FILM AWARDS LIGHT THE PATH TO A DREAM

The Women in Film organization, which Sunday night presented its first set of Luminas awards, hopes that one day there will be no need to give them.

The awards are for the best positive, non-stereotypical, multi-dimensional portraits of women in a year’s worth of movies and television. The fond dream is that one day the industry’s writers, producers, directors and network and studio brass will, to a person, always and automatically conceive of women in those unhackneyed ways.

“We all hope it will become second nature,” said a young producer (male) accepting for one of the television shows.

The idea of annual awards with obsolescence built in may rank with the temporary tax and the short wait for seating as wistful hopes.

Yet the evidence of the presentations at the Directors Guild, where they were the concluding event of a three-day “Women in Film Festival,” was that the portrayal of women has come a fair way already from the old polarities that saw woman as very, very good or very, very bad . . . but reacting to a man’s world either way.

The Luminas awards (from the Latin for “light”) are chosen by a blue-ribbon committee within the organization, and are non-competitive. If a show is judged to meet an imposing list of criteria, it is honored. There were thus 27 winners and a special individual award.

“Cagney & Lacey” led the list of dramatic television series, with awards for three episodes, including “The Clinic,” an unsparing story about abortion. There was a special award for the show’s executive producer, Barney Rosenzweig.

Also honored in the category were episodes of “Fame” (on a young woman learning self-reliance) and “Hill Street Blues” (on the difficulties and rewards of a relationship).

Two episodes each of “Golden Girls” and “Kate and Allie” were honored in the sitcom category. Each of the four stories could be said to treat, in its way, the theme of a non-dependent individuality being asserted by the women involved. The value of warm relationships with men was not denied, significantly, but the surrender of individuality was seen to be too high a price.

Also given Luminas awards were episodes of “227,” “Family Ties,” “The Cosby Show” (in which Claire’s broken toe leads to a particular declaration of independence) and “Facts of Life.”

“Second Serve,” the docudrama starring Vanessa Redgrave as Renee Richards, the man-then-woman tennis star, was honored in the dramatic special category.

Eight movies of the week received awards, including “Samaritan: The Mitch Snyder Story,” which, although it dealt with the activist worker for Washington’s homeless, also featured outstanding characterizations by Cicely Tyson and other actresses.

The other honored movies were “Johnny Bull” (an abused and captive wife fights back), “Between Two Women” (Farrah Fawcett and Colleen Dewhurst as daughter-in-law and mother-in-law re-adjusting their lives), “Love, Mary” (Kristy McNichol as a dyslexic child who became a doctor), “Nobody’s Child” (Marlo Thomas as an abused girl and her long struggle to succeed ), “This Child Is Mine” (motherhood versus career), “Picking Up the Pieces” (Margot Kidder trying to protect her children in a bitter divorce), and “Tough Love” (Lee Remick as a mother making hard choices about a drug-abusing child).

Interestingly enough, at least half of the television movies honored were based on real-life experiences, and all were issue-oriented. Not all movies of the week claim such a high seriousness, but it is clear that for a complex of reasons (prestige, press attention, dramatic intensity, ratings), television has become an important carrier of social concern.

Five theatrical films received Luminas awards: “The Trip to Bountiful,” “The Color Purple,” “Eleni,” “Marie: A True Story” and “Out of Africa.”

There were weak, ineffectual and actively villainous men strewn through the honored episodes and films. But it was not invariably so. It did not require flawed men to reveal heroic women; social and economic realities were enough. And there were flawed and defeated women in view as well.

Yet what could be observed in the honored material was that multidimensional, non-stereotypical portrayals of women evoked correspondingly rounded and recognizable portraits of the men.

Ed Asner, a late-hour replacement as emcee for the ailing Marsha Mason, read aloud the criteria for the women’s role and said he wouldn’t mind a little such freedom from stereotype for male roles too.

The men in the media have always had a better time of it, but in the reflected light of the Luminas awards, it was easy to see that a little more reality wouldn’t hurt the males at all.

Irma Kalish, president of Women in Film, introduced the evening with Linda Seger, who chaired the Luminas committee. The presenters were producers Barbara Corday, Gale Hurd and Renee Valenti and actresses Betty White and Julie Harris.

To be noted by all other show-business award-givers: Women in Film rationed each winning show to one acceptee. It made for a brisk ceremony, after a late start.