I suddenly feel overwhelmed for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a bit emotional to arrive at the milestone of Titanic: It’s the 70th Best Picture winner, and it’s the film that launched my personal mission to watch all the BPs. Second, it’s very difficult now to capture and convey just how huge Titanic–the movie, that is–was in its day. It had the biggest budget in cinema history (an estimated cool $2 million), and for a while it was the highest grossing film of all time. It’s still the third most financially successful movie ever made, whether or not one adjusts for inflation. Some calculations put Titanic‘s revenues at over $3 billion.

Monetary calculations aside, yes, it’s a stunner of a film. I can remember exactly where and when I first saw it. Just maybe I’ve attempted to reenact that “I’m the king of the world” bit a few times (don’t even try to claim you haven’t). Sure, Leo’s cute as a button (I don’t think I’ve ever actually thought this…just immersing myself in the general consensus of 1997). And “My Heart Will Go On” is probably the most universally recognizable love ballad of the twentieth century. Case in point, Titanic refused to stay in theaters and merely play the role of successful film. It became a cultural phenomenon. Certainly, it commanded the box office; but it also dominated music, television, literature, conversations, etc.

Nowadays, it’s become quite rare for films that are successful at the box office to also achieve favorable results at the Academy Awards. But Titanic didn’t have that problem. Not surprisingly it swept into the Oscars with 14 nominations (tied with 1950’s All About Eve–and later 2016’s La La Land–for the most nominations ever), and left with 11 wins (tied with 1959’s Ben-Hur–and later 2003’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King–for the most wins ever). So, if we’re looking only at Academy Awards success to judge the greatest film of all time (and we’re probably not), Titanic would win since it is the only film to hold the record for both Oscar nominations and wins. James Cameron’s masterpiece was victorious in the following categories: Art Direction, Film Editing, Costume Design, Sound, Sound Effects Editing, Visual Effects, Cinematography, Music (Original Dramatic Score), Music (Original Song – “My Heart Will Go On,” sung by Celine Dion), Directing for James Cameron, and Best Picture (it failed to win for Makeup and in any acting categories, notably Actress in a Supporting Role for 87-year-old Gloria Stuart and Actress in a Leading Role for Kate Winslet).

It takes a bit of pondering to figure out why Titanic (the film) was launched upon the world in 1997. Disaster movies were all the rage in the 1990s, with hits like Twister (’96), Dante’s Peak (’97), and Armageddon (’98) at the top of the box office. But with its lengthy first-half presentation of the gulf between the upper and lower social classes of the early 1900s, as well as its establishment of the unlikely romance between poor Jack and spoiled Rose, Titanic doesn’t truly fit into the same category as the aforementioned smash-and-dash disaster flicks. While the film undoubtedly played well to those audiences looking for an adrenaline-inspiring cinematic experience, the success Titanic enjoyed in the late 1990s may well have been more connected to the reemergence of the actual ship in the consciousness of the general public around that time.

Titanic (the historical ship) set sail in April 1912 and sank just a few days later after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic. For decades it slept on the bottom of the sea until 1985, when Robert Ballard, a commander in the U.S. Navy, discovered the famed ship’s final resting place. The work of Ballard and his team, on a classified mission to explore the wrecks of two sunken U.S. nuclear submarines (this shocking info was just declassified last year), led to renewed interest in Titanic and the story of its tragic demise. Still, it took an underwater-obsessed director with sci-fi tendencies, James Cameron (the mind behind Terminator, Aliens, and later Avatar), to resurrect the Titanic for the curious multitudes in the mid-1990s. In 2005, Cameron explained to online British newspaper the Independent what partly draws him to the old ship and why he feels it still holds value: “The Titanic has a great metaphorical and mythical value in the human consciousness. Is it the most compelling thing in the world when we need to find a cure for Aids and millions of people are dying in Africa? No, on that scale, it’s not a priority. But you have to think of the Titanic in terms of a feature film or a novel – something that touches people’s emotions. Wrecks are human stories. They teach us something about ourselves. A wreck is a fantastic window into the past. Steel can’t lie – it doesn’t have an agenda. These wrecks are like time-capsules. We’ll put parking lots over battlefields, but underwater these sites are frozen in time. By visiting them, we can touch history.”

So, what is it about Titanic that allowed it to become and then remain so successful (we’re talking the film here, not so much the ship)? Roger Ebert asked this question as well just a couple of months after the film was released–when it was quickly becoming apparent that Titanic was a unique achievement in film and a record-smasher. Ebert insisted Titanic‘s popularity was due to the fact that it “touches universal feelings.” He went on to note how the film’s opening scenes include actual footage of the ship’s wreckage, which causes viewers to consider everything else they see in the film to be reality as well. This creates a much stronger emotional connection to the movie for most viewers and leads them to begin to question in their own minds what they would do if they found themselves in the situations portrayed in the film. For instance, if one is a male viewing Titanic, one would wonder, “Would I give up my seat in a life boat for a woman or child? Or would I do anything to save myself?” In short, when we watch motion pictures (or television, for that matter), we automatically identify with certain characters. When we know we are watching something that is based on true events–and horribly tragic ones–the stakes of our involvement become even higher. We empathize more with what we are seeing because someone else actually lived it. Says Ebert, “The buried power of ‘Titanic’ comes not because it is a love story or a special effects triumph, but because it touches the deepest human feelings about living, dying, and being cherished.”

For more thoughts on Titanic and its significance, please check out the full post this weekend!