Oscars 1997: Best Picture

There was no beating the Titanic juggernaut for Best Picture, not in 1997:

But here's how I'd rank 'em:

1997 Oscars: Best Supporting Actress

Best Supporting Actress was a tight race between two very different performers and performances. In one corner, the beauty demonstrating her thesping abilities in the throwback noir L.A. Confidential, Kim Basinger (some still may consider her role a leading lady part); in the other, the veteran whose career was older than 20th Century Fox, emotionally anchoring the narrative of the epic box office titan (!) Titanic, Gloria Stuart! Indeed, at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, they both won, a rare awards season tie.

Oscar did not go the same way.

It’s an interesting lineup overall, with three Best Picture nominees, a dramedy, and a studio comedy all in the mix. Here's how I'd rank 'em:

1997 Oscars: Best Actress

Best Actress '97 was one of those where everyone won something. Julie Christie and Helena Bonham-Carter won critics' prizes, Helen Hunt and Judi Dench won Golden Globes, and Kate Winslet won the box office. If you were around in the late 90s, though, you may recall how unstoppable Helen Hunt was. She was the star of the TV hit Mad About You, for which she won four consecutive Emmys, 1996-99, and of the 1996 film, Twister. TV and movie stardom - isn't an Oscar the logical next step?

The nominees, ranked by me:

1997 Oscars: Best Actor

Hard to oversell what a slam-bang lineup 1997's Lead Actor was, is. One of those years where any one of them could win and it wouldn't be the wrong choice. The one that did win? A great choice!:

The nominees, as ranked by me:

1997 Oscars: Best Supporting Actor

Was it inevitable that Robin Williams would triumph at the Academy Awards?:

In addition to three previous nominations in Best Actor and being a beloved industry titan at the time, he was also only one of two Supporting Actors from Best Picture nominees, the other being As Good As It Gets' Greg Kinnear, at the time best known as the host for E!'s Talk Soup, for which he won two Daytime Emmys. L.A. Confidential and Titanic were better represented in the actress categories. And while The Full Monty won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast (or Best Ensemble, as some call it), none of its individual performers were ever able to gain a foothold in the awards race; only the BAFTAs, as one might expect, nominated Mark Addy and Tom Wilkinson, with the latter winning in a category that also included Rupert Everett for My Best Friend's Wedding (also a Golden Globe nominee) and Burt Reynolds for Boogie Nights (the only one of the nominees below so honored by the Brits). Reynolds found himself in the unfamiliar position of being the critics' pick all season, but while Boogie Nights was called his big comeback, Reynolds hated the movie: he fired his agent and publicly dismissed writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson and his experience working on it. The category's other big comeback story, Robert Forster, had a better time with Jackie Brown, praising his experience and crediting it with revitalizing his career (even on Wikipedia, his bio has a section called "Career Slump" before one labeled "Jackie Brown").

The performances, as I rank 'em: 

1997 Oscars: Best Director

We now start our journey through the 50th Academy Awards, celebrating the films of 1997. Next week we'll do Best Picture, this week we'll do the Acting categories, but today: Best Director.

Now, if you recall, it was a director who set me on this path of 1990, 1997, and 2003: Kevin Costner. Readers voted the years in which he directed a film as the project to follow my The Winner Is John Ford series. Sadly, as we noted yesterday, The Postman was little appreciated in its time, though Costner did "win" Worst Director at the Razzies and its overseas equivalent, Spain's Yoga Awards. Unfair and unjust.

Two directors who missed the Oscar lineup: James L. Brooks for Best Picture nominee As Good As It Gets and Steven Spielberg for Amistad, both nominated at the Directors Guild of America Awards and at the Golden Globes. The Boxer's Jim Sheridan was also nominated at the Golden Globes while missing out at the Academy Awards. And then there's Baz Luhrmann, whose 1996 Romeo + Juliet was no awards favorite in the States but qualified for the next year's BAFTAs, where he was nominated for Best Director against Curtis Hanson, Peter Cattaneo, and James Cameron...and won. 

But there can be only one King of the World at the Oscars: 

Here's how I'd rank 'em:

1997: The Big One

Today we cover the last month of films in 1997, including two Best Picture nominees and Kevin Costner's second directorial effort.

December 19, 1997, is one of the most important dates in cinema history, as it is the release date of James Cameron's Titanic. People forget this, but at the time, disaster was expected. The film went over $100M over budget, shooting went two months over schedule, and the release date was pushed back multiple times before being given an inauspicious pre-Christmas date. "Cameron's ego's done him in this time!" people thought. It soon became the world's highest-grossing film in history, a title it would hold until...James Cameron's Avatar in 2009, another film that people thought would bomb its release (people online said with Avatar: The Way of Water, this time the long-foretold end of Cameron's career would finally take place, it's bound to be a flop, no one cares about these movies! both Avatar films rank above Titanic in all-time box office). The movie was the #1 film at the box office for 15 weekends in a row, 3.75 straight months of Titanic dominance.

But just because something wasn't #1 doesn't mean it didn't make a lot of money. As Good As It Gets came out Christmas Day. The fourth film by James L. Brooks, it follows the unlikely relationship between an obsessive-compulsive ornery romance writer, his big-hearted but sharp-tongued waitress, and his gay artist neighbor. A heartfelt rom-com with very little in the way of special effects, it wound up a sensation, grossing over $300M and winning Oscars for lead actors Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt.

That was just one of several Christmas Day releases, including The Postman. It had been seven years since Kevin Costner had made his directorial debut with (and won the Oscar for) Dances with Wolves. In the years between, though he didn't direct, he produced many of the films he starred in, some of which (Wyatt Earp, Waterworld) people bring up when talking about Costner as a filmmaker. No one made that error with his films immediately following Dances with Wolves: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, JFK, and The Bodyguard. I think the reason is obvious: they were hits, and people want to associate Costner the Director with less-than-successful, big-budgeted epics. Something about the success of Dances with Wolves seemed to stick in people's craw.

The Postman, at least, would finally prove them right. He got the job directing because the source novel's original author, David Brin, felt Costner channeled his titular hero throughout his filmography. The hero being a drifter in a post-apocalyptic United States who is mistaken for a postal service worker, and in a world without mail or phones, he represents healing, communication, hope. Sentimental and sincere, critics hated it and audiences didn't see it. It grossed less than half its budget...worldwide. It would be another six years before he directed again.

But there were more than just three December releases. There were also these: