WU-ING SPIELBERG

Take heart, Steven--even in China they think you got a bum Oscar deal.

It “doesn’t seem logical” that “The Color Purple” got nominated for best picture and Spielberg didn’t get a best-director nod, said Wu Yigong, a film director and president of the Shanghai Film Corp. (one of 16 state-run Chinese studios). Traveling for a month in the U.S. on a USIA grant, Wu said of “Purple”: “Cinematically, it was very descriptive of the way of life of blacks in the U.S.,” though he conceded that he didn’t understand the language.

Through an interpreter, Wu added that he “didn’t like ‘Rambo,’ but my 17-year-old son did. It’s very popular with the common people, but intellectuals thought it was thin.” He found “Kramer vs. Kramer” better, liked “On Golden Pond” for its realism and “Taxi Driver” “because it showed the common everyday life that such a person (Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro) has.”

Wu’s film, “Memories of Old Peking,” an autobiographical account of pre-revolutionary Peking in the 1920s, has been shown at the Library of Congress in Washington.