Best Picture of 1997. By far.

Rating: 10/10 (24 February 2003)

1998 was one of the most controversial years ever as far as the Best Picture Oscar winner, but I think that this is only because Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love, the two front-runners for the award, were both such tremendously spectacular movies. There was a similar situation the year before, in 1997, with the rivalry between Titanic and As Good As It Gets, it's just too bad that the Academy chose to give the award to Titanic's ticket sales rather than the sheer earthquaking quality of As Good As It Gets and the fabulous talent within it. Thankfully, the Best Actor and Best Female Actor awards were given to the stars of As Good As It Gets, clearly showing that the Academy realizes that the content was in As Good As It Gets, but chose instead to award the financial purging and pretty pictures and sparkly oohs and aahs that were in Titanic. The Oscars, it becomes clearer and clearer, are entirely a commercial event and have little to nothing to do with furthering film as an artistic medium.
1998, then, may be seen as something of an apology, where the Academy tries to show that they know about good film beyond goofy romantic set pieces like the joke that Titanic has turned out to be, but unfortunately in 1998 they awarded a worthy film but had to also turn down another equally worthy film. Like I always say, though, movies are not a stratified medium that releases one great film every year and a lot of pretty good movies every year so that the Oscars can be neatly distributed and we can all go home smiling, which is why I don't involve myself too much in who gets what Oscar, but rather watch the Academy Awards for entertainment purposes and, most of all, to develop a list of the quality films that I missed during the year. I wish people wouldn't get so freaked out about it and just enjoy the show, because it is quite often these same people that go out and pay full ticket prices for crap like Big Momma's House and Gone In 60 Seconds and the Scary Movies and whatnot. We have a consumer responsibility people! These trashy movies keep getting made because someone keeps buying tickets to see them! Who are these people??
But I digress. As Good As It Gets, as the title refers, is just about as good as human interest dramas get. I have read reviews complaining that Melvin (the mentally flawed character played flawlessly by Jack Nicholson) is a man who it is impossible to like or love, whose compulsive, antisocial behavior is sad and disturbing, neither cute nor funny, to put it in the words of one of these unsatisfied reviewers, Christopher Brown, my colleague and good friend. Quite the contrary, however, Melvin Udall is a man who suffers from obsessive compulsion, severe antisocial tendencies, and whose interaction with the world, like Vincent Gallo's Billy in Buffalo '66, is limited to harsh insults intended to harm. I think it's true that the character is presented in such a way that he doesn't seem to realize how hurtful his statements can be (such as in the diner scene when he makes a touchy comment to Carol (Helen Hunt) about her son.
The major flaw of the film is that the plot boils down to a fairly familiar formula, in which the man who hates everyone he comes into contact on a daily basis softens and ultimately grows to accept everyone from women and children to his gay neighbor's dog. Given the fact that the film is peppered with high priced Hollywood movie stars (Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, Greg Kinnear, Cuba Gooding, Jr., etc.), it's obvious that it's not a cheap production, so the crowds have to be pleased to some extent, but even the rather conventional path that it follows to the end is made into a tremendously enjoyable ride because of the quality of the performances. You can clearly see the difference between where the money goes in a movie like this and a movie like Titanic. You can either have enormous special effects and fancy cinematic trickery dumbed down by wooden performances, as was the case in Titanic, or you can have a movie that takes place in a familiar setting and is bursting with Oscar worthy performances from top to bottom, as in As Good As It Gets.
That being said, I am willing to forgive a little bit of bending to the crowd-pleasing formula, which is something that I generally hate more than anything else because it is so rarely done right. Most producers (Jerry Bruckheimer) try so hard to please so many different people that they end up pleasing no one at all. In this film, the conventional formula is the price that we have to pay to see the quality of the performances and the story. Clearly, no one but Jack Nicholson could play a character like Melvin and still be liked by the audience, so his character is a success despite the callousness of him as a person. I can understand that there are a lot of people who may have been put off by a purely superficial look at the movie, maybe they couldn't look past Melvin's insults or maybe they weren't satisfied by the ending, which left very open the possibility that the future would hold more trouble like we had already seen up to that point in the movie (I felt this way myself, to a certain extent), but there can be no denying the enormous quality of the film and it's inarguable superiority to Titanic. As Good As It Gets is such a fun movie that it's almost hard to see how anyone could not like it, unless maybe they were in bad mood when they watched it. If you are one of these people, I would advise you to watch it again and pay close attention to Melvin's character throughout the film. You may be able to profit from his lessons.