What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2002

The Year: 2002
What the Nominees Were: Chicago, Gangs of New York, The Hours, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Pianist
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Spike Jonze’s meta-mindbender Adaptation, Haynes’ mediation on melodrama Far From Heaven, and Spirited Away.

What Did Win: Chicago
How It’s Aged: It’s good. It can never quite decide if it wants to be a full adaptation with period sets and costumes, or just a filmed staging of the musical with modern sets and costumes, but Zellweger and Zeta Jones both give excellent full-tilt performances.

What Should’ve Won: Spirited Away (the American dub) (the Japanese version was released in 2001, but I’m trying to recognize movies on the year they were eligible for the American Oscars, and this movie’s American dub won an Oscar for 2002, so that’s the cut I’m recognizing.)

How Hard Was the Decision: The Pianist was eliminated due to problematicalness, which left Adaptation, Far From Heaven, and Spirited Away. In the end, I decided that the Parasite Rule must prevail and I had to choose the animated classic. (Odd that all three times I’ve used the rule it’s been for Japanese films. I don’t think of myself as a Japanophile, but that’s just the way it’s sorted itself out.)

Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Writer: Hayao Miyazaki
Stars: The late Daveigh Chase, who is wonderful; Jason Marsden; Suzanne Pleshette; David Ogden Stiers

The Story: Chihiro and her parents are en route to a new home when they get lured into an abandoned amusement park with food that turns the parents into pigs. Chihiro must take a job at a bath house for spirits in order to win their freedom.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Best Animated Feature, which was its only nomination.
Why It Didn’t Win: Miyazaki always had some American filmmaking fans, but it wasn’t until after he (semi-)retired that he was finally recognized as one of the all-time greats. There has still never been an animated Best Picture winner, much less a foreign one, so it’s a stretch to say this could have won, but it’s been universally recognized in the years since as one of the best films ever made, so I’m giving the people of 2002 the ability to spot that.

 
Why It Should Have Won:

1. This is one of many masterpieces made by Miyazaki (I’ve been failing to point out that his other films should have been considered) but this one merges the best elements of his other films: It combines the bountiful visual imagination of Castle in the Sky and satisfyingly complex mythology of Howl’s Moving Castle, with the good-natured gentleness of My Neighbor Totoro. This is the ultimate expression of his life’s work.
   
2. For its dramatic engine, the film revisits a topic from another early Miyazaki film, Kiki’s Delivery Service: the first job. But whereas that one was about (what would come to be called) the gig economy, this one is about starting out in a minimum wage job under one roof, and it perfectly captures the ups and downs of that experience: Sometimes you spot clever solutions that the drudges around you fail to see, sometimes you make rookie mistakes that almost bring everything crashing down.
   
3. Everyone is pursuing their own self-interest except Chihiro, who is trying to rescue her parents, but even she eventually realizes that the only way to get them back is to deprioritize them and instead pay the new debts she has acquired. The theme is one of letting go (from the flowers she is crushing at the beginning, from her old school and life, and from her parents), reclaiming your name from those that would take it from you, and helping out wherever you can, without insisting on overturning the apple cart.
   
4. Most great stories contain elements of real life national pain. This film focuses on the environmental damage of Japan’s economic boom, and the financial suffering of that boom’s bust. The magical land is said to be one of many amusement parks abandoned during the recession. The stink spirit Chihiro saves is filled with pollution, and her friend Haku turns out to be the spirit of a river that was paved over. Restoring balance is always a major theme in Miyazaki’s work. (Compare this to truly terrible American animated films with environmental themes like PIXAR’s Hoppers.)
   
5. I’ve had financial opportunities I did not take because I never wanted to force my kids to move once they’d started school. Every middle-grade story about the wrenching pain kids undergo when they have to do so has affirmed that decision.

Ah, 2002: To this day, nobody knows what to do on these anniversaries...

