Oscar Show: Long and Predictable

From The Times: April 1, 1981

"They should bring in Michael Cimino to edit this show," Johnny Carson told the in-house audience in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center during a long-running commercial interruption Tuesday night.

And, indeed, an abundance of length — three hours, three long hours — about the 53rd annual Academy Awards festivities. The cheerful news about academy member Ronald Reagan out of Washington — so cheerful that Carson could make a sharp joke about the President's hatchet work on support of the arts — lifted the anxieties that had spilled over from Monday into Tuesday.

(Carson had a joke about the delay, suggesting that the Beverly Hilton was offering bargains on a half-ton of day-old guacamole.)

The outcome of the awards themselves was almost, but not entirely, as predicted and they were, without exception, to the considerable liking of the audience.

You could in fact have predicted the winners with very fair accuracy from listening to the applause as the participants were read off during the show's opening.

The Oscars and their night, whatever the indifference the nominees (and non-nominees) profess, is a high-excitement event.

Produced this year by filmmaker Norman Jewison, who began his American career directing "Your Hit Parade" on television, this was the most film clip-oriented show in memory, a series of carefully assembled collages of lines, songs, dances and faces, including an understated array of stars who departed in 1980, from Alfred Hitchcock to Mae West.

The most vivid face of the evening was undoubtedly Henry Fonda's, seen from early days in "Drums Along the Mohawk" to his just-completed "On Golden Pond."

His friend James Stewart once remarked that what movies give you is pieces of time, moments that stay in memory long after the title, the story, the year, have faded. Oscar nights do the same thing, and Fonda, obviously ailing and dependent on a cane, provided a piece of movie history that will linger in the mind.

So, in a wildly different mood, did the appearance of tenor Luciano Pavarotti, who is only about to be a film star but drew the night's first and loudest standing ovation. He is obviously the most ingratiating operatic entertainer since Helen Traubel did a nightclub act with Jimmy Durante.

While it's hard to tell from the monitors in the auditorium, there is some suspicion that this year's show looked even better as a stage act than it did on the home screens, where the camera trickeries kept the images alive with zooms and slow dissolves and closeups but did not always catch the sheer and quite wonderful full-stage spectacles created by art director Roy Christopher and choreographer Alan Johnson. It was a dazzling use of color and a prevailing theme of sunrise at Camp Art-Deco. (Behind the excellent Henry Mancini orchestra, the center of the sunburst was occupied by drummer Shelly Manne, looking cool.)

It was clear from the start, and the night's first Oscar for supporting actor Timothy Hutton, that the sentiments were squarely for "Ordinary People," and its subsequent wins for script, direction and best picture evoked the same warm enthusiasm the mini-sweep for "Kramer vs. Kramer" had a year earlier.

Pleasing surprises (relative surprises) were the best supporting actress award to Mary Steenburgen and the best original script to Bo Goldman, both for "Melvin and Howard."

The three Oscars for Roman Polanski's "Tess" were also warmly received, a bittersweet victory for the director, who remains a fugitive from an American court.

Honors for the most graceful acceptance speeches were shared by editor Thelma Schoonmaker ("Raging Bull") and Mary Steenburgen. Honors for the longest were widely shared. But the problem of length is only partly the acceptors'. The dreaded chitchat hasn't yet been eradicated and it dulls what is otherwise a showier show all the time.