The nominees, from top to bottom, include Shakespeare in Love, Elizabeth, and Saving Private Ryan. All five best-picture nominees are historical films.

Historic Hollywood? Seems oxymoronic to think of the high-tech, jet-set center of cinema as a kind of motion picture Colonial Williamsburg. But not this year. With all five Academy Award best- picture nominations going to historical films, the past is triumphant in Tinseltown.

In addition to the wildly successful Shakespeare in Love, the dark, turgid biography, Elizabeth, brings Renaissance England (a perennial favorite) back to the silver screen in spades. Not only do these films share settings and monarchs, they also both boast the young actor Joseph Fiennes, who plays Shakespeare in the former and the Earl of Leicester in the latter.

The World War II era, a Hollywood standby with its clear division of good and evil, is the setting for the three other Best Picture hopefuls. The famously graphic, ultimately traditional Saving Private Ryan takes place in the European war theater, while the long, impressionistic story, The Thin Red Line, is about the terrible 1942 battle for the Japanese-held island of Guadalcanal. A surprise nomination is the Italian film Life is Beautiful, directed by (and starring) Roberto Benigni, in a Chaplinesque fantasy about the force of imagination doing battle with stark reality in a Nazi concentration camp.

The 71st Academy Awards ceremony will be broadcast Sunday, March 21, on ABC, 8:30 p.m./ET.