What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1997

(Can I tell you how much I hate this poster? That’s not how people hug! Either her neck has snapped or he’s getting impaled by her shoulder.)
The Year: 1997
What the Nominees Were: As Good as it Gets, The Full Monty, Good Will Hunting, L.A. Confidential, Titanic
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: It’s crazy that Donnie Brasco wasn’t nominated (Give it the As Good as It Gets spot!) Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men was great (I had it at the top of my list at the time, but I was more edgelord-y then), Allen should have been in contention with Deconstructing Harry, Sayles delivered yet again with Men With Guns, and one of my personal favorites from that year was Jill Sprecher’s Clockwatchers.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Titanic
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard. Donnie Brasco is great and L.A. Confidential is even better. It would easily win if I could move it to another year. But Titanic (a movie I didn’t appreciate at the time) just gets better and better every year. I showed it to my kids (10 and 13 at the time) and it instantly became the all-time favorite movie for both.

Writer and Director: James Cameron
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Gloria Stuart

The Story: An American heiress named Rose meets a rootless drifter named Jack on the doomed ship and they instantly fall head over heels for each other. Will either one survive the disaster?

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It won (deep breath) Picture, Director, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Editing, Score, Song, Sound, Sound Effects Editing, and Visual Effects. It lost Make-Up, Actress for Winslet, and Supporting Actress for Stuart, meaning that it got no acting awards.
How It Won: A pretty easy decision for the Academy: The most successful movie of all time, and it was a historical epic? Sign us up, please! America would have torched the Academy if this movie hadn’t won. Everybody was so enthusiastic to see it win that it ended up being the most watched Academy Awards show ever, as of this writing.

Why It Won:

1. Cameron may or may not be the best scenarist of all time, but there’s no doubt he’s the best scene-deleter. As with many of his movies, the deleted scenes would have made this movie awful, but Cameron thankfully realized what needed to go, including everybody confronting old-Rose at the deck of the ship to keep her from throwing the necklace in.
   
2. This movie has my favorite runtime for any movie ever, which is to say that, in the original press materials, it listed the runtime as “2 hours and 74 minutes,” which is technically true…but is not the way we typically reckon with time. I’m famous for my predilection for handsome (which is to say, shorter) movies, but this is one epic that earns every second. The movie is masterfully structured, and it’s no accident that the iceberg hits at the exact midpoint (and we’re enjoying ourselves before it hits as much as we do afterwards.)
   
3. The dialogue in this movie gets criticized a lot (specifically the fact that Jack and Rose call out each other’s names too often) but I’ve never gotten the objections. Yes, I wouldn’t call the prose literary, but the dialogue makes me fall in love with these characters just as much as they’re falling in love with each other, and that’s all I can ask.
4. The movie is also criticized for some small deviations from the true story, but that seems hopelessly nitpicky. Cameron (one of the first and most frequent people to visit the wreck) is clearly one of the all-time great experts on the topic, and the wealth of detail is luxuriously opulent. Most of the deviations (such as demonizing some people who weren’t that bad) are in the interest of telling a better story, and some of the flat-out mistakes (Jack remembers a lake that hadn’t been created yet) are charming.
5. Winslet getting a nomination as DiCaprio was passed over was perhaps unfair, but it speaks to Cameron’s frequent preference (in his best movies) for strong heroines over strong heroes. (Thankfully, Cameron hired silent-film-vet Stuart to play old-Rose instead of putting Winslet in old-age makeup, but you can’t help but notice that the only awards it lost were for Winslet, Stuart, and Make-Up. Combine those three into one and you would have surely had a winner.)
   

Ah, 1997: My dad growing up was always offended by ads that sexualized asexual products and would shout “It’ll get you laid” as he watched TV. This one would amuse him.