The audience was going to come and come again – especially those teenage girls ready to sink or swim with Leonardo DiCaprio.But Best Picture? Better than The Ice Storm, Jackie Brown, The Sweet Hereafter, Deconstructing Harry or The Wings of the Dove (not one of which was nominated), or even LA Confidential (which was)? Confidential won every critics’ award in America, and it has the best ensemble acting of the year. A mere three months ago, Titanic was mocked for having cost over $200 million; now it has taken in something like $1 billion worldwide, with no end in sight. A crucial New York Times review, by Janet Maslin, hit the keynote by saying that it was this generation’s Gone With the Wind. Well, yes, often Titanic is every bit as foolish and flawed as much of GWtW.

But, like the Selznick movie of 1939, it is a phenomenon (the status that now floats all defects in credibility, character, interest or seaworthiness) That’s what I sniffed 10 days before the opening For the show worked. In fact, even before it opened, I predicted that it would win Best Picture. At that time, there were many in Hollywood who would have traded being on the real ship (at least some were saved) for having their money and their future in the movie. I have little against Titanic, except its disproportionate success. The Full Monica, the mouth yearning to open, yet somehow sealed – if he didn’t inhale, did she swallow?
And if you murmur that that last remark has scant place in a decent family newspaper, you’re right, of course. Yet look around, dear ones, and observe that there are no decent family papers any longer, a process in which we have all played our part.My mood is made skittish by the steady pressure of having to predict the winners (there is an accumulative strain in gambling that urges the player to take on absurd, self-destructive wagers), and in the fact that this year we are going to have to use the words “Titanic” and “Best Picture” in the same sentence. But in an essay founded on the spooky hook of prediction, there should be room for earnest falsehood (the common currency of this republic) – by which I want to suggest that, having reached the estimable but retirable age of 70, isn’t it time for the Academy to hang it all up? Or extend its solemn range for awards into the wilder territory of our acting? For example, most potent appearance by a silent-screen player – Monica Lewinsky, getting in and out of cars and history.

He examines Hollywood’s preoccupation with love, sex, death, money and glory. Beneath Mulholland immeasurably enlarges and enriches our already undying memories of, and pleasure in, the Hollywood movie.”! IoS readers can order Beneath Mulholland (Little, Brown) ahead of its British publication, in hardback, on 2 April, for the cover price of pounds 20 – post & packing is free. To reserve your copy, ring (0181) 324 5515, and mention the IoS.. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN (and in this Clintonian land, such words now summon as much fragrant sense of lost history as muffins and petticoats, or Hutton and Washbrook), welcome to the 70th – and last – presentation of the Academy Awards, our Oscars

All right, I lie; this isn’t meant to be the last.