On Screen

...Instead, she greets him with a welcoming smile and gentle words that nail down the filmmaker's redemptive message—but they also render her as void of autonomy as the other women who inhabit her world...

...Michael Clarke Duncan, who in The Green Mile portrays a retarded death-row inmate capable of healing cancers with the touch of his hand, moved the Academy more than Tom Hanks' comparatively ordinary but more complex protagonist...

...American Beauty's, characters all deal with their misery in the weakest and most cowardly manner possible—by running from problems, not trying to solve them...

...Meryl Streep picked up her 12th nomination for Music of the Heart, tying Katharine Hepburn's record...

...Crowe and Pacino do manage, over the course of the action, to coax 60 Minutes into airing their antitobacco broadcast...

...But in a dismal list of mediocrities, the appearance of The Cider House Rules, which received seven nominations to American Beauty's eight, offers some hope that a few filmmakers, and Academy members, are willing to push at least a little against the burly, smirking callousness that now dominates contemporary sensibilities...

...Since the film takes place in a racist Southern town in the 1930s, director Darabont could have staged a great scene where the suddenly healthy woman rails against the enormous alien figure standing over her...

...But the film's performances are charming...

...Bening plays a fanatically insecure real estate agent who works all day, conducts a passionless affair with a professional rival, and somehow manages to come home in time to prepare gourmet dinners for a family unwilling to enjoy them...

...Its pro-choice position is forcefully articulated and, through a set of unfortunate and moving circumstances, passionately defended...

...Ripley to reveal the satiricheart of the film's source novel...

...Adapted by John Irving from his novel, the film is a coming-of-age story about a young orphan who leaves his foster home to find himself in the world...

...The women in The Sixth Sense and The Green Mile are absurdly beneficent, colorless vehicles forthe redemption of their men...

...Every year, we complain so vociferously about unfair nominations and overlooked works that when the date of the ceremony draws near, our hopeful defenses of worthy nominees and condescending predictions about those who will carry the day sound hollow...

...Along with The Sixth Sense, however, they are concerned only with the salvation of the protagonist and those close to him...

...The most memorable are the lawyer for CBS, who prevents them from putting their exposé of tobacco companies on the air, and Crowe's wife, who divorces him when the going gets tough...

...Their efforts may have been honored merely because they betray a pretentiousness that, like many of the chosen actors, advertises itself, often at the expense of narrative development...

...The films nominated for Best Picture —Lasse Hallström's The Cider House Rules, Frank Darabont's The Green Mile, Michael Mann's The Insider, M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, and Sam Mendes' American Beauty—all did well at the box office and represent the middle range of contemporary cinema...

...And while Jude Law's doomed object of sexual jealousy won him anod, Cate Blanchett's comic debutante was passed over, even though she was the only performer in The Talented Mr...

...When Tom Hanks discovers, after a grueling two hours, that the dimwitted Duncan can heal the sick, does he campaign to have the man released...

...CBS may be a bit tainted by its initial reluctance, but the network does at last do the right thing...

...Hallström, who did an admirably smooth job with The Cider House Rules, has made minor films in the United States after a checkered career in Sweden, where he made both My Life as a Dog and ABBA—the Movie...

...At the climax of The Green Mile, Hanks and a group of fellow prison guards force the supematurally gifted inmate Duncan past the outraged husband of Hanks' invalid friend Patricia Clarkson...

...Hollywood men of 1999 are fighters rather than lovers, but their narrow struggles make them appear more closely allied with Ralph Fiennes' cankered solipsism in The English Patient than with Braveheart, Shakespeare in Love or even Forrest Gump...

...Of course, I would have liked to have seen other movies make the grade...

...Where it should be contending with the implications of dropping out, it diverts audience attention toward a murder mystery whose culprit becomes obvious long before the camera reveals him...

...Because the film promotes the lie that most TV producers value truth over ratings, Crowe hardly seems a voice crying out in the wilderness...

...In fact, it can stand on its own strong merits...

...But not in 1999...

...The eight-foot black man kneels at Clarkson's bedside, lays hands on her, and heals her cancer...

...Mendes, Mann and Shyamalan rely heavily on the dark, smoky or very drab palates of their cinematographers as they gravitate toward largely empty, poorly lit interiors...

...One is that the early months of the year are notorious as dumping grounds for movies of little critical or commercial appeal...

...But in truth, despite our protestations, we secretly relish the days of Oscar frenzy...

...Crowe's inability to recognize his good fortune as well as his lack of interest in the social benefits of his efforts is mirrored in the allegedly selfless choices of The Green Mile...

...When called upon to do so, he performs illegal abortions (the film is set in the 1940s...

...By the time March rolls around we are no longer reeling from the plethora of December releases...

...Besides Eyes Wide Shut, I wish the Academy had tendered deserved attention to The Straight Story, Topsy-Turvy, The Iron Giant, The End of the Affair, the fascinatingly revisionist Titus, and the simplistic but compelling Hurricane...

...Oscar loves the deranged, the deformed and the victimized...

...Perhaps American audiences really do fantasize about protecting and caring for their families and friends, following a righteous cause that only an inside few can appreciate, and then experiencing spiritual fulfillment as they heartlessly blot out the rest of the uninitiated world...

...Rebelling inamannerwell-tuned to the spirit of the year, she hooks up with a potsmoking classmate she hopes will carry her away and make her forget the unpleasantness of what she sees as her petty existence...

...The second reason is that we are eager to see to what extent our collective commentary was responsible for the Academy's picks...

...Their daughter, played by Thora Birch, is as hostile to the couple as they are to one another...

