A Night at the Oscars, 1998

How Hollywood’s dream machine shaped a generation

It’s March 28, 1998. You’re 13 years old, growing up in Sydney, Australia, and getting ready for the biggest night of your life. A night that allows you to imagine your dreams coming to light, where everything you’ve ever longed for feels as though it might magically appear.

Kate Winslet. Leonardo DiCaprio. The 70th Academy Awards.

It’s the year the greatest movie, according to your teenage self, wins 11 Oscars, coincidentally the exact number of times you’ve seen it at the cinema so far. Weekends revolve around it. You and your friends hop on trains and buses, head to the local cinema, grab the holy trinity, a soft drink, what Americans would call a soda, a large popcorn, and a choc top, an Australian cinema staple you buy even if you skip everything else, and settle in for the greatest three hours and fourteen minutes of your life.

After paying six dollars for the ticket and nine dollars for snacks, you walk out emotionally undone, holding an empty choc-top stick and still wondering how Jack didn’t fit on the door. The mind boggles.

On the way home, you stop at HMV, the Australian rival to Virgin Records, spend hours listening to singles and arguing about whether Savage Garden, the Spice Girls, or the Backstreet Boys are better. It’s the Backstreet Boys. You spend your last five dollars on one song and play it on repeat on the giant stereo your grandmother gave you. She really did. She was pretty cool.

And then you do it all over again the next weekend.

Oscar day arrives. You come home from school buzzing and call your best friend on the landline because cell phones only exist in movies like Clueless. You do not own one, at least not yet. You saw each other less than an hour ago, but that feels irrelevant. There is too much to say.

Her little sister picks up. Your friend grabs the other line and tells her to hang up. The sister pretends to. No click. Eventually, a negotiation involving borrowing an item of clothing gets her to hang up for real.

You talk about everything you have already talked about all day. How much you love Leo and Kate. How you cannot wait to see Titanic again. How you hope it wins everything. How you hope, more than anything, to be on that red carpet one day yourself.

At 13, the possibilities feel endless.

The show starts. You sit inches from the television, convinced that proximity might somehow place you inside it. You control the channel dial because the remote is nowhere to be found. You discover it later, wedged between the couch cushions.

Billy Crystal is hosting. Hooray. The Oscar guy of the era. His opening monologue kicks off and you think, yes, this is it. You don’t understand every reference, but you’re grinning regardless. This is peak late-90s comfort viewing, and you’re watching the dream in action.

We all know what happened next. Kate lost Best Actress to Helen Hunt. Jack Nicholson won Best Actor. Your thirteen-year-old self remained convinced that Leo had been snubbed by not even receiving a nomination, and that was why he didn’t show up.

Why, Leo? Why?

Your heart sinks, fast, and then you surprise yourself by being okay. Even at thirteen, you understand that Helen Hunt deserved the win. As Good as It Gets will prove itself a classic. Jack Nicholson is beloved. You are learning that not every dream comes true.

At school the next day, everyone is talking. Notes are passed. Red Carpet looks are discussed. You all sense that you witnessed a once-in-a-generation sweep.

Titanic was the movie of your youth. It brought people together across generations. Families, friends, neighbors. We went together.

None of this was documented on a smartphone. There were no social media apps, no texts, no emails, no platforms tracking likes or views or shares to tell us whether our excitement was justified. It all happened in a cinema, with a film that asked us to sit still, pay attention, and understand that a story told on such a vast scale could expand our sense of what our own lives might become.

We decided it was one of the greatest films of all time not because an influencer told us so, but because people everywhere showed up. We sat beside strangers and shared the same experience, a film that transported us to another time while keeping us firmly in our own seats.

Maybe that’s what Hollywood was then to a thirteen-year-old growing up in Australia. A dream machine powerful enough to cross oceans and feel close. It proved this world existed, that people built it, and that if something this large could reach you from so far away, maybe there was room for you inside it.

Watching Titanic didn’t just mean seeing a movie. You were stepping into a life larger than the one you knew. For three hours and fourteen minutes, you were completely absorbed, and looking ahead. You believed a bigger life was possible, and at thirteen, that belief made the future feel wide open.

Now it’s 2026. Another Oscar season is here. Leonardo DiCaprio is nominated and could win his second Academy Award. I’m forty-one, living in Los Angeles, still watching the same ceremony with the same sense of anticipation. Leo was part of my youth, and he’s still in the frame. Everything else has changed. The world moves faster. But the pull of stories still exists, along with the desire to believe in something bigger than your own life.

That’s why cinema still matters. Not in an abstract way, and not because we’re meant to say it does. It matters because once, a film took a whole generation by the hand, kids and adults alike, and said, come with me. And somehow, all these years later, we never quite stopped following.