For my paid admission and critical sense the best movie of 1997 was P.T. Anderson's sophomore feature Boogie Nights, a domestic melodrama set in the X-rated film industry beginning the late 1970s and stretching into the video revolution of the early 1980s. Its co-nominees for Best Picture should have been The Full Monty, LA Confidential, Good Will Hunting and Liar, Liar and Titanic should have been consigned to the technical, crafts, music and directorial awards that it eventually won in a clean sweep.

As it was the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences agreed with my assessment, but with one obvious exception. It named Titanic the Oscar winner over As Good As It Gets, The Full Monty, Good Will Hunting and LA Confidential and gave up any sense of its good judgment by caving in to the biggest single commercial success in the history of movies.

Not that the picture is lacking in strengths or that any of its competitors for top awards had nearly the clout and publicity. In fact Titanic's revolutionary quality as a visual, aural and editing leap is such a visionary step in movie technology that it has taken the subsequent years for its techniques and practices just to begin filtering into mainstream practice.

For all that, though, it is a two-hours long wait through a dreary romantic mess before finally delivering the goods in a breath-taking morass of "ooohs" and "aaahs" that defies adequate description. What Titanic lacks is anything remotely resembling a good script touching on human truths, save the most banal ideas about true love and the triumph of self-fulfillment. What it substitutes for this fundamental gap is a Chinese box narrative structure with as many bells and whistles it can throw at audiences along with a number of pandering pieces of sentimentality to elicit tears despite how empty it actually is.

The film opens in 1996 with nautical adventurer and treasure seeker Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) who's searching for a gigantic blue diamond called the heart of the ocean in Titanic's wreckage. Uncovering a suggestive drawing instead of the jewel, Titanic survivor Rose Dawson (Gloria Stuart) is asked to tell her incredible story about the ship's maiden voyage along with her potential explanation of the diamond's whereabouts.

Flashing back through Titanic's wreckage into 1912 with its class divisions and British-American rivalry, Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) gambles his way onto the ship's steerage class even as the 17-year old Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) heads into a meaningless marriage with Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), heir to a steel fortune and the answer to her mother's financial troubles. When Rose half-heartedly attempts to kill herself Jack saves her from certain doom only to become Cal's rival for her affection.

From that point forward the movie concerns itself with the final day of Titanic as Rose and Jack fall in love among various misadventures meant to confuse and infuriate Cal before the fateful iceberg is sighted on the night of April 14, 1912. Then the film kicks into high gear and sidelines its laughable script to depict the ship's sinking and the horrors met by its 2,200 passengers in the cold spring night.

With the filmmakers realistically detailing the ship's collapse and sinking, no sentimental image is left untouched, no gap in the record of what happened ignored, no effect left without being showcased. An old man and woman lay in bed together accepting their doom in a quiet embrace. A steerage mother unable to get above deck puts her children to sleep. The ship's string quartet plays into the night. A smokestack breaks off, the ship cracks in half and the ship sinks leaving hundreds of life-jacketed survivors bobbing in near-freezing water with but one lifeboat willing to pick them up. Naturally Rose is among them, but not dear old Jack who sacrifices himself for her sake with a death pact that she go on living.

Closing its story in the present-day with Brock calling off his reconnaissance efforts to find the heart of the ocean, 101-year old Rose climbs to the deck of his ship and faces the great, wide Atlantic, once again alone. She holds the vaunted and long concealed blue diamond and casts it off into the deep as Céline Dion sings "My Heart Will Go On" over the final credits.

Never before was there ever such a big film put on movie screens. Never before was there such an outpouring of public affection the world-over. Never before did it feel as if a technical marvel without a soul might actually have eclipsed its importance with a hit single, spectacle of untold proportions and two appealing young leads who are given almost nothing to do.

It's a shame, really, what a dumb movie Titanic ends up being when considering all its technical marvels and the assembled cast and crew. Aside from James Cameron as the writer, co-editor, director and co-producer, James Horner as composer, Russell Carpenter as cinematographer, a visual effects group led by Thomas L. Fisher and Robert Legato and installing a groundbreaking sound team under the anchor of multiple Oscar winner Gary Rydstrom, the film also features Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher and Bernard Hill in its supporting cast. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet enjoy good chemistry with Billy Zane filling out their ménage a trois using the right combination of villainous indifference to the suffering of others along with a sense of personal superiority due to his class.

Still, you should keep in mind the $200 million budget and the almost unlimited creative control. That the film is so idiotic and silly only lends credibility to the inability of a mass audience to discern cinematic quality other than the special effects which complete the film's final hour with so much pizzazz it's truly remarkable, maybe even amazing.

Once glimpse of Titanic reveals it as the monster hit of global box office with receipts in excess of a billion dollars. Another glimpse suggests that to its potential audience there was a time when they were disaffected with the project in its entirety.

At one point in mid-1996, when it was clear Titanic was veering wildly out of control due to the tenacity and unyielding demands of its director, its release date was postponed in the midst of massive industry gossip and leaks about overrun and waste. Originally slated for a Christmas release it was held up with one post-production snafu after another, all written off to the hubris of a swelling budget and artistic temperament running without limitation.

As the budget cleared $200 million, and as Lightstorm Entertainment was forced to accept the distribution and production assistance of the major studios 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures, Cameron's exercise in cinematically raising the Titanic from its watery depths was very nearly the biggest single boon doggle in moviedom. Due to the fates of creative excess matched by artistic and technical advancement, however, his risk defied conventional logic on several fronts and made him a rich man in time for his divorce proceedings from then-wife, the Terminator 2: Judgment Day's Linda Hamilton.

Titanic runs over 3-hours in length thereby shortening the daily prospects for screenings at theaters by at least one show a day. Secondly the film's $200 million budget, not including its marketing campaign and drive into ancillary markets, popular music most exceptionally, meant that its break-even point was nearly half billion dollars box office revenue.

Without an adequate explanation for why it happened given I don't care for the movie's first two hours at all, I can only suggest Titanic nailed its cultural moment on the head. Audiences found themselves willing to forgive the faults of its epic, non-literary style and learned to embrace is spectacular qualities. Likewise they found a romantic ideal in Jack and Rose's relationship that made icons of DiCaprio and Winslet, a demi-god of James Cameron and interest in Titanic as a nautical accident, piece of history, motion picture and Broadway musical the leading cultural signifier of 1997.

Far be it for me to suggest it wasn't a very good movie. Especially when the worldwide public voted with their wallets to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in box office receipts.