Myself surprised

Hollywood keeps pace with the indies

I'm still a curmudgeon, I think. I'm the only person on earth who was uncharmed by The Full Monty and who considers comatose Peter Fonda's supposedly Academy Award performance in Ulee's Gold a big ha-ha. Why isn't everyone disappointed with Gus Van Sant for making such a middlebrow, impersonal film as Good Will Hunting? (I hate Robin Williams!) And what's so special about Chasing Amy and L.A. Confidential that almost every critic in America is giddy about them?

But in 1997, this E.T./Star Wars-loather discovered himself oddly fond of big-big-budget Hollywood opuses. Face-Off and Men in Black were okay time-passers, and Starship Troopers and Titanic are -- let's admit it -- spectacular. Staying mainstream, I also enjoyed the gentle, clever comedy of As Good As It Gets and My Best Friend's Wedding.

Add in The Edge and Donnie Brasco, and that's eight Hollywood movies in one year that I thought were pretty decent. That's better than 1996, and a standoff, at least, against the number of 1997's low-budget American independent features of genuine worth: The Daytrippers, Sunday, Female Perversions, All Over Me, A Midwife's Tale, Squeeze, Eye of God, subUrbia.

But 10 is the magic-number limit for critics, so here goes. The drum roll, please...

*The Best Film of 1997: Female Perversions. Tilda Swinton plays an anxiety-ridden workaholic driven wild by Freudian-Jungian unconscious disturbances in this stunning first film from Susan Streitfeld. It's Bergman's Persona as a California black comedy, and the only film after which I stood around with the ushers discussing "What does it mean?"

*Titanic. 200 million dollars very well spent.

*Donnie Brasco. Pacino's great, but so is Johnny Depp.

*All Over Me. The Sichel sisters story of teen anguish is also the Best Gay and Lesbian film of 1997.

*Public Housing. Frederick Wiseman's blistering indictment of black conditions in America in the Clinton era of bootstrap capitalism. Best Political Film of 1997.

*The Ice Storm. Ang Lee's gentle, literary take on life in the American 1970s. Credit James Schamus for Best Screenplay of 1997.

*Love Serenade. Shirley Barrett's barely-seen comedy about two sisters fighting over a Barry White-quoting disc jockey is the wackiest film from Australia since Jane Campion's early Sweetie.

*Waiting for Guffman. Chistopher Guest's hilarious goof on community theater, mid-America-style, is the Best Comedy of 1997.

*Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Errol Morris's look at four weird, obsessive men dealing with a world takeover by bugs, robots, and molerats. Beckett-like, it's the Best Documentary of 1997. (Confession, confession: my girlfriend co-edited it.)

*Irma Vep. French director Olivier Assayas put Hong Kong's Maggie Cheung into a grand movie-within-the-movie in the Best Foreign Language Film of 1997.

And some additional nods . . .

Best Actor: Christopher Guest, whose swishy Corky St. Claire is as much the spirit of theater as Stanislavsky or Robert Brustein, in Waiting for Guffman. Runners-up: Jack Nicholson, As Good As It Gets; Robert Duvall, The Apostle; Alec Baldwin, The Edge.

Best Actress: Katrin Cartlidge, Career Girls. Runners-up: Tilda Swinton, Female Perversions; Martha Plimpton, Eye of God; Molly Parker, Kissed.

Best Supporting Actor: Fred Willard and Eugene Levy (tie), Waiting for Guffman. Runner-up: Cameron Crowe, L.A. Confidential.

Best Supporting Actress: Parker Posey's definitive arts PR gal in subUrbia. Runners-up: Sarah Polley, The Sweet Hereafter; Christina Ricci, The Ice Storm.

Best Direction: James Cameron, Titanic. Runners-up: Atom Egoyan, The Sweet Hereafter; Ang Lee, The Ice Storm; Shirley Barrett, Love Serenade.

Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins, Kundun. Runner-up: Robert Richardson, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and U-Turn.

Best Original Music: Caleb Sampson, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Runner-up: Philip Glass, Kundun.

Best Genre Film: Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven's uncanny recreation of Eisenhower-era rightist comic-books ideology. It's Archie and Reggie and Betty and Veronica in outer space.

Best Belated Opening: Philippe Garrel's exquisite 1993 The Birth of Love, finally arriving in the USA from France.

Best Experimental Feature: Martin Scorsese's Kundun, a spiritual biography as screen poetry, a film which surely will grow on repeat viewings.

Best African-American feature: Squeeze, from Roxbury's own Robert Patton-Spruill. Runner-up: Eve's Bayou, by Newton's Kasi Lemmons.

Best Historical Drama: local filmmakers Richard Rogers and Laurie Kahn-Leavitt's A Midwife's Tale, an inventive and experimental way to make the American past breathe life. Spielberg really should have taken a look before trying to do Amistad.

Best Fresh Face of 1997: Jennifer Winters, an Emerson grad, who is amazingly good in a BU graduate's film, Lauren Himmel's The Tragedy of Samantha Biggle and the Twins. Hey, Matt Damon, do you need a girlfriend in your next flick?

Saddest Goodbye: Jimmy Stewart, perhaps the most important actor in the first hundred years of cinema.