OSCARS GET DOWN TO SERIOUS SHOW BUSINESS

So much for the argument that the Academy Awards are elitist and that they ignore popular films.

Monday night, a day after it had officially passed the intoxicating $100-million box-office mark, Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” picked up four gold statuettes to go with the loot and established itself as the richest movie to ever be named best picture.

At least, it is the richest by current monetary standards. When dollars are adjusted, “Gone With the Wind” remains Oscar’s box-office champ, and there would be a few others ranked above “Platoon.”

But it was not strictly “Platoon’s” show Monday. The academy voters, in their most generous mood since 1981 when they spread their awards over four different films, gave almost equal endorsements to smaller-scale films: James Ivory’s “A Room With a View” and Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters.”

“Room” and “Hannah” each won three Oscars, making it a night for independent film makers, adult filmgoers and Hollywood trend watchers to remember.

Low-budget movies dominated the evening. “A Room With a View,” independently financed for $3 million, won awards for Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s screenplay, adapted from an E. M. Forster novel, and for costume design and art direction.

“Hannah,” reportedly made on a $10-million budget, won awards for Allen for original screenplay and supporting actor awards for Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest.

Caine was the only surprise among the major categories. Tom Berenger (“Platoon”) and Dennis Hopper (“Hoosiers”) were thought to have been the leading candidates.

What the relatively inexpensive movies have shown is that American audiences are older and wiser than Hollywood has been treating them for the last 10 years, and maybe--all they have to do is read the grosses--the major studios will join the swing toward reasonably priced quality films and overcome their feeling that teen-agers will only see movies a chimpanzee can understand.

“(It’s an) amazing turnaround in the mood of the country . . . that people would go to see this kind of movie,” said Stone, after picking up his Oscar for best director. “Teenagers are going to see it.”

“Kids want something real today,” added “Platoon” producer Arnold Kopelson. “They don’t want teen-age gloss.”

The big-budget movies weren’t overlooked altogether. Chris Menges won the cinematography award for the $26-million “The Mission,” a film that was otherwise shut out. And “Aliens” won Oscars for visual effects and sound-effects editing.

Monday’s Oscar show was a gem to watch, both for the awards and the production, the first under the aegis of Samuel Goldwyn Jr. Goldwyn’s decision to dwell on film clips, both from vintage films and from those pertinent to the nominations, kept the show rolling without the usual second-hour flat spots.

There were the usual production glitches and a normal allotment of tongue-twisted readings of bad dialogue on the TelePrompTer, and it drifted 22 minutes beyond the three-hour limit. But it didn’t feel like it.

The show should be remembered, if for nothing else, as the night the voting rules and the Price-Waterhouse accountants were excluded.

The show needed to be good, given the number of no-show winners. Most conspicuously absent was Paul Newman, who finally won a best actor Oscar after six earlier nominations.

Overall, the academy did right by the 1986 nominees. Newman’s win over the superb work of both James Woods in “Salvador” and Bob Hoskins in “Mona Lisa,” was a sentimental lapse but an understandable one.

“Platoon” may have just been the right movie at the right time, the one that Stone said found Americans in the right mood to exorcise their feelings about the Vietnam War. But on a more mundane level, it also points up the folly of major studio spending (“Platoon’s” $6-million budget is about one-third the cost of an average studio movie).

If Woody Allen had been tuned in, his concerns about the indignity of Oscar competition would have been confirmed by the opening number, which had Dom DeLuise, Pat Morita and Telly Savalas singing an Oscarized version of “Fugue for Tinhorns.” The original lyrics had been substituted by lines assessing the chances of the evening’s acting nominees.

The use of film clips in introducing the screenplay awards were superb. They were not only some of the greatest and most familiar scenes in Hollywood history, but they actually gave viewers a visual lesson in how words become screen images.

Things got off to a no-show kind of night, with the first two winners--Jhabvala and Allen--not there to pick up their Oscars.

Caine was a no-show, too, but not by choice. He had been set to present the Oscar for sound-effects editing but had to withdraw last week when producers of “Jaws 4,” in production in the Caribbean, would not release him for the day.

“Platoon’s” Oscar for best sound was something of a surprise. The sound editors’ guild had presented its Golden Reel award to the “Top Gun” team, which was expected to win again Monday. But then, “Top Gun” was not expected to win for best original song, which it did.

Wiest seemed to go out of her way not to thank Woody Allen when she accepted her award for best supporting actress for “Hannah and Her Sisters.” Wiest mentioned that she is currently working on her fourth movie with Allen, but she reserved her thanks to her co-stars and her family.

When she got backstage, Wiest looked at the assembled reporters and answered the question before they could ask her: “I can’t believe I did that. You know what I left out, I left Woody out of my speech.”

Asked how she thought the Oscar would affect her career, Wiest said, “Gee, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get to work with someone besides Woody.”

“I know you’re on the edge of your seats wondering who I will trash tonight,” said Bette Midler, who went on to trash no one in her brief but lively presentation of the Oscar for best score.

“I’ll save the cheap shots for the People’s Choice Awards,” Midler said.

The Irving Thalberg Award was preceded by a superb visual biography of the film mogul in whose memory the award for film-making excellence is presented. Many people regarded the selection of Steven Spielberg for the periodic Thalberg award as a consolation prize for his snub last year as best director for “The Color Purple.”

Spielberg, who received applause in each of the press rooms backstage, deflected questions about the events of last year.

“What happened last year?,” he said, laughing.

Spielberg, 38, said he would like to win an Oscar some day, and though his acceptance speech was a plea for screenplays of substance, he qualified it backstage to mean “ entertaining screenplays of substance.”

“I am not going to change and start doing arty films,” he said.

During his opening monologue, “ ‘Crocodile’ Dundee” star Paul Hogan advised losing nominees to be bad sports and promised that things “wouldn’t be pretty” if he didn’t win a screenplay Oscar after traveling around the world for the show.

But he was on his best behavior when he was beaten out by Allen’s script for “Hannah.”

“Hey, if this movie took an Academy Award as well as being a blockbuster around the world, I’d probably be doomed for my second film,” Hogan said. “(The film’s success) makes people feel good; it’s like a dose of medicine. . . . After some of the depressing movies they’re making these days, they need it.”

The mustachioed gentlemen identified as Oliver Stone during the introduction of the best-director nominees was actually Andy Kuehn, president of Kaleidoscope Film, a company that specializes in movie trailers. It was not known whether Kuehn did the trailer for “Platoon.”

David Fox and Pat Broeske contributed to this story.