Best Picture, 1997

Awards presented March 23, 1998 

The nominees were ... 

• As Good As It Gets
• The Full Monty 
• Good Will Hunting 
• L.A. Confidential 
• Titanic

... when they should have been ... 

• As Good As It Gets
• Boogie Nights  
• Jackie Brown  
• L.A. Confidential 
• Titanic

And the Oscar went to ... 
Titanic. If you ask them, lots of people today will deny that they ever liked James Cameron's blockbuster. Which makes you wonder how it managed to become the first movie to gross a billion dollars, to set a record of fifteen consecutive weeks as the No. 1 film on the box-office charts, and to tie Ben-Hur's record of eleven Oscars. The truth is, it was a must-see spectacle with special effects never witnessed before. The other truth is: The Academy follows the money, unless it is given strong reason not to. In this case, there was no strong reason -- like an equally compelling film with a comparable box-office but a more intelligently written screenplay than Cameron's (which didn't merit a nomination) -- not to give the store away to Titanic. But this is a blog about hindsight, and hindsight has not been kind to the movie.   

... when it should have gone to ...

L.A. Confidential 

Which did have an intelligently written screenplay, by Brian Helgeland and the film's director, Curtis Hanson, and it won the Oscar. It also had a pretty terrific cast, including Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey, and James Cromwell, as well as Kim Basinger, who won the supporting actress Oscar that many expected to go to Titanic's Gloria Stuart. But L.A. Confidential is just a sharp-edged movie about cops and corruption in the 1950s, with no romantic self-sacrifice, and nobody left the theater raving about its special effects -- if it had any.