Last year’s unexpected triumph by “Crash” over “Brokeback Mountain” gave the Academy Awards their own twist ending, but beforehand, questions lingered about who had seen the nominees in the first place. As argued by Grady Hendrix in these very pages, the meager total grosses of the 2006 best picture slate reflected an Academy out of touch with what audiences were actually paying to see. This year’s nominees, who will gather in Los Angeles on Sunday for the 79th Academy Awards, also rang in well below average. All we need is a lackluster third year to declare a crisis and launch a thousand trend stories.

But is it a crisis or a developing look for the typical Oscar landscape? The last time a pauper best picture led the way was in 1997, when “The English Patient” beat out “Fargo,” “Shine,” “Secrets and Lies,” and the only one of the lot to break $100 million at the box office, “Jerry Maguire.” Besides providing a neat decade’s difference, the look back to 1997 proves surprisingly fruitful. The comparison throws into relief the characteristics of movies coming out today and suggests an adjustment to new models of production and taste in the industry.

The triumph of the little film is not something that the current mainstreaming of indies invented with “Little Miss Sunshine.” Indeed, the most striking thing about 1997 is the production provenance of its best picture nominees, which were overwhelmingly indie. Particular triumphs were “Fargo,” the crowning of film-geek stylists the Coen Brothers, and “Sling Blade,” the one-man-show that made a name for writer-director-star Billy Bob Thornton.

But before we crown a golden age, the survivors from the pack tell a different story. For one thing, you won’t find October or Gramercy or Fine Line in the phone book under “film distributors” anymore. But in the years after 1997, Miramax continued an astonishing streak of nominees. Ultimately more of a studio-caliber art house than an indie outfit, Miramax’s tactical approach to film makes it the true antecedent to this year’s coup by “Little Miss Sunshine,” which was released by Fox Searchlight. Baptized in the fire of a bidding war, “Sunshine” is virtually a computer-generated ideal of an underdog crowdpleaser. Character quirk is managed as carefully as prestige and PR placement always were with Miramax releases.

“Little Miss Sunshine” might suggest that indies make inroads by becoming more like Hollywood. But the subject matter and ambiguities of its colleague, “Half Nelson,” which won an acting nomination for its star, Ryan Gosling, point to something distinct in the class of 2007, namely darker tones and themes that often broach politically sensitive territory. The 1997 slate of nominees, for all its pressing and well-meaning dramas, looks positively carefree alongside the range of historical and psychological horrors that marks this year’s batch: “United 93,” “Letters From Iwo Jima,” “The Last King of Scotland,” “The Departed,” and in their own gratuitous fashion “Babel” and “Little Children.” Unlike “United 93,” “Letters,” or “The Departed,” no one sat in the theater after “Jerry Maguire” or “Shine” momentarily because they were too stunned to leave.

In this sense, “Shine” and “Fargo” almost feel as though they are from another age. The virtuoso portrayal of the walking wounded in “Shine” (Geoffrey Rush as savant-like pianist David Helfgott) gains our sympathies, but it’s a familiar minigenre (“My Left Foot” through “I Am Sam”): the arousal of self-congratulatory but studiously apolitical compassion.

And the knowing dark ironies and deadpan of “Fargo” somehow seem less knowing, tilting toward mannered, when confronted with the tortured psychologies and historical realities in this year’s slate of nominees. Watching William H. Macy flee in his underwear in “Fargo” was pitiful, but the schizophrenic moralities of Leonardo Di-Caprio and Matt Damon in “The Departed” are positively corrosive. Martin Scorsese’s characters are offered no clear escape — a more familiar state to an American psyche frayed by the threats and compromises of life after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The violent intrusion of the international arena into the country’s consciousness via September 11th also engenders a new approach to locale and period. The 1997 winner for best picture, “The English Patient,” epitomized the romantic use of far-flung lands and eras and the high-toned, literate sorrows and effete pleasures long perfected by Merchant-Ivory and Miramax. Cut to 2007, where all hell has broken loose: In “Babel,” a daisy chain of benighted international dramas speak their own message of the world’s delicate unity, like a movie adaptation of the corny old telephone company slogan “We’re All Connected.”

These are slots that in 1997 were filled by nominees like “Ghosts of Mississippi,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” and “The Crucible” — issue films grounded in civil-rights era righteousness. The new “provocative” issues come from abroad. Mr. DiCaprio, who would do economysize teen romance in 1998’s “Titanic,” is now a venal diamond merchant in “Blood Diamond.” “The Last King of Scotland” finds its fraught history in Idi Amin’s brutal, grimy dictatorship in Uganda. That’s not even counting the Oscar films that explicitly address international terrorism and the Iraq war: two Iraq documentaries, the imagined British dystopia of “Children of Men,” and the horrifying “United 93,” which at once occurs everywhere and nowhere.

What a comfort, then, is “The Queen,” an excellent TV movie that finds the British prime minister, Tony Blair, as a freshly minted, touchy-feely Clintonite. Stephen Frears’s film reminds us that Hollywood has always harbored Anglophiles. Seemingly every year, around a quarter of Oscar’s performance nominations are cornered by Britons. In 1997 it was Ralph Fiennes, Mr. Rush, Emily Watson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Brenda Blethyn, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, plus pictures from eight British directors. The Union Jack holds its own in 2007: Kate Winslet, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, and eight-time nominee Peter O’Toole, along with five directors. (We might as well throw in Cate Blanchett, an Aussie whom everyone assumes is British.)

The Anglophilic trend might not hold forever for directors, judging from the welcome infusion of international talent via three Mexican directors (Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, and Guillermo del Toro). Few could have predicted their Oscar recognition 10 years ago, but if there’s one thing constant about the Academy Awards, it’s the churn of success and obscurity. Just ask Cuba Gooding Jr., the 1997 winner for Supporting Actor in “Jerry Maguire.” Or, for that matter, Anthony Minghella, director of 1997’s best picture and the rather less acclaimed 2007 gentrification drama, “Breaking and Entering.” (Bonus points for anyone who can even name the director of “Shine.”)

All this prognostication may mean little to the films and filmmakers who didn’t get an invitation to the party, of course. But “Dreamgirls” fans can huddle with past sufferers of Oscar envy: Cast your memory back to 1997, when another musical bagged multiple nominations but missed out on the grand prize — “Evita.” “You Must Love Me,” indeed.