DARING DESIGNER PHILLIPS SHUT OUT OF NOMINATIONS.

Byline: Amy M. Spindler The New York Times

The costumes Arianne Phillips designed for ``The Crow'' helped spark a cult following, and the ones she made for ``Tank Girl'' were spun off into a clothing collection. Those she created for ``The People vs. Larry Flynt'' made it the rare contemporary film that not only defines the characters through the costumes but also shows the arc of each character's development through them.

So, she really didn't need another indication that, at 33, she is already one of the most influential costume designers working on films with contemporary settings.

She got one anyway: She joined every important costumer of a nonperiod film in being ignored by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences in making Best Costume nominations. In the last five years, only three of the 25 films nominated have been nonperiod. This year, not only was ``Larry Flynt'' overlooked, but so were the powerful modern costumes of ``Trainspotting'' and ``William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet''

``To me, great costumes should be judged on their integrity to the characters and what they do to embrace what the film is about,'' Phillips said. ``I don't think it's an understood category. It becomes more about what is aesthetically pleasing rather than what is challenging.

``The arc of what happens to the characters beginning to end is where the work comes in,'' Phillips said. ``I love costume dramas more than anyone, but it's hard for people to differentiate between doing a period and doing your job.'' And she said, ``The '70s has not been recognized as a period.''

Phillips designs some things and finds others in thrift stores, through costume houses or commercial designers or on sale racks in stores. A contemporary costume designer's job can thus sometimes seem like glorified shopping. But with many period drama costumes coming from rental houses, costume drama designers ``shop,'' too; the academy may even be awarding some of the same costumes year after year.

For ``Larry Flynt,'' there were 68 costume changes for Woody Harrelson, who plays Flynt, and 55 for Courtney Love, who plays his wife, Althea. It was a job made easier by the fact that Phillips and Love share an obsession for the '70s.

Janet Yang, a producer of the movie, who hired Phillips and who now runs Manifest Films, said that when Phillips and Love got together, ``they were talking a language to the minutest detail of a button I didn't understand.'' The costumes Love wore as Althea slipped into decay bring to mind a comment that the photographer David LaChapelle, whose work Phillips often styles, made about her unswerving understanding of fashion's symbolism. ``To her, fishnet stockings mean something,'' he said.