Hollywood Looks at Itself

...They were dwarfed, though, by the film's machinery, all devoted to proving that Cameron was worthy of making the most costly production of all time...

...Jack Nicholson, a successful novelist and obsessive-compulsive recluse in As Good As It Gets...

...Breakdown was the year's most exciting action picture...

...Dustin Hoffman's Hollywood producer in Wag the Dog did not cry out as loudly as the others for therapeutic help...

...Hillary Henkin and David Mamet, who wrote Wag the Dog, gave Hoffman their funniest lines, but De Niro as a spin doctor was the film's anchor...

...A crime drama that celebrated the nihilistic self-absorption of its characters, it boasted a pleasurably intricate and effectively sensationalistic plot...

...Afterglow offered Julie Christie her finest opportunity in years, and she was as perfectly in tune with its drama of marital infidelity as she was with its moments of door slamming farce...

...Despite his having played Al Capone, the young Vito Corleone and a host of pennyante gangsters, he found a new way to impersonate a lowlife thug...

...has gone to war with Albania...

...I wonder if its working title was Ugly Men...

...To my list of the disregarded I must add Martin Scorsese's Kundun, featuring a large cast of Asian nonactors...

...Firm and apparently congenial, he set the sinister mechanism of the movie in motion, diverting attention from a Presidential sex scandal by convincing the television audience that the U.S...

...Moreover, the triple- plotted film was crisply adapted and beautifully directed by Coppola, who for the first time in many a moon preferred substance to style...

...Gorgeously photographed and steeped in the ceremonies and customs of Tibetan culture, it traced the life of the 14th Dalai Lama from the time of his birth to 1959, when he was exiled from his homeland...

...Resembling a toothless Jerry Magiare, it was a meandering character piece concerning a small group of lost souls who came together reluctantly, grew to love one another and thus overcame their neuroses...

...Setting warm, charming players in a world that is actually corrosive and demeaning, The Full Mont}· reminded me of a famous Julia Roberts vehicle...

...In my view, the remaining three in the category were the most deserving...

...Kevin Spacey, who won in the Best Supporting Actor category two years ago for playing a gimpy criminal mastermind in The Usual Suspects, deserved to be tapped for L. A. Confidential...

...Perhaps this was because the Academy favors the star turn and they had ensemble casts...

...Two actors in particular may have been overlooked precisely because they dampened their customary histrionics...

...This time around the nominees included Matt Damon, a self-destructive mathematical genius in Good Will Hunting...

...The choices provide an opportunity to see what Hollywood insiders themselves think about the films of the previous 12 months...

...Good Will Hunting was one of last year's biggest surprises—a sincere drama directed by, of all people, Gus Van Sant...

...Francis Ford Coppola's John Grisham's The Rainmaker, for instance, which did not receive a single nomination, had some of 1997's best acting...

...The excessive show, and the "suspense," may well be over as you read this, but no matter...

...Nevertheless, the film homogenizes a corrupt industry by congratulating the heroes for joining it, rather than the work force...

...Still, he was so bent on receiving credit for the fake war he stage-managed that he got himself killed...

...Titanic was not powerful enough—nor was it made in a year whose other efforts were sufficiently mediocre—to merit the place it has been accorded in the annals of the Academy...

...The weakest contender was The Full Monty, Britain's sleeper hit about a group of unemployed workingclass men who decide to make a few bob as strippers...

...Indeed, nothing he has done in the past couldhave prepared us for his appearance in Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino's follow-up to Pulp Fiction...

...L. A. Confidential— starring the slighted Spacey—was a more plausible candidate...

...Helena Bonham Carter proved herself a star in The Wings of the Dove, bringing pathos to a figure that could easily have been played as a vicious conniver...

...Miniver...

...Sidney Lumet's Critical Care, admittedly preachy and redundant, nonetheless was the angriest and most cynical hospital drama to come out of Hollywood...

...Like Spacey, De Niro was also remarkable in a second film last year...

...It should be noted as well that the Academy was sensible enough to honor Gloria Stuart, who played a 100-year-old woman in Titanic, but failed to acknowledge The Rainmaker's Teresa Wright, as good there as she was 56 years ago when she walked off with an Oscar for playing the ingenue in Mrs...

...and Robert Duvall, an evangelist preacher with frighteningly violent tendencies in The Apostle...

...What De Niro and Spacey have shown, and what Nicholson, Fonda and even Hoffman have yet to prove, is that they are good enough to deliver superior performances in productions that are not centered around their personae...

...Good Will Hunting was a genuinely human story, a sharply written and well acted meditation on the rewards and pitfalls of higher education...

...The selection in past years of Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, Geoffrey Rush in Shine, and Tom Hanks in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump clearly indicated the industry's fondness for men who prove their worth in spite of emotional or physical disabilities...

