie feels like a modern version of the best of Classical Hollywood style, in which the director guides a group of actors and craftsmen to stellar work rather than an individual auteur piece. But he just narrowly misses Best Director, and the movie is my Best Picture choice by far.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1997

Post by Mister Tee »

1997 wasn't a bad year, but Oscar voters made the competition less than fun for me by sidestepping most of my favorite films.

First and foremost, I'm in agreement with FilmFan, that The Ice Storm is Ang Lee's finest achievement, and the best film of 1997. The word I used when my wife and I emerged from the theatre was exquisite: the film was a tough-minded look at an era I knew well, but so lyrically composed it felt gentle and forgiving. The near-the-end shot of Tobey Maguire emerging from the train, and seeing his family posed grimly on the platform, is my favorite moment in all of Lee's filmography. That no category -- including screenplay! -- found room for the film is one of my most grievous Academy disappointments.

Boogie Night at least managed acting and screenplay nods, but it deserved much more -- not least best director, where I'd have chosen Paul Thomas Anderson's brio in a close vote over Ang Lee. Anderson virtually debuted that year -- his Hard Eight was only released earlier in the year -- and his enormous talent seemed to have emerged full-grown.

The beautifully written Donnie Brasco and Iain Softley's pungent, gorgeous The Wings of the Dove are two other films I prefer to almost all of the best picture contenders.

I saw Titanic fairly early in its run -- mid-January -- but it was already at something like legendary status thanks to its soaring grosses. Maybe if I'd seen it weeks earlier I wouldn't have had such a harsh opinion of it. It's not that the film doesn't have its virtues: as a spectacle of what it would be like to go down on a ship, it’s impressive. But in other areas -- i.e., characters and dialogue -- I find it a complete bust. DiCaprio's Jack is a thin line drawing: Cameron's romantic view of himself as fearless adventurer, a character that wouldn't last ten minutes on the streets. Winslet is better, but she (and everyone else aboard ship) is saddled with dialogue that's stilted or anachronistic, sometimes both simultaneously. (The only scenes that weren't poorly written were the present-day ones) I know a lot of people saw this at a young age and swooned over it. I saw it as very much a grown-up, and found it ridiculously overrated.

Though James L. Brooks and Mark Andrus share credit on As Good As It Gets, only Brooks showed up to accept the WGA prize. This -- and watching the film -- suggests to me that Brooks took the shell of Andrus' script and reworked it substantially. This is the only way I can account for what appears to be an acute schizophrenia in the film: the plot and initial characterizations are at borderline piece-of-shit level. Yet much of the dialogue, especially between Nicholson and Hunt, sparkles with very Brooksian insight and wit. The film can only rise so far given the narrative handicap…but the fact that some of the film DOES work I have to credit to the two main actors and to James Brooks. Nonetheless: this is the only one of his nominated films for which I won't even contemplate voting.

The Full Monty was a minor piece of work, but it's another one of those movies -- like Four Weddings and a Funeral -- that grown-up audiences felt they discovered and made into an unlikely hit. The film had been cordially received at Sundance, but it had such a low profile that some at Fox Searchlight were begging the creators to change that indecipherable title (a title which has now gone into the language). A good TV ad instead helped make the film a strong opener, and then it just played week after week. Its Academy good fortune was a by-product of that sleeper success. Of course it doesn't deserve award consideration (and the directing nod was one of the most shocking I've ever witnessed), but it's a sweet little film, and its inclusion was less dreary than the anticipated Amistad would have been.

My film buff nephew at the time asked me, of Good Will Hunting, if I thought it wasn't as well-done as it might have been. I said, no, it's hard to imagine it having been better done -- the dialogue was sharp enough, the acting solid, Gus van Sant's gentle touch kept sentimentality in check (as someone said at the time, if you don’t think van Sant made a contribution, imagine Joel Schumacher's Good Will Hunting). The problem was at the core: a hokey, unimaginative premise. So, despite the film providing a generally enjoyable two hours -- and basically introducing me to some solid talent --it gets no consideration from me.

I like the environment of The Sweet Hereafter -- you can just about feel the chilly air coming off the screen, and what it does to its characters. I also find the film very well-composed: Atom Egoyan is easily the strongest director in this group, and he creates an interesting world, one filled with haunting moments. I was mesmerized while watching. But I have a problem with the narrative spine, which feels flimsy to me. There's plenty of nicely filled-out detail obscuring it, but, basically, the film comes down to Sarah Polley's testimony and her (to me, fairly straightforward) reasons for giving it -- a climactic development which made me feel a seemingly complex narrative had been reduced to a tit-for-tat that resolved things all too patly. (I've heard some argue the action has more layers than that, but I don’t see them) I still like the film -- more than the others I've already discussed -- and, in the absence of my true favorites, I'll cast a vote for Egoyan here. But my nagging issues with the finale make this only a second tier effort for me, not the towering masterpiece I know many see.

I, like most her, end up with LA Confidential as best film, but I feel somewhat forced into the move. I'd rank the film about with Donnie Brasco and Wings of the Dove -- solid, but not great. Part of my feeling may come from having been a real fan of the novel (and other, earlier Ellroy works). Ellroy's book was incredibly ambitious, full of multiple plots, many of which had to be omitted to fit any standard screen-time; it's almost inevitable that some of my favorite parts were those eliminated. But I also just didn’t get the noir-elation many critics at the time did -- for me, the film doesn't come within shouting distance of Chinatown (its ending, for one thing, hasn't anything like the resonance). What you've got is a well-written, nicely designed and sparklingly-acted police procedural -- nothing wrong with that, but not the second coming, either. As I say, it gets my vote -- but the year belongs to Ang Lee and Paul Thomas Anderson.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1997

Post by FilmFan720 »

This was a truly interesting year for American cinema, with the emergence of some of the most interesting filmmakers of the following decades (Paul Thomas Anderson, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Leo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Neil LaBute, but also people like Christopher Guest and Curtis Hansen started moving into the types of films that would get them a lot of attention in the coming years). Unfortunately, the Academy gave us a list of nice films, but casts aside a lot of the films that would stand the test of time.

