Not only was the 70th Academy Awards Show a time of sweet vindication for James Cameron, the man behind Best Picture winner “Titanic” and the major beneficiary of its record-tying 11 Oscar haul, it was a victory for mavericks, intransigents and dreamers throughout Hollywood. For all those reckless spirits from D.W. Griffith to Michael Cimino, who dare too much, spend too much and often fall on their faces.
Just as much, Monday night was a time for all those cocky young actors, daredevil writers or aging vets who have to buck conventional wisdom and the star system for their moments of glory.
It was an evening that sometimes surprised (the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Kim Basinger) and sometimes went according to script (the technical awards for “Titanic”) and sometimes perplexed (the Best Original Musical or Comedy Score Oscar for “The Full Monty,” which I’m told contains about 10 minutes of original music). But from first minute to last, it was a night that belonged to “Titanic.” And for all its makers, it was a night to remember.
The 11 Oscars triumphantly climaxed Cameron’s stormy progress with his movie, ridiculed during its over-budget filming as a floating disaster. Though “maverick” status may seem to sit oddly on Cameron, it fits him and in some ways the other big winners: Best Actor designee Jack Nicholson for his decidedly non-heroic portrait of a misanthrope in love, his heart improbably melting and his soul ineluctably shifting, in “As Good As It Gets;” Best Actress co-star Helen Hunt as Nicholson’s tough-talking waitress amour in the same movie, a working mother coping with an awful life who matches this old weirdo in both nastiness and kindess; Best Supporting Actor and perennial Oscar night madcap Robin Williams for his poignantly serious change of pace as the psychiatric mentor to Matt Damon’s troubled mathematics genius in “Good Will Hunting;” and Kim Basinger — also an outsider, prey to lawsuits and bad press — coming back strong with her torchy performance as “L.A. Confidential’s” tough but vulnerable Veronica Lake look-alike hooker.
“Titanic’s” other Oscars, all in the production and music categories included prizes for costume design, sound, sound effects editing, visual effects, original dramatic score (James Horner). One movie that managed to break the big winner’s hammerlock was “Men in Black,” whose funny aliens helped win the Best Makeup award.
What does it all mean? In the inevitable, already ongoing critical backlash against “Titanic,” its Oscars may be widely interpreted as a victory for the studio system at its most lavish, spendthrift and old-fashioned — a revival of bad, bloated audience-pandering old Hollywood values. But that’s just as much an over-interpretation as seeing last year’s shutout of the original major studios in the Best Picture nominations as the death knell for old studio power.
As prize after prize went “Titanic’s” way — to the cheers of an audience hardly less prestigious and splendidly attired than the one that went down with the actual big ship — you could see things in a different light. For, while “Titanic” is now Hollywood’s most expensive movie and biggest all-time box-office hit, it was not hamstrung by studio rules or committee. It was, good or bad, Cameron’s film and vision: a 3 1/2-hour epic of romance, class conflict and wild emotion that broke Hollywood’s usual special effects-action disaster blockbuster rules. It was a vision Cameron guarded so zealously that he wound up giving back an astronomical profit participation, to cover budget overruns.
Seen from that angle, “Titanic’s” win said as much for personal, offbeat moviemaking as the 1997 triumph of “The English Patient,” but on a vaster scale.
“Personal” is the keynote. Consider some of the night’s other big winners. Certainly Best Actor Nicholson has been a Hollywood maverick supreme, a chance-taker, making unusual and often daring movies ever since he hit stardom. Nicholson took his third Oscar on his 11th nomination (the other two for 1975’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and 1983’s “Terms of Endearment”).
Curtis Hanson, who won the Best Adapted Screenplay award for “L.A. Confidential,” with co-writer Brian Helgeland, is an ex-film critic who gradually worked his way into the system, only to take the gamble of his life with “L.A. Confidential,” a dark, complex, violently iconoclastic crime story by hard-boiled novelist James Ellroy. And what better exemplifies the idea of the outsider triumphing than the victory of the darlings of Monday night’s crowd: jubilant young “Good Will Hunting” writing-acting team, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, two buddies, tired of the roles they got, who decided to write their own script?
As always with the Oscars, you can argue. This is — never forget it — the world’s biggest and most-watched popularity contest, even though the popularity is defined by the narrower community of America’s professional filmmakers. I happen to think Robert Duvall should have easily won Best Actor for his nerve-rendingly brilliant performance as devil-and-angel Pentecostalist preacher Sonny Dewey. In fact, I think it’s a disgrace that he lost — even though Nicholson is, in many ways, my favorite movie actor. But Jack’s lovelorn obsessive in “As Good As It Gets” pales next to his great un-Oscared roles in “Five Easy Pieces,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “The Last Detail” and “Chinatown.”