...Of the year's major releases, The End of the Affair alone fits yesterday's mold, and it was tapped just twice: for Julianne Moore's affecting lead performance, and for its cinematography...

...Does he take him to a hospital of incurables...

...This doesn't stop Mann from constructing sequence after sequence where his tormented and self-obsessed hero is discovered typing at his computer, lounging melancholically in an easy chair, or swinging at golf balls on an elephantine practice course...

...I doubt that any segment of the population looks forward to them more eagerly...

...Its suburban protagonists, descendants of overtly sunny but inwardly tortured figures that span American films from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to Blue Velvet, make up a vindictive and cantankerous family...

...Of the five nominees, only The Cider House Rules contains anything like a love story, though at the first sign of adversity the heroine refuses to commit to her beloved...

...Earlier this year, Atom Egoyan's Felicia's Journey put prochoice rhetoric in the mouth of a sexual deviant and serial killer...

...The much more intelligent Cider House Rules serves as an antidote to that fiasco, making a case for the necessity of abortion under certain circumstances...

...Michael Caine, as the doctor who trains Maguire, and Delroy Lindo, as a paternalistic apple picker with a dark secret, are particularly memorable, though only Caine received a nomination...

...It is a little syrupy...

...He helps Clarkson, a personal friend, and then allows the inmate to fry in the electric chair...

...And it indulges liberal fantasies by having Maguire befriend a group of itinerant and illiterate black apple pickers who accept him as a fellow worker and friend...

...It is unlikely that any of these people will ever attain the stature of an Orson Welles or a John Ford, much less that of the directors they shut out...

...MORE ARRESTING is the radical change in the Academy's interests, reflected by its candidates for Best Picture...

...Intentionally or not, The Insider is an epic about the diversions of the leisure class, about men who live so well that it is difficult to sympathize with them when they put their careers in danger or are doomed to return, late and alone, to their stately manors...

...None are masterpieces, but the members of the Academy had the good sense to choose them over commercially successful yet artistically disastrous works like The Matrix, The Blair Witch Project, Paul Thomas Anderson's endless and tiresome Magnolia, and Oliver Stone's boorish and unexciting Any Given Sunday...

...Their films are so long in part because, unlike the great cinema artists, they favor dialogue over image...

...Given the pool, The Cider House Rules would be worth championing merely because it is the least defeatist of the nominees...

...Both The Insider and The Green Mile profess to be about redemption...

...The couple at the center of A merican Beauty torment and betray each other, yet where the film humiliates and embarrasses Annette Bening, it celebrates Kevin Spacey's greater viciousness...

...Kevin Spacey's unexplained and sudden loathing for the doll house he built and populated is once again portrayed as a kind of spiritual awakening, but his new awareness leads only to cruel and ironic attacks...

...After learning that Duncan has grown weary of life and is capable of transferringhis gift to another person, itnever occurs to him that he should take over the doomed man's mantle and continue his healing work...

...As for performers, the Academy characteristically opted for the flashy...

...This year, for example, we can tell ourselves that American Beauty is the front-runner because it was very favorably reviewed...

...It is difficult for me to understand the appeal of movies whose meanness of spirit is barely masked by an attractive cast and an affirmative New Age score...

...That is to say, a successful picture had to have something in it for the ladies as well as the gents...

...It is the only one of the five to articulate a political position, to affirm a social imperative...

...The film does not satirize their sad attitudes, it glorifies their hostility by depicting Birch's deadpan demeanor and Spacey's cool rage as a kind of ironic heroism (he narrates the picture...

...Indeed, we are starved for something to discuss and can look back at the previous year soberly...

...Television producer Al Pacino and scientist Russell Crowe bond during the course of The Insider, but all the women in the film are obstructionist harpies...

...Last year may not have been a great one for veteran directors, but it did boast impressive work from Woody Allen, David Lynch, George Lucas, Neil Jordan, John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, and Mike Leigh, not to mention Robert Airman and Stanley Kubrick...

...By the same token, the meticulously crafted and commercially touted Eyes Wide Shut will not be considered even for technical awards, in part because most commentators panned it so forcefully...

...The films nominated this year are the ugliest in Oscar history...

...To these directors visual effects are a supplement to action...

...Overall, the Academy's choice of actors, particularly in the lead category, was fairly conservative, favoring the young professional and the seasoned player...

...Every winning movie since 1994 has told the story of a deeply passionate yet doomed romance within the context of a historical drama, an adventure tale or a disastermovie...

...Of the men nominated, Mendes and Spike Jonze (who made Being John Malkovich) are first-timers, Shyamalan has done two minor pieces, and Mann has only a handful of features under his belt...

...If Michael Mann wanted The Insider to expose the corruption of television news, he chose to tell the wrong story...

...The rest of the world, it would seem, can go to hell...

...It brings Tobey Maguire from the sparklingly genteel orphanage, where he has become an expert medic without any formal training, into a rural fantasy world...

...Our hero then returns to his original calling, working with sick children at an orphanage...

...The choices for Best Director, by contrast, tottered alarmingly toward inexperience...

...His heroism is marked by the insults he rifles at his wife and the lust he conceives for his daughter's best friend, a high school cheerleader...

...It offers him a gorgeous supermodel to make love to and—temporarily—care for him...

...Thus The Sixth Sense's Haley Joel Osment, playing a child haunted by the spirits of the dead, received a nomination while his co-star, the equally good Bruce Willis, was overlooked...

...Angelina Jolie's incurable sociopath in Girl, Interrupted impressed the organization more than Winona Ryder's fine work as a convalescent...

...That would certainly explain the popularity of American Beauty, the crudest and most derivative of the Best Picture nominees...

...There are two reasons fortius...