The Best Actress list is even shorter — in fact, it's hard to think of more than a handful of studio movies this year in which women have even had leading roles. Contact's Jodie Foster and My Best Friend's Wedding's Julia Roberts are two exceptions, but since neither film is traditional Academy fare, the race has to be considered wide-open.
Hollywood's creative slump has given the backers of smaller films even more incentive to start their Oscar campaigns early. Miramax Films has at least half a dozen hopefuls, including Britain's Dame Judi Dench, who plays a lonely Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown, and Sean Penn, whose performance in August's She's So Lovely won him the Best Actor prize at Cannes. And with the right mix of critical and popular support, any of a dozen indie films — including Atom Egoyan's Cannes prizewinner The Sweet Hereafter (Fine Line); Neil LaBute's sure-to-be-controversial In the Company of Men (Sony Pictures Classics); Ang Lee's '70s period piece, The Ice Storm (Fox Searchlight); and Joel and Ethan Coen's Fargo follow-up, The Big Lebowski (Gramercy) — could grab a Best Picture nomination. "Will there be a Shine or English Patient this year?" asks Bingham Ray, copresident of October Films, which scored last year with Secrets & Lies and Breaking the Waves. "Who the hell knows?"
Indeed, the indies have their own problems this year, and few expect them to repeat their near sweep of last spring, when Hollywood's sole entrant for Best Picture was Jerry Maguire. "I think this is going to be the year of the studios," concedes Barker.
"If Academy voters are still on a negative trend and if the press remains anti-studio, regardless of what we do, it could turn out not to be," says Twentieth Century Fox film chairman Bill Mechanic, still smarting from the studio drubbing last year. "But we've got both big and small pictures coming out of the studios that should merit Oscar consideration."
That's true — at least in theory. The second half of 1997 will bring Steven Spielberg's slave-ship-mutiny drama, Amistad; Clint Eastwood's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil; Martin Scorsese's Tibet epic, Kundun; James L. Brooks' comedy-drama Old Friends; and films from Robert Benton, Francis Ford Coppola, Kevin Costner, Barry Levinson, Robert Redford, and Oliver Stone, all of whom already have Best Director Oscars to their credit. "The indies are going to get massacred by films like Amistad, Kundun, Redford's The Horse Whisperer, and Donnie Brasco," predicts Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein.
And then there's a wild card by the name of Titanic. When Paramount (which shared costs on the film with Fox) moved James Cameron's mega-budgeted behemoth from July to December, it went from summer-blockbuster wannabe to Oscar hopeful. "It absolutely merits" Oscar consideration, says Mechanic. "Will people judge it on its own merits and not all the noise around it? That's what you don't know. But it's very cool. The guy's made a $200 million art film." An Event Art Movie? If Oscar approves, this could be the start of something big.
