A Matter of Heart : Oscar winner Michael Cimino says the nominations show a hunger for the personal (‘The Postman’) and whimsical (‘Babe’), if the director speaks from his innards.

A year in which the Oscars’ best picture race pits a movie about a friendly talking pig against a movie with wall-to-wall beheadings is a year that needs to be put into some serious perspective. And Michael Cimino, winner of the best director and best picture Academy Awards for 1978’s “The Deer Hunter” and currently ensconced in post-production as he readies his latest film, “The Sunchaser,” for the Cannes Film Festival, is willing to give such a year some sober thought.

Asked by The Times to comment upon and perhaps handicap the Oscar race in the best director and best picture categories, Cimino shows up for brunch at the Hotel Bel-Air fully prepared: He has brief director biographies, as well as a list of the nominees with notes carefully penned in the margins. And he has some intriguing ideas as to what the Oscars mean: Though many critics charge that 1995 was a bad year for films, Cimino offers a different perspective.

“It wasn’t a bad year as much as it was a transition year,” Cimino suggests. “It was a year that was reflective of a major shift in the audience’s appetite in what they want to see. That’s why there are such seemingly very diverse candidates. Audiences were sending a message to filmmakers and exhibitors, and some of the pictures being considered reflect that.”

He continues: “The bad luck that some of the bigger action movies [“Under Siege II,” “Cutthroat Island,” “Waterworld”] suffered last year has kind of moved the audience around in my view. What we’re seeing now is that people seem to be interested in people movies, about relationships, with one-on-one performances between two people. ‘Il Postino,’ for example--it’s a very simple story about two people. The success of the [Robert] Redford movie [‘Up Close and Personal’]--it’s a simple story, but they’re responding to these one-on-one honest relationships.

“ ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ is a relationship, ‘Dead Man Walking’ is a relationship, and they’re very contained movies. They’re compressed and not in wide open spaces all over the place. That’s what this year shows, is that the audience is in the mood for that--and whimsy, as ‘Babe’ illustrates. They want to laugh and cry and sigh, not just be knocked over by some humongous explosion. Those are the movies they’re reacting to.”

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With that in mind, Cimino offers his assessments of the nominees in the two categories, beginning with one that is the diametrical opposite of the “people movies” he’s espousing.

‘BRAVEHEART’

“This was just the tail end of the shift, and because it was Mel [Gibson], who everybody likes and is enormously appealing on screen, and had wonderful production values--it sort of rides that genre out into a glorious sunset in a sense. A first-class job.”

Of Gibson, Cimino says, “He did a wonderful job. Anybody who can choreograph the amount of people, horses, just the sheer choreography of it was admirable. But I think that that’s a certain kind of skill, and some people have it and some don’t. It’s interesting that he went from directing an intimate little film [“The Man Without a Face”] to this; this clearly is his metier. He loves this.”

‘BABE’

“Noonan just did a marvelous job,” Cimino says. “I think ‘Babe’ should be in a separate category, because it’s this wonderful movie, it should have its own category--and win. I don’t think it should be up against actors. It’s charming and clever, but it needs its own category.”

Any chance that parents in the academy might put “Babe” over the top? Cimino thinks not: “Adults love it, everyone loves it on its own merits--it doesn’t matter if they have kids or not.”

‘THE POSTMAN (IL POSTINO)’

The Italian import starring the late Massimo Troisi is Cimino’s favorite of the nominees. “To sustain a movie with complete unknowns in a language that is not your own and not cheat on it, and elicit such a special tone and special sweetness really takes a lot more out of you personally--you have to put a lot more of yourself into a movie like that,” he says. “And you have to infuse that movie with something that touches you very deeply.”

Moreover, “Working with an actor you know is dying--that happened to me on ‘Deer Hunter,’ I knew John Cazale was dying of cancer--it takes a special sensitivity, to keep a guy going and make such a sweet movie. I give it high marks on that count.”

On the other hand, Cimino sees two possible scenarios on Monday night: Fans of small, quirky films triumph, or, more likely he thinks, they do themselves in.

“If ‘Babe’ and ‘Postino’ cancel each other out, I think that ‘Braveheart’ may sweep,” he says. “If they don’t, then I think that ‘Postino’ has a really good shot, and if Radford got it, I think it would be deserved. It would be reflective of that shift, as well. But I think ‘Braveheart’ just might sweep.”

‘DEAD MAN WALKING’

“Tim Robbins did a marvelous job of sustaining the performances between Susan Sarandon--who I think will win best actress, handsdown--and Sean Penn, and managing to hold the audience for the length of that picture,” the director says. “That’s not an easy thing todo with a very static situation, with someone in jail talking to someone else, essentially.”

‘LEAVING LAS VEGAS’

“I thought it was very good, very workmanlike, very professional, but I don’t think that there was this same level of personal involvement--and I’m not talking about how hard people work because everyone works insanely hard on a movie--but I think the emotional input was greater on these other movies,” he says. “With Radford and Tim Robbins, there had to be more of them, their insides. They were very personal pictures and that’s what the audience is reacting to, that intense personal involvement. They don’t know where it’s coming from, but they’re reacting to something intensely personal.”

‘APOLLO 13’

In terms of being a big, mega-budgeted adventure movie, Cimino says, “ ‘Apollo 13’ is sort of the same genre of ‘Braveheart,’ only ‘Braveheart’ has more panache, with Mel.”

One reason Ron Howard might have been overlooked in the directing category, Cimino says, is that “there have been so many shows on behind-the-scenes moviemaking that the audience isover-saturated on how we do our tricks. So they know Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t hang from the Empire State Building himself. Everyone knows how it’s done, there are no surprises, the mechanics are too visible. So the direction suffers by virtue of that. It becomes a casualty of the amount of information that the audience has about all that special-effects stuff. Even if the direction was so undeniably brilliant, it would still suffer.”

‘SENSE AND SENSIBILITY’

“The period nature will work against it in all the categories except [adapted] screenplay,” Cimino says. “Emma [Thompson] stands a good chance with the screenplay--she’d be my choice. I don’t think it will have a chance anywhere else,” adding that in the technical visual categories--costumes and cinematography--”Richard III” and “A Little Princess” may slip past it.

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Other Cimino preferences and/or predictions: As stated above, Sarandon for best actress, and “Nick Cage, with Sean Penn running a hot second,” for best actor. Mira Sorvino will take best supporting actress for her work in “Mighty Aphrodite”: “She was special. She’s a new face. What we forget is that the academy is a star-maker, or it reinforces the stardom of people. It’s one of the wonderful things that the academy does--a talented person comes along like Mira Sorvino and it elevates them up to stardom. If she wins, she allows a whole raft of pictures to get made that otherwise would not get made. A lot of interesting movies will get made because of her.”

Kevin Spacey gets Cimino’s best supporting actor nod for “The Usual Suspects”--”He just did more interesting things than anyone else”--and Christopher McQuarrie’s original script for the caper movie gets his vote, as well. “It’s such a twisty screenplay and full of surprises. It’s got some brilliant touches in it and I think it’s the most unique of all the screenplays.”

And does Cimino have any early predictions for next year? You bet: Look out for Woody Harrelson in “The Sunchaser.”