Spectacle Matters: Titanic, The Sweet Hereafter, and the Academy and Genie Awards
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In spite of the fact that, as Atom Egoyan has noted, “both The Sweet Hereafter and Titanic have big crashes with ice and water that take place halfway through the film” (qtd. in Lacey, “Tale” A2), these two films would seem to share little between them. They were made in the context of vastly different industries, according to different aesthetic concerns, with large discrepancies in their budgets and box-office grosses. However, the Academy Award nominations, announced in February 1998, inserted Titanic and The Sweet Hereafter into the same category, as both Atom Egoyan and James Cameron were nominated for Best Director. This grouping of the films sets the stage for a deeper comparison beyond Egoyan’s casual observation. These two films, which feature large vehicles crashing into or through ice, depict these accidents through opposite relations to spectacle. As an extension of the accident, death itself becomes spectacle in Titanic; The Sweet Hereafter, in contrast, invokes death without representing it. The narrative structures of the films also differ: Titanic shifts unproblematically between present-day narration and Rose’s memories of the ship; The Sweet Hereafter confuses temporal relations without using the clear flashback structure of Titanic. In addition to the internal workings of the texts themselves, the films have acquired other meanings and significance through awards and recognition bestowed upon them.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".