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2001

The Year: 2001
What the Nominees Were: A Beautiful Mind, Gosford Park, In the Bedroom, The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, Moulin Rouge
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: In retrospect, the most acclaimed movie of this year is now David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The Coen Brothers turned out one of their weirdest but best with The Man Who Wasn’t There. Wes Anderson almost equaled Rushmore with The Royal Tenenbaums. Donnie Darko was a great one-hit wonder. And then of course, there’s Memento…

What Did Win: A Beautiful Mind
How It’s Aged: Anyone who knows anything about mental illness was going to feel very frustrated here, wanting to shout “that’s not how that works!” An honest portrayal of the life of John Nash, who was not a very good person, would have gone down very differently.

What Should’ve Won: Memento
How Hard Was the Decision: This is another hard year because the general consensus is that the Academy was wrong and that the best movie of this year was Mulholland Drive. But I just can’t get behind that choice. The movie started as a TV pilot, and I’ve always felt it would have been a great TV show, but the decision to tack on an ending and try to wrap things up quickly was ultimately a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is great, and maybe if I didn’t know the history, I wouldn’t notice this at all, but once you know it, it’s tremendously obvious. So I decided to go with Memento. (I should point out that Memento was released in festivals in the year 2000, and won some awards that year, but didn’t have a wide release until 2001 and that was the year it was eligible for Oscars, so I’m counting it as a 2001 release.)

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer: Christopher Nolan, based on the short story “Memento Mori” by his brother Jonathan Nolan
Stars: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano

The Story: A former insurance investigator named Leonard Shelby, who cannot make new memories, makes the extremely bad decision to hunt down his wife’s killer. A femme fatale named Natalie manipulates him into killing a sketchy cop named Teddy …Or that’s what we eventually figure out, but every scene in the movie is in reverse order, making everything very confusing, and putting us in his shoes.

Any Nominations or Wins: It was nominated for Original Screenplay (despite being adapted) and Best Film Editing, but lost both.
Why It Didn’t Win: An “inspiring” “true story” like A Beautiful Mind beats this gritty mindbender any day of the week.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. This is the ultimate puzzle box of a movie, and you feel very smart as you snap the jigsaw pieces together (and occasionally dumb as you fail to do so.) It’s a very satisfying reveal when we find out that the one really jerking Leonard around is neither Natalie or Teddy, but he himself. Like most of us, Leonard is his own worst enemy.
2. One of the enduring mysteries of Hollywood: why wasn’t Guy Pearce more of a star? He made a big splash with L.A. Confidential, then he had this masterful performance, and then… very little. He was lucky to get a villain role in Iron Man 3. But why wasn’t he playing Iron Man himself? Is it a case where he was picky in his roles, or was he difficult to work with, maybe? I don’t know. (For that matter, Carrie-Anne Moss should’ve gotten more parts too.)
   
3. The bizarre DVD requires you to take a psychological test to get to the menu, and if you answer it in just the right sequence it’ll give you the ultimate easter egg: the movie rearranged in chronological order. Massively edifying to see it that way, and it is possible to cheat using the internet, so check it out!
4. It’s funny to watch today. For a movie from the 21st century, the plot is very reliant on outdated technology (landlines and a polaroid camera). Leonard Shelby may still be out there killing the wrong people, but hopefully he’s doing it more efficiently these days with the help of a smartphone.
   
5. I can’t say for sure whether or not we’ll be seeing Christopher Nolan again, because I’m writing this book in order, but I can say definitively that this is my favorite of his films. I have a limited tolerance for the narrative trickery of some of his later films, but this one hits me just the right way, setting a bar that he still has yet to surpass, in my opinion. This time around, the central conceit is dazzling, and a little dizzying, but never deadening.
6. As Leonard himself point out, this whole situation is karmic justice for him denying an insurance claim of a man with a similar condition.  At the heart of so much of American literature is the evils of our health-care system.  

Ah, 2001: I guess it’s never the wrong time to send the right message, but this was an odd choice, Kenneth Cole…

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2000

The Year: 2000
What the Nominees Were: Chocolat; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Erin Brockovich; Gladiator; Traffic
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: The Coen Brothers’ delightful O Brother Where Art Thou?

What Did Win: Gladiator
How It’s Aged: Your milage may vary, but I feel that this is a fundamentally silly movie that takes itself way too seriously. I actually preferred the critically derided Gladiator 2, because that movie knew just how cheesy it was.

What Should’ve Won: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
How Hard Was the Decision: Not very. I love this movie.

