OSCAR PAYS TRIBUTE TO THE IMPORTS

Tonight is the Academy Awards, when at last we’ll have the answers to one of the hardest-to-predict Oscar races in years.

However, the Oscar festivities got under way Saturday, a day the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences traditionally devotes to making all of its foreign nominees feel like winners. It is a moment of calm and civility, a time when film as an international language and a universal art form is paid tribute with wit and sentiment by some of Hollywood’s shrewdest and most successful survivors.

It is an occasion when a young director like Yugoslavia’s shaggy-haired Emir Kusturica can express awe at being seated at lunch between such urbane living legends as Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann--yet come away assured that it’s Hollywood that needs to learn from such an intimate, personal film as his “When Father Was Away on Business,” rather than the other way around.

As usual, the day began with the foreign-language symposium--read press conference--at the Beverly Hilton featuring four of the directors and one of the producers of the five nominated foreign-language films. A luncheon at Le Dome followed, at which Hollywood directors, ranging from such veterans as George Sidney and Martin Ritt to such relative newcomers as Hector Babenco and Barbra Streisand, played host to their nominated guests. The day was capped by a cocktail party at the academy, where the visitors received their plaques of nomination.

Acknowledging that this year there are no “red-hot controversial films” among the foreign nominees, director George Schaefer, the symposium’s moderator, pointed out that four of the five nominated pictures were nevertheless political, set in restrictive societies in which a whisper at the wrong place and wrong time could destroy an entire life.

Schaefer was referring to Istvan Szabo’s “Colonel Redl,” a true story of a military man made more vulnerable by his impoverished background than by his homosexuality during the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Agnieszka Holland’s “Angry Harvest,” a complex character study in which a Polish farmer shelters a Jewish woman during World War II; Kusturica’s film, which deals with political oppression in Yugoslavia in the ‘50s, and Luis Puenzo’s “The Official Story,” which calls attention to the thousands of Argentines who disappeared during the rule of the now-deposed military junta.

Jean-Francois Lepetit, producer of “3 Men and a Cradle,” a comedy about three bachelors stuck with an abandoned baby fathered by one of them, lightly--but aptly--protested his exclusion from the “political” category through his translator, the academy’s Maurice Marsac: “The relationship between a man and a woman, which we deal with, is quite often political.”

When asked about the problem of censorship in a communist country like Hungary, Szabo replied eloquently that the greater problem for film makers everywhere is with self-censorship. “This is really dangerous,” he said. “You want to catch success, and you know which way to go to get it. Such a ‘censor’ in your heart is more terrible.” By way of analogy he said, “In World War II we were not allowed to see American films; maybe we would have seen that ‘the enemy’ looks like us.”

On the whole, the foreign film makers, even though all their films have been successful on home ground as well as abroad, revealed that in return for working long hours on small budgets they enjoyed a control of their work and a freedom from box-office considerations that would be the envy of most American film makers.

In offering a toast at lunch, Wilder, praising the nominees’ talent said, “And I want to make sure all these directors go home!”

“Yesterday I was told not to worry about my Hungarian accent,” quipped Szabo, “because Alexander Korda and Michael Curtiz had the same accent. But I was also told that on the wall of his office Adolph Zukor had a sign, ‘It is not enough to be Hungarian, but it helps.’ ”

On a more serious note, Irvin Kershner remarked that “Foreign films are showing more of what’s going on in the world than our own films do.” While praising all five of the nominated films, Streisand said, “I’m so very proud to say that two out of the five were directed by women.”

Paul Mazursky, who had lots of fun kidding Babenco, so recently moved from Brazilian to American films, for arriving in a mile-long Hollywood-style limousine, then cut across national boundaries with a serious observation: “Only we know how crazy it is to make a movie. I just hope we keep chasing our dreams.”