I also would have ranked Best Actress winner Hunt, as good as her performance got, a bit behind one of the losers, Britain’s Judi Dench. One of Britain’s greatest actresses, Dench was clearly the best of a high-quality group. How many times do we get to see anything as fine, true, poetic and subtle as Dame Judi’s sublime yet very human portrait, in “Mrs. Brown,” of the kind of part usually played as a reverent waxwork: Queen Victoria in love.
But the biggest injustice of all came, once again, in the Documentary category, where Spike Lee, outspoken against the Academy as always, lost with perhaps the most beautiful and emotional film of his career, the Birmingham Church bombing chronicle, “4 Little Girls” (defeated by a very good, but more conventional film on the Holocaust, “The Long Way Home”).
The Netherlands’ “Character,” a mystery story with style, is a decent Foreign Language Film winner. But that whole selection process remains dubious: with the individual countries still submitting the official entries (and often making questionable choices).
And the biggest fiasco and time-waster was still the Oscar Best Score vote, still split absurdly into “Dramatic” and “Musical or Comedy” categories. “Titanic’s” James Horner won the first, Anne Dudley’s “The Full Monty” took the second. And you can only wonder once again: why are musical scores separated into two sections and not the acting and writing categories? (Or anything else, for that matter, including cartoons.)
That was the trend of this year’s Oscar night. We can see that same commitment to personal filmmaking in many of the previous Oscar-winners of the ’90s (like “Unforgiven,” “Schindler’s List” and “Dances With Wolves”) and among many other 1997 winners as well (“Good Will Hunting,” “L.A. Confidential”). Have Oscar voters gotten a bit more sophisticated over the years? More receptive to the unusual and more adventurous? “Titanic’s” big win doesn’t alter the overall course of the 1990s. In many ways, it confirms a welcome new direction.
Despite quibbles, it’s obvious change has occurred. Voters are more adventurous, risks more rewarded. The evening, swept along on a wave of Billy Crystal’s usual quips, ended up reaching port as late as it always does. But as it sailed along, through rough spots and smooth, the glamour and folly remained impressive. The old “Golden Age” Hollywood was well in evidence at the Shrine Auditorium, with Fay Wray, Charlton Heston and Jack Lemmon in the house, not to mention Bart the Bear presenting an Oscar, with “Titanic’s” 87-year-old Gloria Stuart sitting up front, with a warmly applauded appearance by Special Oscar winner Stanley Donen — one of the great MGM musical makers and co-director of the Gene Kelly classics, “On the Town” and “Singin’ in the Rain.” So was the new Hollywood, with Madonna’s presentation and the triumphs of Damon and Affleck, “L.A. Confidential,” Helen Hunt. In fact, by evening’s end, it was hard to tell the difference between the two.
THE WINNERS
PICTURE
“TITANIC”
DIRECTOR
JAMES CAMERON
“Titanic”
ACTRESS
HELEN HUNT
“As Good as It Gets”
ACTOR
JACK NICHOLSON
“As Good as It Gets”
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
KIM BASINGER
“L.A. Confidential”
SUPPORTING ACTOR
ROBIN WILLIAMS
“Good Will Hunting”
SCREENPLAY
ADAPTED
BRIAN HELGELAND AND CURTIS HANSON for “L.A. Confidential”
SCREENPLAY
ORIGINAL
MATT DAMON AND BEN AFFLECK “Good Will Hunting”
FILM EDITING
“TITANIC”
MAKEUP
“MEN IN BLACK”
CINEMATOGRAPHY
“TITANIC”
ART DIRECTION
“TITANIC”
COSTUME DESIGN
“TITANIC”
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
“THE LONG WAY HOME”
DOCUMENTARY SHORT FEATURE
“A STORY OF HEALING”
FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
“CHARACTER”
The Netherlands
ORIGINAL SONG
“MY HEART WILL GO ON” from “Titanic”
ORIGINAL DRAMATIC SCORE
“TITANIC”
ORIGINAL MUSICAL OR COMEDY SCORE
“THE FULL MONTY”
SHORT FILM LIVE ACTION
“VISAS AND VIRTUE”
SHORT FILM ANIMATED
“GERI’S GAME”
SOUND
“TITANIC”
SOUND EFFECTS EDITING
“TITANIC”
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