Director: Ang Lee
Writers: Wang Hui-ling, James Schamus and Tsai Kuo-jung, based on the novel by Wang Dulu
Stars: Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen

The Story: Master swordsman Li Mu Bai entrusts his treasured green destiny sword to his never-quite-happened love interest Yu Shu Lien but the sword is then stolen by a young noblewoman-by-day, thief-by-night named Jen Yu. Jen Yu is tracked by down by her own conflicted lover, a mountain bandit named Lo. Will our heroes get the sword back, and who will end up dead in the process?

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Foreign Language Film, Art Direction, Cinematography and Original Score. It lost Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Costume Design, Editing and Original Song.
Why It Didn’t Win: Obviously it was under serious consideration, because it won four awards, but ultimately it couldn’t compete with Gladiator’s revival of the good old fashioned sword-and-sandal flick.  Maybe the Academy just prefers its epics in English (though there was a crude English dub of this one.)

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Neither Chow Yun Fat nor Zhang Ziyi were trained martial artists, but you’d never know it, because Lee and fight choreographer Yuen Wo Peing (who also did The Matrix) beautifully and balletically choreograph everything down to the smallest gesture. (Lee says in the commentary, “I learned the hard way making this martial arts film…the way this kind of film works, it’s more like music, more like dancing choreography…It’s cinema. It’s cinematic skills rather than the skill of beating someone up.”)
   
2. His co-writer, co-producer, and co-commentor James Schamus then cuts him down saying: “It’s not cinema, it’s a movie.” The commentary is great fun as Schamus keeps needling Lee about his previous flops (“Ride with the Devil, what a bomb”) and any other way he can. They’re a fun pair.
3. I was shocked to discover that the movie is exactly two hours. It feels more like three, in a good way, in that it’s got a lot of epic sweep crammed into its handsome runtime. The twenty minute flashback to Lo and Jen’s romance, shot on the scenic wastelands of far-Western China, is worthy of David Lean.
   
4. This is the first Lee movie I’ve gotten to (but not the last, of course.) It’s radically different from his previous movies in some ways, but Schamus points out that it’s sort of Sense and Sensibility with Martial Arts. “We’re talking about the relationship between individual freedom and the oppressive orders of a society that has yet to deal with the aspirations of its female members.” (He of course later sums this up more dismissively as “Ang Lee, repression, blah blah blah.”) It’s great to see Michelle Yeoh, who had made lots of good chop-socky movies, get a meaty part like this.
5. Peter Pau’s Oscar winning cinematography steals the show throughout, and he’s particularly good at one of the biggest challenges in film: Day for Night (scenes set at night but shot during the day.) Digital color-timing was new and this was the first movie to master the advances to make Day for Night work, really for the first time in cinematic history (Lean himself never mastered it and that’s the biggest flaw with Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia)
   
6. The Pitt-Jolie version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith would steal from this movie the whole “prove someone’s a super-assassin by dropping something at the dinner table and their super-reflexes keep it from hitting the ground” bit, but this gets points for doing it first and doing it better. The look Yeoh gives Ziyi when she gives herself away is devastating.
   

Ah, 2000: You keep using this word “punk.” I do not think it means what you think it means.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1999

The Year: 1999
What the Nominees Were: American Beauty, The Cider House Rules, The Green Mile, The Insider, The Sixth Sense
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: This year is very frustrating for me. The internet (and even an actual print book entitled “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen” by Brian Raftery) loves to claim that this was one of the all-time best years for American film. I just don’t see it. Most of the nominees are merely okay movies. As for non-nominees, it’s supposedly a shame that The Matrix wasn’t nominated? Really? When I saw it, I immediately tagged it as a recipe for creating psychopaths (nobody is real but you) and that’s proven to be very true. Fight Club has similar problems. Magnolia is a very good movie but it’s also a mess, where half the storylines don’t work as well as they ought. Eyes Wide Shut is a bit of a trainwreck. I enjoyed Being John Malcovich at the time but tried to rewatch it recently and couldn’t get through it because it’s just too self-consciously quirky. Election is brilliant, but its attitude toward child-abuse has aged very badly. Speaking of which…

What Did Win: American Beauty
How It’s Aged: Hoo boy. This very sympathetic portrait of a would-be child molester has aged even worse. Could you make an unproblematic movie about that subject matter? Maybe so, if you were very careful to get the tone right, but this movie doesn’t pull it off. And of course, given later allegations against star Kevin Spacey, it’s deeply ironic he got (and won an Oscar for) this role.

