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The 1998 Ella Awards

The Butcher Boy

Best Picture: With ebullient flair and a sensibility at once playful, savage, and sympathetic, Neil Jordan's extraordinary -- and extraordinarily overlooked -- The Butcher Boy humanizes the growing pains and pleasures of an out-of-control lad growing up in post-Second-World War Ireland.
Runners-up: The butcher boy grows up in The General, John Boorman's black-and-white beauty about Irish gangster Martin Cahill; Steven Spielberg and Terrence Malick measure the costs of war in Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line; Warren Beatty raps his way to liberation in Bulworth; Paul Schrader adapts Russell Banks with tact and sensitivity in Affliction.

Best Foreign-Language Picture: Ecstatic, brutal, weird, and gorgeous, Japanese director Takeshi Kitano's Fireworks explores the strange mind of a detective who brings equal zest and method to taking out mobsters and caring for his terminally ill wife.
Runners-up: Danish director Thomas Vinterberg takes a hand-held camera to a riotously dysfunctional family in The Celebration; Bruno Dumont gets inside the head of a young French racist in The Life of Jesus; in Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry a man drives across Iran to find an accomplice in his own suicide.

The Truman Show's     Laura Linney

Best Documentary: Jonathan Stack and Liz Garbus's The Farm, an urgent, heartfelt examination of life in a Louisiana penitentiary.
Runners-up: Bennett Miller's whimsical The Cruise, a one-man study of a logorrheic Manhattan street poet; Danielle Gardner's lively, touching Soul in the Hole, about inner-city basketball players; Dariusz Jablonski's The Photographer, a reconstruction of daily life in the Lodz ghetto during the Second World War, using photographs taken by the ghetto's Nazi accountant.

Best Actress: Emily Watson and Rachel Griffiths, for their symbiotic passion as the cellist Jacqueline Du Pré and her less-gifted sister in Hilary and Jackie.
Runners-Up: Cate Blanchett, as the mercurial, politically savvy monarch in Elizabeth; Dominique Swain, for her grown-up turn as precocious child-woman in Lolita; Meryl Streep, as the prissy eldest sister of an Irish matriarchy in Dancing at Lughnasa.

Best Actor: Brendan Gleeson, for the elastic range of his performance as the charismatic Irish gangster in The General.
Runners-up: Ian McKellen, wry, anguished, and lyrical as the gay film director James Whale in Gods and Monsters; John Hurt, likewise as the gay writer in Love and Death on Long Island; Nick Nolte, full of bluster and pain as the self-destructive cop in Affliction; Denis Leary, as the Boston-Irish thug in Monument Ave.

Rushmore's Murray

Best Supporting Actress: Laura Linney, for her hilariously over-the-top Nurse Ratched takeoff as Jim Carrey's wife in The Truman Show.
Runners-up: Kathy Bates, for her funny, affecting turn in the Betsey Wright/Vince Foster role in Primary Colors; Joan Allen, as the '50s mother who serves cholesterol breakfasts from hell in Pleasantville; Lisa Kudrow, for her acidic delivery as the ultimately endearing spinster in The Opposite of Sex; Kimberly Elise, for her quiet dignity as Oprah Winfrey's surviving daughter in Beloved.

Best Supporting Actor: Bill Murray, for his hangdog gravity and wild unreason, as the tycoon defeated by life in Wes Anderson's Rushmore.
Runners-up: Billy Bob Thornton, as a simpleton who belatedly grows a conscience in A Simple Plan; Jon Voight, for his restrained grace as a dogged detective in The General; Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the nerdy crank caller in Happiness; Chris Eigeman, as the unctuous club manager in The Last Days of Disco.

Grace Notes

Gods and Monsters

War: In The Thin Red Line an American grunt, after plucking gold teeth from the mouths of dying Japanese soldiers on a battlefield, gets the shakes and throws the teeth away.

Beauty: Brendan Fraser, as a gardener befriended by film director James Whale (Ian McKellen), honors his dead friend at the end of Gods and Monsters by walking the monster walk.

Chastity: Cate Blanchett's Queen puts on a chalky face and retroactively claims her virginity in Elizabeth: "Behold, Lord Burghley, I am married to England."

Ready for her close-up: A très pink poodle in Babe: Pig in the City grieves for her glamorous past. "This recalls the glory days, when I was dizzy with privilege."