Facing a dearth of quality homegrown products, Oscar went shopping elsewhere. Two major nominations went to independent John Sayles’s “Passion Fish” (screenplay and best actress Mary McDonnell), and three nominations each went to “Enchanted April” (a small English film) and “The Player,” Robert Altman’s thorny critique of Hollywood. Accenting its inability to create decent roles for women, the Academy came up with only one Hollywood actress in the supporting category–Marisa Tomei in “My Cousin Vinny.” Where were the laurels for those Oscar-lusting movies like “Toys” and the Jack Nicholson “Hoffa”–both big-budget disasters? Where was the $70 million Tom Cruise “Far and Away,” a bungled try at an old-fashioned epic? Nineteen ninety-two seemed to be the year Hollywood gagged on itself.

What’s gone wrong with the most powerful movie industry in the world? Answer No. 1: movies cost too damn much to make. When the industry average to make and market a big-studio movie is $40 million, movie executives become ruled by fear. Moreover, studio overheads run to $100 million a year. Only a blockbuster hit will cover such expenses. As one studio head put it, “If we make a million dollars on every picture we make, and we make 20 movies a year, we lose $80 million a year.”

“The studios are built for home runs,” says Tom Sherak, head of distribution for Twentieth Century Fox. “They just aren’t equipped to handle these smaller movies.” The majors wouldn’t know what to do with an oddball, no-star drama like “The Crying Game.” It needs the kind of slow, gradual release that Hollywood hasn’t the patience, or the know-how, to finesse.

So it’s hardly surprising that the studios turn to presold concepts, sequels and remakes. Or that market research has replaced the gut instincts of the old moguls. Guess what? You’ll soon be seeing sequels to “Wayne’s World,” “The Addams Family,” “My Cousin Vinny” and the doggie hit “Beethoven.” The wave of the future is to haul the old TV shows out of the crypt and dust them off. Among the projects in development: “Dennis the Menace,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “F Troop,” “Mr. Magoo” and, yes, even “Mr. Ed.” This year you’ll see “Coneheads,” based on the old “Saturday Night Live” skits.

It’s not just the mass-market youth pictures that steal their inspiration from elsewhere. Suddenly moviegoers are kneedeep in Hollywood remakes of tony foreign films. Jodie Foster and Richard Gere have transformed the French art-house hit “The Return of Martin Guerre” into a plushly romantic Hollywood hit called “Sommersby.” The Dutch thriller “The Vanishing” didn’t cross over so well, even with the same Dutch director: it’s about to vanish itself. On the near horizon is a remake of the flashy French thriller about a chic hit woman, “La Femme Nikita”: Bridget Fonda is now the gun-packing punkette and it’s called “Point of No Return.” Hollywood even has the chutzpah to try to improve upon the Oscar-winning Italian gem “Cinema Paradiso.” Easier to fathom is the planned remake of the cheesy horror classic “Godzilla.” When the Japanese made that one back in the ’50s, they were ripping us off. Now we rip them off. Sound familiar? Hollywood, meet Detroit …

As our new president is fond of reminding us, we’re in a global economy now. Hollywood movies have to be made for a world market because today the foreign market accounts for more than half of the industry’s profits. The guys greenlighting projects are looking for sure-fire international fare, top-heavy with thrills, that will play in any language. Which is why Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Van Damme, who speak the Esperanto of action, are the kings of the new global hill.

Hollywood has always answered criticism of its lowbrow product by pointing the finger at the audience: we’re just giving them what they want. Maybe the industry has created the audience it deserves, a TVbred generation with short attention spans and a white hat/black hat view of the world. “Audiences are conditioned by TV to seeing the same thing over and over again, with small variations,” says a studio head. “They don’t want to pay money to see something different.”

The glory of the Hollywood studio system has always been its ability to turn out mass entertainments that could appeal to the entire spectrum of the audience-and win Oscars and critical acclaim. Think of “It Happened One Night” or “The French Connection” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”–or last year’s winner, “The Silence of the Lambs.” Now even the biggest hits, like “Batman Returns,” alienate half the audience or simply exclude adults, like “Home Alone 2.” Hollywood can count on its prime ticket-buying public-teenage boys-to line up for the parade of “Lethal Weapons,” “Die Hards” and Steven Seagal movies, but it has driven away millions of potential viewers in the process. (Ticket sales have dropped from 1.2 billion in 1983 to 950 million in 1992, and the largest drop has been for adult ticket buyers.) Since the studios have decided that women matter less than men in dollars and cents, it always catches them by surprise when a small “woman’s film” like “Fried Green Tomatoes” turns into a runaway hit. You have to wonder if the boys in the Hollywood boardrooms, who seem to get younger and younger by the year, know that mass culture doesn’t just mean kiddie culture.

Adult audiences are hungry for movies that they can talk about, that take them places they’ve never been. The success of Neil Jordan’s “The Crying Game,” with little national advertising, suggests that, contrary to the studio head’s belief, something different is precisely what a lot of people want to see. Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenberg and Columbia’s Mark Canton have both said that they feel a need to make “better” movies. Sony and Universal have created new divisions to make and market more intelligent fare. And Walt Disney Co., the highest-concept outfit in Hollywood, has made a three-year deal with Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, who made “A Room With a View” and “Howards End.”

But don’t hold your breath. When Neil Jordan’s earlier independent gem “Mona Lisa” became a hit in 1986, Hollywood rewarded him by hiring him to make “High Spirits” (which was mutilated in the recut) and the woeful “We’re No Angels.” After that unhappy experience, he vowed he’d never work in Hollywood again. He went off instead and made “The Miracle” and “The Crying Game.” Now here comes Mr. Jordan again: Geffen Films and Warner Bros. have given him the big-budget “Interview With the Vampire.” Will he have a free hand? Perhaps. But if “Vampire” sucks, he may have two choices: flee to Ireland to invent another “Crying Game,” or stick around and hope to land the remake of “The Love Bug.”

Dream factory is now clone lab for remakes like “Point of No Return” with Fonda and “Sommersby” with Gere and Foster.

POINT OF No RETURN

SOMMERSBY

GODZILLA

High budgets and low inspiration make star-driven epics like “Hoffa,” with Nicholson, and “Far and Away,” with Cruise, box-office disappointments.

HOFFA

FAR AND AWAY

TOYS

Audiences welcome good offbeat independent films like “The Crying Game,” with Forest Whitaker and Stephen Rea.

THE CRYING GAME

HOWARDS END

THE PLAYER