Casino.

Well, what do you know? As Oscar time approaches, I can actually name--for the first time in memory--more than ten actresses cast in meaty enough roles to make the Best Actress and Supporting Actress races interesting and serious this year.

And what unlikely actresses most of them were. When you get past the two predictably stunning performances in predictably "uplifting" roles--Meryl Streep in The Bridges of Madison County and Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking--what you have left is a list of highly unlikely actresses in far from uplifting, or even typically Hollywood, roles.

Jennifer Jason Leigh, brilliant once more in Georgia, is the only one of the bunch that one might have expected to be "Oscar-qualified." She is, after all, the designated "serious young actress" of the moment now that Jodie Foster has turned director.

But Sharon Stone? Nicole Kidman? Elisabeth (who?) Shue? Who would have guessed that any of them would have turned in hauntingly powerful, nuanced performances in such challenging, down-beat films as Casino, To Die For, and Leaving Las Vegas?

Nor were these the only remarkable and unexpected female performances. Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite, Linda Fiorentino in Jade--I could go on, and you probably could, too. There was, in truth, an embarrassment of riches this year for those of us who are perennially starved for the sight of powerful women on the big screen.

Of course, to feminists who insist on positive images, this list of portrayals must hardly seem heartening. Prostitutes, junkies, and cold-blooded killers are not exactly the role models we would choose for our daughters. But there was a surprisingly long list of "good-girl," "female-bonding" movies in which groups of mismatched friends saw each other through conflict and crisis, good men and bad, to a predictably soft-focus moment of sisterhood triumphant.

For a variety of reasons, we were offered an unprecedented number of well-meaning movies last year: more women in decision-making positions in studios and in the director's seat; more women seeing movies, and buying their own tickets; more female stars, desperate for decent scripts, producing their own movies; more money men willing to take risks on female-driven movies since Thelma and Louise, Little Women, A League of Their Own, and a few others hit pay dirt. Among the uplifting films were How to Make an American Quilt, Moonlight and Valentino, Boys on the Side, Now and Then, The Baby-Sitters' Club (a preteen version), and Waiting to Exhale--noteworthy for its presentation of African-American women as successful and upwardly mobile.

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But as welcome as these candy-coated valentines to female audiences were, they amounted to pretty thin stuff. In fact, they all tend to merge into a single, soppy blur of sugary sentimentality, with only the barest hint of spice. Even Waiting to Exhale--the only one of the bunch with any spirit or passion at all--in the end was no more than a cartoon cutout version of the feisty novel upon which it was based.

For all the understandable clamor for "positive" roles and representations, the movies in which female virtue and talent were rewarded--whether with love or money, personal fulfillment or professional triumph--ran the gamut from forgettable to annoying to inane.

By contrast, the performances that have stuck in my mind have all been bad-girl/loser roles. For my money, the three most outstanding performances were the three that dug deepest into women's experiences in the dark side of American life. Two--Sharon Stone as a hustler and addict, and Elisabeth Shue as a streetwalker--are set in the seediest of American landscapes: Las Vegas. And the third, Jennifer Jason Leigh as a failed bar singer, alcoholic, and junkie, is set fairly close to that spiritual vicinity.

If you want to say something socially and emotionally important about women in American life, you are obliged today to tackle the gloomier areas of our social and psychological landscape. Sadly, that's where the most serious truths about gender are still most likely to be found.

Ugly Truth Number One: many decent women do--indeed, often must--turn to prostitution when all else fails. Why? Not because they are "bad." Not even, in most cases, because they were "victims" of some sort of abuse (although that is a factor in too many cases). No, the primary reason is, and always has been, economic. In a market-driven, sexist society, the female body is the one economically "valuable" commodity a woman will always be able to sell. Spiritual desperation will often accompany this kind of economic despair. And so it is understandable that addiction itself often serves as cinematic metaphor for such spiritual desperation.