For me, the masterpiece of the year was The Ice Storm, probably the best film Ang Lee ever directed, and a moving picture of the 1970s that becomes more heartbreaking and chilling with each passing year. How it managed not a single nomination is still beyond me. My Top 5 list is finished off with Waiting for Guffman, Boogie Nights, Irma Vep and The Sweet Hereafter.

There are two pretty bland, mainstream choices on this list from me, both from filmmakers I generally like that fall completely flat. Good Will Hunting and As Good As It Gets are both fairly flat, derivative films that act more of reminders of why other films were so much better than works on their own. Good Will Hunting had such a great story behind it, and does feature some nice acting, but I will never understand how anyone could have ever bought into a moment of As Good As It Gets.

The Full Monty is a delightful comedy, although I think the stage musical a few years later is an improvement, and it certainly is nice to see a straight comedy make the list here. I won't vote for it, and I wouldn't have nominated it, but it's a nominee I won't gripe about.

L.A. Confidential is a film that i respect greatly, and that has a lot of interesting things going for it, but is also a film I respect more than really enjoy. I probably should revisit it soon, and I want to vote for Curtis Hansen (especially because there is at least one situation in the coming years where I will gripe about his exclusion), but there are other places to go.

The Sweet Hereafter is a fantastic film, albeit one that is a little too cold (pardon the pun) for my takes. Like L.A. Confidential, I probably respect the crafted hand that drove the film more than truly cherish it. I almost voted for Egoyan here, and would love to see him nominated again in the future.

But in the end, I have to endorse the Academy's choice of Titanic and James Cameron. The film certainly has its flaws, and it could certainly use a firmer edit and some crafty rewrites, but there is a lot of really terrific work being done in this film. James Cameron is one of our last true Hollywood craftsmen, using the innovations of film and the tropes of the Hollywood formula to create a film that might seem familiar (but not derivative, a la Good Will Hunting) but is instead an excuse to craft a thrilling yarn. Add in that this was such a cultural landmark, a film that united all sorts of moviegoers in a way that films (or music, or TV, or even book) don't anymore, and I have to give this achievement my vote. It may not be the hip choice, but sometimes the popular choice is the right one.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1997

Post by mlrg »

voted for L.A. Confidential and Hanson.

Boogie Nights is my favourite film of the year.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1997

Post by Greg »

In what will probably make me a large outlier, Contact is my favorite film of 1997.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1997

Post by Reza »

Voted for L.A. Confidential and Curtis Hanson

My picks for 1997:

Best Picture
1. L.A. Confidential
2. The Sweet Hereafter
3. The Ice Storm
4. Titanic
5. Boogie Nights

The 6th Spot: As Good As It Gets

Best Director
1. Curtis Hanson, L.A. Confidential
2. Atom Egoyan, The Sweet Hereafter
3. Ang Lee, The Ice Storm
4. Paul Thomas Anderson, Boogie Nights
5. James Cameron, Titanic

The 6th Spot: James L. Brooks, As Good As It Gets
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1997

Post by Precious Doll »

A good solid 'Hollywood' Best Picture line-up but nothing anywhere near worthy of so much as a nomination.

I only voted for Atom Egoyan.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 1997

Post by ksrymy »

My picks

Best Picture

1. L.A. Confidential
2. Boogie Nights
3. The Ice Storm
4. As Good As It Gets
5. Titanic

6. Jackie Brown

Best Director

1. Curtis Hanson, L.A. Confidential
2. Paul Thomas Anderson, Boogie Nights
3. David Lynch, Lost Highway
4. Ang Lee, The Ice Storm
5. Quentin Tarantino, Jackie Brown

6. Atom Egoyan, The Sweet Hereafter
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Best Picture and Director 1997

Post by Big Magilla »

1997 was a good year for movies in general. It was a great year for Titanic which I somehow instinctively knew would be both a box office juggernaut and a huge Oscar winner. I can't say I've been that clairvoyant about any other film before or since. I could predict that Avatar would rake in the bucks, possibly supplanting Titanic as the most profitable film of all time. I could predict that Million Dollar Baby would come out of nowhere to win Best Picture, but more often than not I've been wrong about such things as last year's failure of Les Misérables, the first film I've since predicted to do both, to do either, certainly proves. But I did have 1997, not that I agreed that it was the year's best film. That distinction belonged, in my estimation, to L.A. Confidential, my favorite film since Chinatown and Nashville more than twenty years earlier and just about anything since. A case of to have and have not, as the saying goes.

I can't gripe about any of the nominees. I genuinely liked all five of them, although The Full Monty barely makes my top ten list. Its Best Picture and Director nods struck me as a bland substitute for the more daring Boogie Nights; The Sweet Hereafter and The Ice Storm.

Among directors, P.T. Anderson (Boogie Nights) and Ang Lee (The Ice Storm) were the big losers, but they did manage to nominate Atom Egoyan and recognize both he and Anderson for their screenplays.
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