HERE'S THE REAL BEST PICTURE

By RICHARD CORLISS

OH, YES, THERE WERE DEBATES about the quality of feature films in this year's Academy Award race. Really now, can anyone but Mel Gibson and Pat Buchanan have thought Braveheart the very best movie of 1995? But on one matter, few of the cognoscenti would argue. The freshest, most beguiling film to win an Oscar last week was an epic you may have never heard of: A Close Shave, Nick Park's stop-motion, comedy-thriller mini-masterpiece about a dog named Gromit and his pet Englishman, Wallace.

In a sluggish era for what most people think of as movies--those two-hour, live-action behemoths that saturate the multiplexes--some of the cinema's most inventive talents are working in miniature: short films, music videos, commercials. Park, 37, a star of Aardman Animations in Bristol, England, has done it all, contributing to the 1986 Peter Gabriel video Sledgehammer and a series of spots for Britain's Heat Electric utility. But Park is best known for his own four films, all Oscar winners or nominees: Creature Comforts (1989), a five-minute potpourri of comments by ordinary English folk put into the mouths of zoo animals; and the three Wallace-and-Gromit adventures, A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave. All but the last one are on video; several will be shown this week and next in festivals in New York City and Los Angeles.

Stop-motion animation, in which each character and prop made of clay or plastic must be adjusted 24 times for every second of film, is a technique that requires a masochistic devotion. Park has that and more: a storyteller's genius for incident and personality. Wallace--an airplane-headed, cheese-loving bachelor--and the silent Gromit share a village home, less as man and dog than as two longtime companions stolidly accepting of the other's quirks. They are, in a way, the definitive English odd couple.

Wallace has the nuts-and-bolts romanticism of a crackpot inventor; Gromit, a bookish sort, gets his friend out of wild scrapes when not reading Crime and Punishment (by Fido Dogstoyevsky) or Pluto's Republic or Electronics for Dogs. The typical plot: Wallace will be seized by some selfish idea--flying to the moon for a cheese snack in A Grand Day Out or renting out Gromit's room to a pistol-packin' penguin in The Wrong Trousers or courting a sheep-napping femme fatale in A Close Shave--and Gromit will pitch us a conspiratorial sigh with a mute eloquence worthy of Buster Keaton. The put-upon pooch will then save Wallace in a breathless climax whose brio and ingenuity shame any live-action thriller.

A Close Shave, which would make a fine companion piece to Babe, is a dazzly melodrama about criminal woolgathering and an adorable lamb named Sean (as in shorn). Its blithe originality suggests that Park could make terrific Wallace-and-Gromit films forever. But he already has a feature-length project on a new subject. Park is right to think big. In a year or two, he could be holding an Oscar for best picture.

--By Richard Corliss