...In addition, the movie's leading man, Matt Damon, was nominated for both Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay...

...But it garnered nominations in 14 categories— matching the record set in 1950 by writerdirector Joseph L. Mankiewicz' All About Eve, starring Bette Davis, which ended up winning seven Oscars...

...All the other nominees were British, with Kate Winslet of the astronomically popular Titanic riding high...

...True, the hourlong climax, where the great ship slowly sinks, was breathtakingly executed, a special effects tour de force...

...By contrast, writer-director James Cameron's Titanic was an epic that dabbled in clichés about class, gender and the destructive powers of nature...

...The other actor robbed of a nomination this year was Robert DeNiro...

...In short, I think the competition for Best Picture could have been much suffer...

...In doing so, it ushered the viewer into a strange culture not, in the typical Hollywood manner, by looking at it through Western eyes, but by following the intellectual and emotional growth of the Dalai Lama himself...

...Lumet's Night Falls on Manhattan and Jim Sheridan's The Boxer were politically charged films that also dealt with a broad range of characters instead of focusing exclusively on the motivations of one or two individuals...

...I would concede, however, that none of the nominations in this category were downright awful...

...The film went out of its way to explore the psyches of these other characters, but Spacey's steely portrayal was its ownjustification...

...John Singleton triumphed with Rosewood, a telling period piece about racial conflict in a small Florida community...

...Judging from the Best Actress category, for example, American women were deemed to have fared poorly in 1997...

...Helen Mirren and Albert Brooks stood out in a dream cast that included James Spader, Edward Herrmann and Wallace Shawn...

...his authority was so profound that he had no need to flaunt it...

...Several of the year's finest movies were left out of the running for Best Picture, too...

...It could be argued that he was even better in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Clint Eastwood's adaptation of the John Berendt bestseller...

...Of the five candidates, only Peter Fonda, who played a goodhearted and responsible grandfather in Ulee's Gold, was restrained...

...Career Girls, written and directed by Mike Leigh, was a unique and moving work about the lasting power of friendship that similarly had extraordinary supporting performances...

...Hunched and slow-witted, he was the antithesis of Wag the Dog's quick thinker, open to any suggestion but erupting into violence when taunted...

...Rather than draw attention to themselves, the two achieved credibility by integrating their characters into the pace and flow of the respective films...

...Although Hoffman talked and acted like a man in charge, the shoulder-shrugging De Niro was a subtler figure...

...Mickey Rourke, Virginia Madsen and Clare Danes surpassed themselves, while Jon Voight, Danny DeVito, Dean Stockwell, and Danny Glover were at the peak of their powers...

...His fame grubbing, coldhearted police lieutenant was a terrific foil in a three-man team that included a calculatingly ambitious detective and an impulsive crusading cop...

...His character was an inarticulate sad sack, withdrawn to the point where it seemed an effort for him to look anyone in the eye...

...In addition to employing Hitchcockian techniques of suspense, it had equally colorful heroes, villains and minor figures...

...It cost $2 million and has pulled in $200 million at the box office...

...On Screen HOLLYWOOD LOOKS AT ITSELF By Raphael Shargel Before each Academy Awards ceremony, with its television audience of a billion viewers, stars scheduled to participate fuss over elaborate costumes, writers compose campy bits that will be spouted from the podium, and choreographers create a new series of kitschy, overlong dance numbers...

...And actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet did have some passionate moments together that Cameron milked for as many tears as possible from his audience...

...Duvall did a magnificent job demonstrating how a man could merit the idolatry of his parishioners yet deserve to be hated by his family and feared by the women he pursued...

...The movie itself was tedious and almost wholly lacking in dramatic conflict, but De Niro was brilliant in his most understated role to date...

...Just one, Helen Hunt—currently an industry favorite—made the cut for her performance in As Good As It Gets...

...In the Best Actor category the Academy hewed to a tried formula...

...The filmmaker's work generally drips with irony and satire...

...As Good As It Gets was not much more substantial...

...The protagonists were ordinary looking guys and their exhibition was a one-night stand...

...it deserved to be nominated—and to win—for Best Director and Best Picture...

...Among the Best Picture nominees, it alone tackled a meaningful subject...

...Of greater interest to me than the winners is the whole spectrum of those nominated for Oscars by the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences...

...Judi Dench's rich, multilayered Queen Victoria was the best thing about Mrs...

...Kundun did receive a number of nods in minor categories...

...Sly and charming, he inspired equal measures of sympathy and suspicion...

...Brown...

...The movie progressed aimlessly from vignette to vignette, its interest resting almost entirely with Spacey's Southern gentleman accused of murder...

...here it got him a shot at Best Director...

...He was cowriter of the script with his friend Ben Affleck, another member of the cast...