> Still, hurrah for the success of LOTR, if for no other reason than to keep Titanic from being remembered as one of the two most successful oscar winners of all time...

I still don't get why Titanic is now the worst movie ever. From December 1997 until around the spring of 1998, it was the best movie ever, in almost every demographic. But it's like all the non-teenaged girls looked around at their fellow fans, said, "Hmmm, there are teenaged girls here, and they are acting very embarrassing toward Leonardo diCaprio," and so they switched sides, and only the teenaged girls were left, and they had moved on to Ewan McGregor anyway.

Maybe Titanic legitimately doesn't age well in the memory -- some movies really are like that -- but if one can separate the movie from the extraordinary hype and the subsequent backlash, it really is a great movie, about the pride of humanity, the heroism that tragedy can bring out of everyday people, all wrapped around a love story that's somehow down to earth and otherworldly at the same time.

Maybe since 9/11, a story like this told with a love story at the center feels wrong to us, but I dunno. I think a movie like Titanic does the important thing of putting human faces on death toll statistics. 1500 people died in the sinking of the Titanic, and every one was an irreplaceable human being. We know this simple fact when asked, but how long after a tragedy like this do we stop thinking of individuals and remember the numbers more prominently? That it was human pride that resulted in the Titanic disaster makes it all the more poignant. Reminders of these things don't hurt at all, and I thought the movie did a remarkable job of exploring all these interlocking themes.

That said, granted, it's a long way from being one of the three best movies of all time, and I'm still astonished that it did $1.8 billion worldwide box office, when only just a couple weeks ago did any other film edge over $1 billion. But I think people get so caught up in knocking it down from that perch that they develop the desire to knock it *all* the way down. And since when were Oscars and box office accurate indicators of the best movies of all time anyway?