Altman seems to have mellowed. He now says with resignation that he and the movie studios are in different businesses: "They make gloves and I sell shoes."

But through ups and downs, flops and hits, Altman has kept making movies. When the big studios wouldn't have anything to do with him, he went independent. And when the money dried up, he turned to daring work for television. Or the theater. Or opera.

He hasn't had a monster hit since M*A*S*H in 1970 (even Nashville, a huge critical favorite, did only so-so business), but somehow he's always working, putting together projects that mean something to him and finding financing wherever he can.

Performers like Paul Newman, Lily Tomlin, Shelley Duvall and Elliott Gould have worked with Altman again and again. The reason, Altman has said, is that he gives actors credit for being creative, artistic individuals. He hires them not for what he knows they can do, but for the surprises he hopes they will deliver.

"He's like the host of a good party," longtime Altman actor Michael Murphy has said. "That's why you never see a bad performance - because everybody's relaxed."

And then there's the process. The Robert Altman set of today is no longer the pot-puffing love-in of his early films. Still, it's a remarkably open, collaborative environment where everyone from electricians to stars is invited to watch the latest dailies in a friendly frat-house atmosphere.

He's made a few near masterpieces (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, Short Cuts) and plenty of artistic/commercial flops, but even an Altman mess is more interesting than the middling work of most other filmmakers.

Although one of his biggest supporters, legendary New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, once said of Altman: "I don't know how to account for the fact that when he's good, he's superb, and when he isn't good, he's nothing."

Whether he was pitting individual initiative against corporate capitalism on the American frontier (McCabe), identifying with Depression-era bank robbers (Thieves Like Us) or gambling addicts (California Split), or retelling the myth of Icarus in the Houston Astrodome (Brewster McCloud), Altman films could be counted on to offer a gentle appreciation of life's losers, a gleeful dismantling of authority figures and a distinctive visual and aural style that opened new cinematic possibilities.

Altman used overlapping soundtracks to create an aural environment in which individual lines of dialogue often were less important than the atmosphere they created. His restless camera and zoom lenses were rarely still (there is not one stationary shot in all of The Long Goodbye, his deconstruction of the hard-boiled detective film).

It is often hard to find a comfortable center in an Altman movie. Films such as A Wedding, Health, Nashville, Short Cuts, Gosford Park and the upcoming A Prairie Home Companion are structured just tightly enough to make sense but loosely enough to give the impression of life caught on the fly. Altman has rarely shown an interest in the easy-to-grasp storytelling that Hollywood believes audiences demand. He's much more interested in eavesdropping on situations.

And Altman has not done too badly in the new millennium, either, with his drawing-room mystery Gosford Park becoming a solid hit and picking up seven Academy Award nominations.

But for all of this, he's never won an Oscar for directing. Which brings us to the presentation tonight of an honorary Academy Award to Altman.

It will be interesting to hear what he'll have to say. Meanwhile, one can't help but fondly recall how Alfred Hitchcock (who also never won an Oscar for directing) responded when asked why he thought it had taken so long to be recognized by the academy.

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