What Should’ve Won: The Talented Mr. Ripley
How Hard Was the Decision: Ultimately, there are only three unproblematic movies I love from this overrated year: Galaxy Quest, The Sixth Sense and The Talented Mr. Ripley. I rewatched the latter two to help make my decision and this one won (though I really enjoyed Sixth Sense and I do recommend it highly. Talk about a movie that rewards rewatches!)

Director: Anthony Minghella
Writer: Minghella, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith
Stars: Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jack Davenport

The Story: After borrowing a friend’s blazer for a piano recital, young con man Tom Ripley gets a chance to go to Italy and try to convince a rich man’s son, Dickie Greenleaf, to come home. Instead, Tom kills Dickie and takes over his life, then has to tell many lies to try to avoid being discovered.

Any Nominations or Wins: Astoundingly, it didn’t get a Picture or Actor nomination, but it did get nods for Supporting Actor for Law, Adapted Screenplay, Score, Production Design and Costume Design. It won nothing.

Why It Didn’t Win: American Beauty oozed Profundity with a capital P (Oh, the plastic bag!) so this neo-noir beauty couldn’t compete, I guess. Still, it’s baffling that it got beat out for a nomination by weak fare such as The Cider House Rules.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. It certainly seems that the Academy has never loved Matt Damon (though 2026 may finally be his overdue year). This is one of multiple years he should have won the award, perfectly capturing both the psychopathic hollow soul and the achingly sympathetic underdog that form the warring cores of the character. Those two aspects shouldn’t go together, but Damon makes it work beautifully.
   
2. I’ve always said that the special ingredient to a great performance is to always give your actor a secret that is not revealed in the scene. Even better is when they have conflicting lies that the audience knows about that are about to smash together, and then we watch them acrobatically get out of it. Damon’s linguistic gymnastics are delightful and riveting.
   
3. At this point I’ve read the novel, seen the original French adaptation with Alain Delon (Purple Noon), seen this, and seen the excellent black-and-white TV adaptation “Ripley” with Andrew Scott in the role. I enjoyed all four, but this one is the best of them, because Minghella complicates the story more, twisting the many knives that are out for Tom at all times. (Most of the second half of the movie, featuring the Blanchett and Davenport characters, was added by Minghella.)
   
4. One of Minghella’s many changes was switching Dickey’s amateur dabbling from painting to jazz, which is inherently more cinematic (though the TV show got great fun out of Dickie’s terrible paintings.) You can tell that Minghella loves luxuriating in the late-night jam sessions, just as much as he loves to recreate midcentury Europe at its most gorgeous.
   
5. Speaking of gorgeous, is there any better casting as “the beautiful people” than late-90s Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow? They’re both great actors, but they also needed ethereal good looks for these part to work, and they certainly make the movie easy on the eyes.
   
   
   

Ah, 1999: Their slogan was “Don’t Be Evil.” Then they changed it.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1998

The Year: 1998
What the Nominees Were: Elizabeth, Life is Beautiful, Saving Private Ryan, Shakespeare in Love, The Thin Red Line
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski. Over in Denmark, the Dogme film movement hit a high mark with Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, which certainly deserved a nod.

What Did Win: Shakespeare in Love
How It’s Aged: Personally, I like it a lot. A delightful little pastry combining 90s Rom Com tropes with a highly fictionalized version of the life of Shakespeare. A good movie that suffered from being named Best Picture, a bar it shouldn’t have had to clear.

What Should’ve Won: Rushmore
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard. It’s universally considered to be one of the great Oscar injustices that Saving Private Ryan didn’t win, so I just rewatched that movie…and I really hate it. “Greatest Generation” macho fan fiction, in which the only one who follows the Geneva conventions of course turns out to be a sniveling coward in battle, uselessly quivering as the German soldier they spared comes back and kills several of them. Way too long (three hours!), terrible score, very dated acid-washed color timing, gloopy acting from Hanks…Compare this to a vastly superior movie, The Big Red One (which I reluctantly passed over back in 1980), which tells a similar story, but this time written and directed by an actual veteran, and there’s a world of difference. Fuller has the genuine humanity that Spielberg sorely lacks. So that left Rushmore and The Big Lebowski. Believe it or not, of the two, I prefer this one. Lebowski is great, but a bit too shaggy-dog to rank up there with the Coens’ best, in my eyes.

