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More and more, the mania surrounding "Titanic" (which is only going to swell when the movie wins best picture) is starting to seem like some weird echo of the ballyhoo surrounding the launching of the ship itself. There's the way in which the emphasis on the film's cost, the length of its production schedule, the three-hour plus running time, recalls the publicity about the manpower and money expended on the ship. And there's the way in which Paramount is getting to live out the fantasy that was denied the White Star cruise lines.

As the most expensive movie ever made on its way to become the highest-grossing film ever made, "Titanic" has become as unsinkable as its namesake was presumed to be. Its function for Hollywood would now seem to be a way of justifying the industry's recklessness without, as the builders of the ship did, having to answer for it. In movie terms, "Titanic" raises to the surface the arrogant grandiosity that sank with the ship ("Size really does matter," as James Cameron so crassly and accurately put it in accepting his Golden Globe). Joel Siegel was very perceptive on "Good Morning America" when he noted that the film's huge budget will be a plus with academy voters, who'll see the film's success as a way of ensuring their own elephantine budgets on projects to come.

And Siegel was perceptive, by default, when he summed up the four nominations for "Kundun" by saying, "You can assume it got nominated in all the craft categories." In other words, it's a boring picture but it sure is pretty to look at. The pity of this isn't just that "Kundun," at roughly one-eighth of "Titanic's" budget, is a genuine piece of epic filmmaking -- imaginative, intuitive and heartfelt where "Titanic" is calculated, shallow and secondhand. It's that "Kundun" is a harbinger of the wreckage that "Titanic" and all the attempts to top it will leave in its wake for years to come.

Even if Disney had supported "Kundun" instead of doing its best to sabotage it, the movie wouldn't have reached the audience "Titanic" has. It's too unconventional a film for that. But Disney's treatment of the film seems emblematic of what happens to a movie that, unlike "Titanic," stands in the way of movie execs' fantasies of grandeur, specifically Disney's hopes of lucrative deals with China. Months before "Kundun" was released, Disney was starting to distance itself from it. On "Charlie Rose," Disney CEO Michael Eisner proved himself as much of a rodent as the mouse he represents by saying that the Chinese didn't understand how "in this country you put out a movie, it gets a lot of momentum for six seconds and is gone three weeks later." Disney then went about making Eisner's remarks a self-fulfilling prophecy, opening the movie on two screens Christmas Day and selling it in a manner more befitting an Oriental rug than a historical drama that spans three decades.

What's frightening is the way most American critics fell in line. In New York magazine, David Denby claimed that a movie about Buddhism, presumably even one about attempted genocide, couldn't be dramatic. And in the Boston Phoenix, Gary Susman epitomized the most idiotic complaints against the movie when he wrote, "It's no wonder that China threatened to boycott Disney over 'Kundun,' which paints the Chinese as uniformly villainous (though no less one-dimensional than the saintly Tibetans) ... Hints that the politics of the situation were more ambiguous ... remain frustratingly undeveloped." The mind boggles. What dimensions and ambiguities did Scorsese omit? That Tibet really did belong to China? That the Chinese had a good reason for genocide?

In some ways this year's Oscars will be the same old story of unimaginative blockbusters running roughshod over better movies. What makes it seem more sinister is that "Titanic," which is going to be the evening's big winner, has taken American movies to a defining moment whose legacy is going to prove to be just as destructive as the legacy of "Star Wars" (the last picture with comparable impact). Good movies have always managed to get made and will continue to get made. But once again, it's just gotten harder for them.
SALON | Feb. 11, 1998

Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon.

Discuss the good, the bad and the ugly Oscar nominations in Table Talk's Movies discussion area.