Blame Canada: The Toronto Film Festival

Others rushed to fill the Miramax void. Among the 328 films screening around Toronto, there was SoHo art darling-turned-director Julian Schnabel's visually opulent Before Night Falls (the life story of exiled Cuban novelist-poet Reinaldo Arenas), which nabbed the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival the week before. ''It's been one of those follow-your-bliss weeks,'' raved Schnabel. ''We actually could be in tuxedos in March.'' Ang Lee might want to dust off his Sense and Sensibility cuff links, too: His mythopoetic martial-arts romance Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon took home Toronto's People's Choice Award. Tiger even burned bright enough to woo other actors away from hyping their own films. ''It's my kind of chick flick,'' gushed Helen Mirren, in town to help sell the comedy Greenfingers. ''It's not about pregnancy and boyfriends and divorce, it's about chicks fighting each other sensationally.''

There was rampant gushing for Willem Dafoe's petulant bloodsucker in Shadow of the Vampire and splatters of praise for Ed Harris as the explosive art star Jackson Pollock in Pollock. Appropriately, this Olympic year also generated plenty of global discoveries: Spain's Javier Bardem as the lead in Before Night Falls, Irish stage actor Colin Farrell as a Vietnam-bound Texan soldier in Joel Schumacher's Tigerland, and Eric Bana as a real-life Aussie crime legend in Chopper. ''The screening just finished, and people keep coming up saying 'D'you have representation,''' Bana marveled. ''I wish I did, for no other reason than I could say, 'Yes, go away.'''

Still, for all of these memorable roles and films, no movie strutted away with that out-of-the-blue American Beauty jackpot. ''I'm not sure there's a huge surge of excitement about one film, although Billy Elliot created a ripple,'' festival director Piers Handling said of the bittersweet British comedy about a kid boxer- turned-ballet dancer. ''Almost Famous came here with enthusiasm already building.'' So did favorites like Before Night Falls and Crouching Tiger.

Distributors trawling for a big catch found themselves spending their pennies on popcorn, since most of the freshest phenomena — like the labyrinthine thriller Memento, with L.A. Confidential's Guy Pearce, and David Mamet's showbiz satire State and Main with Sarah Jessica Parker and Alec Baldwin — arrived in Canada with distributors. Unlike 1997, when Robert Duvall's The Apostle sold for an estimated $6 million at 1:30 a.m. the night of its premiere, distributors had no religious conversions at Toronto 2000. There were sales, but nothing that inspired a bidding war, let alone a holy one. ''This is my 19th year,'' said Artisan's Malin. ''It used to be you'd negotiate on 5 or 6 films, and seriously like at least 12. But the range of films available for acquisition in recent years has gone from extremely disappointing to kind-of-okay-but-there's-no-money-in-it.''

While Artisan bought nothing, Lions Gate spent a reported $1 million on Weight of Water with Sean Penn and Elizabeth Hurley, and snagged the low-budget comic shocker Vulgar (coexecutive-produced by Kevin Smith) about a gang-raped transvestite clown. ''It's rude and crude and brilliant,'' says Lions Gate president Tom Ortenberg. So crude that one female viewer fled during the rape scene (think Deliverance with chattier hicks) to vomit in the bathroom.

The All Quiet on the Distribution Front vibe actually helps maintain Toronto's for-the-love-of-film integrity. ''It's a filmmakers' fest, not a slave market,'' said Ben Kingsley, in for his brutal role as a sociopathic thief in Sexy Beast. Mark Ruffalo, star of You Can Count on Me — Sundance's top prize winner — was far more relaxed with his film in Toronto: ''There's no innocence in Sundance. We're all disgusted and burnt out; then you come here and these people, they love it.''

— Additional reporting by Thom Geier and Chris Nashawaty