Hollywood has always loved its bad girls, especially its whores. Male directors have, in fact, been obsessed with the theme of the "fallen woman." But until now, they have chosen to give us only the most degraded or romantically absurd stereotypes of such women. Thus the endless list of "whore-with-a-heart-of-gold" fables--from the euphemistic "showgirls" in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to Julia Roberts's star-making performance in Pretty Woman.

In these, and their many clones, prostitutes with virginal souls find Prince Charmings who recognize their essential goodness and carry them off into a diamond-strung sunset. Thus does Hollywood periodically wish away the sorry truth about female degradation and its true causes and cures, and send its male viewers home with clean consciences. (No surprise that Woody Allen, the man for whom the term "denial" was invented, has stuck with this hokey, "whore-with-a heart-of-gold" image in Mighty Aphrodite.)

The uglier--and far more common--film version, the one in which the woman meets a tragic end in the gutter or morgue, is less likely to form the central storyline of any Hollywood movie. Rather, the standard role for female prostitutes (and junkies, for that matter) is not even supporting, but more often merely bit.

Usually we see a prostitute, cast as a woman of color, on screen briefly to be brutalized--a prop to illustrate the viciousness (or even worse, the macho bravado) of a male character. The current hit Heat is classic: virtually every female character is betrayed, humiliated, and exploited, but only the African-American woman, a prostitute, is brutally strangled and disposed of in a five-minute sequence.

We've seen this version of the Hollywood whore millions of times. It is truer to life, unfortunately, than the "prostitute as virginal princess-to-be." But the fact that it is presented so casually, so matter-of-factly, works as an endorsement of its legitimacy: she must have done something to deserve such a fate is the implicit assumption, since no other explanation is hinted at. (The parallel with the "black, single mother on welfare," so popular in political discourse, is obvious. In our world, the most unfortunate among us are also the most often stigmatized and blamed for their sorry fates.)

What makes the Stone, Leigh, and Shue vehicles so much more interesting than any of these earlier film versions is that they reverse the Hollywood tradition. In these films, the prostitutes and addicts are central characters, not bit players to be mutilated and discarded. And each--refreshingly and realistically--is closer to Divine Brown than Julia Roberts.

But while all three are worth seeing, only Mike Figgis's remarkable Leaving Las Vegas manages to allow its heroine to emerge from the squalor of her life with real dignity and self-respect.

RELATED ARTICLE: Casino

Casino, despite its many, oft-noted flaws, would be well worth seeing even if it didn't offer so powerful a female character. That's because, like most Scorsese films, it delves deeply, relentlessly, and unsentimentally into the source of America's moral and spiritual decay: the driving lust for power and wealth as ends in themselves. It lays out the economic and political workings of Las Vegas--always a perfect metaphor for American capitalism at its rawest.

But what makes the film particularly interesting is that Martin Scorsese--the classic director of male-centered, tough-guy films in which women play the usual brutalized roles--sees fit this time to include a woman in his rogue's gallery of lost souls. Sharon Stone's Ginger McKenna is a player, a woman who uses her body and her seductiveness to elbow her way into the high-stakes male game on her own terms. She does well in this game, as long as she sticks to hustling. But when she agrees--because she is offered more money, gold, and jewels than she can refuse--to give up her role as a partner in crime to Robert De Niro's casino manager and become a wife and mother, she is doomed. The domestic-housewife role stifles and destroys her, and she ends up as a pathetic, grotesque junkie.

Casino, like all Scorsese's darker films, is a tragedy about people who are brought down by their own character flaws, and by the built-in boody traps of the system they choose to work within, and hope--desperately and foolishly--to beat. For Scorsese, human nature never rises above the level of the degraded world that spawns it. It is therefore inevitable that every one of them, including Ginger, will end in ignominy, and, more often than not, brutal death.

Nonetheless, the figure of Ginger McKenna, doomed and degraded as she is, is intriguing. And her tragedy reveals something about the sexism of the system that Scorsese hasn't previously tackled: the gendered playing field that puts women--forced into traditionally stifling roles--at so great a disadvantage in the male world of power and money.