Director: Wes Anderson
Writers: Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson (!)
Stars: Jason Schwartzman, Olivia Williams, Bill Murray, Brian Cox

The Story: Max Fischer is a scholarship student at an elite private school, where he runs all the clubs but neglects his grades. He strikes up a friendship with a school funder, Mr. Blume, and develops a crush on a Kindergarten teacher, Ms. Cross. When the dean kicks him out, Max ends up in public school, but he continues his schemes to get Ms. Cross. Instead, she falls for Bloom. Max tries to get revenge, but ultimately helps get them together and finds a girl his own age.

Any Nominations or Wins: Nothing! Not even Murray! Not even screenplay! Truly shocking. It won Independent Spirit Awards for Director and Supporting Actor for Murray. Murray was also nominated for a Golden Globe.
Why It Didn’t Win: This year is infamous as the year that Harvey Weinstein’s influence peaked and the dubious win of Shakespeare in Love has his fingerprints all over it. (Weinstein remains one of the most thanked people in the history of the awards) If Miramax had distributed Rushmore, would they have given this one that push instead? That’s an interesting “what if.”

Why It Should Have Won:

1. I fell in love with Wes Anderson when this movie was released and he’s still my favorite working filmmaker today. (If you were to ask Reddit to create a Mount Rushmore of the greatest directors working today, it would surely be Nolan, Villeneuve, Fincher, and Tarantino. Each of those four men has made at least one good movie, but I find it so depressing that the style they share is the dominant one.) Anderson has a strong personality that has only asserted itself more and more in the years that have followed this one. Some find it twee, but I find it delightful, and, like Kubrick, the man is precise. Every prop is bespoke and intentionally placed. And they both know where to put a camera.
   
2. We passed over Groundhog Day, but I’m glad to get to award another legendary Bill Murray performance here. The movies are only five years apart, but they marked different phases of his career, going from cocky leading man to world-weary supporting player. I adore his line reading when he tells Max he was in Vietnam and Max knows just enough to ask “Were you in the shit?” Murray considers laughing in the kid’s face, but instead quietly responds, “Yeah, I was in the shit.”
   
3. Out of every movie I’ve seen, I identify with this (frequently awful) hero the most. Like him, I was a precocious kid with bad grades and too much interest in extracurriculars. Like him, I always befriended adults, then felt easily betrayed by them. Like him, I became marginally less insufferable only due to some big humiliations. Schwatzman’s bluster is infectious, but it’s wonderful whenever it gets punctured a little, such as when he suddenly loses all confidence and meekly asks the dean, “Couldn’t we just let me drift by...for old time’s sake?”
   
4. In good movies, the hero must always choose between goods or between evils, rather than choose between good and evil. That choice is the theme. The theme of this movie is ambition vs. acceptance. As always, the hero must ultimately choose one over the other, but not be sure if he is right. Max chooses to scale back his ambitions in the end and accept some things about himself (“I’m a barber’s son.”) but he’s still mounting a ludicrously over-the-top play at his new, more modest public school. For my checklist, I identified various things he says that might qualify as a “false statement of philosophy” in the first half and a “corrected statement of philosophy” in the second half, but I realized there’s one statement he never abandons. He finds that Ms. Cross has transcribed a Jacques Cousteau quote: “When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.” That remains true of Max throughout.
   
5. Max tries to seduce Ms. Cross by reading David Halberstam’s “The Powers That Be” in front of her, which doesn’t work, but it does wonderfully establish his metaphor family: Midcentury public intellectual (“May I see some documentation?” “I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but…”, “I strongly agree with your views,” and my favorite, when he adds “and whatnot,” to the end of a sentence.)

Ah, 1998: Nope, don’t buy these! Much better flat-screen TVs for cheaper are coming very soon…

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.