MOMENTS THAT MATCH THE NIGHT

Sitting in the audience at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, or running through the memories a year or a decade later, the Academy Awards are finally not results but indelible human moments, occasionally funny (the streaker behind David Niven), occasionally startling (Sacheen Littlefeather accepting for Marlon Brando on behalf of Native American rights), but most often terrifically moving.

I have little doubt that the scene likely to be remembered longest from March 30, 1987, is Marlee Matlin accepting her Oscar as best actress. It was the kind of sentiment-heavy event that Hollywood is good at inventing for the purposes of fiction: the moment when the triumph over adversity and bad odds is achieved and savored.

But this was real enough. And, as the brief clip from “Children of a Lesser God” made absolutely clear, Matlin’s performance simply as performance was, in its intensity and conviction, an Oscar-worthy piece of work that earned its own way.

It was an affecting moment not least because the role--and the Randa Haines film--reconfirmed the power of the screen to place its viewers inside someone else’s sensibilities--fears, angers and dreams.

The show missed its three-hour target by 22 minutes. But it was not the show itself that seemed to drag, it was the endless commercial interruptions. All the sermonizing about short acceptances were taken so much to heart that the president of the Academy, director Robert Wise himself, was hooked by his own petard as it were, and silenced amid the confusions attendant upon Bette Davis’ presentation of the best actor award to Paul Newman.

At long last the show wrapped the five nominated songs into one medley that was most visually exciting and well-paced production number of the evening. If the vote had been taken at the moment, it would have been a tie between “Mean Green Monster From Outer Space,” sung most wondrously by Levi Stubbs, and “Life in a Looking Glass” as sung by the affable Tony Bennett. As it was, of course, neither won. “Take My Breath Away,” which did, produced some appropriate gasps. But the fast-changing set, the ingenious use of the Hollywood sign and the inverted searchlights which for once beamed down upon us, worked handsomely.

The unifying presence of Bernadette Peters and that fitting ballad (“What You Need Is an Original Song” by Ken and Mitzi Welch) was an inspired invention, and while the medley occupied a large piece of time, it was a huge improvement over the old tradition of five separate presentations.

The visual trickery of Tom Hanks and Bugs Bunny as joint presenters was another delicious invention. Yet overall the show achieved briskness at the cost of a certain erratic choppiness. There were those of us (I own up) who found that Bob Hope had grown over-predictable at the podium, but it’s clear there is much to be said for an anchoring presence as against the current multi-host approach, with its attendant nervous giggles.

Yet what is also true is that the tone of the show owes a good deal to the pattern of the awards themselves. This had seemed to be a less predictable year than some, although as it turned out the most frequently guessed-at (and the most pleasing) winners really did win.

The one fairly startling winner was Michael Caine as best supporting actor, and it seems a reasonable speculation that Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe of “Platoon” divided the vote either of them alone might have had.

It is hard to recall a recent year in which the honors went to so many films--11 titles, and only a mini-sweep for “Platoon,” although it captured two of the top prizes and, judging from the audience response at the Music Center, was a very popular choice.

The wide dispersal of the awards doesn’t--and didn’t--engender the kind of down-to-the-wire suspense there has been in other years, when two films trade Oscars like punches in a prize fight. On the other hand, it suggests a fair state of health in the industry when so much admirable work is identified in so many films.

There were other moments to remember from the show: the eloquence of Steven Spielberg’s remarks as his accepted the Irving Thalberg Award, the solemnity of Dustin Hoffman’s tribute to the collaborators on any film. “You have to break your heart to break those odds (against you)” is a line that may echo down the years for its painful truth.

The archive clips were nicely and, in the matter of the uses of sound, very wittily put together. The clips from the nominated films were helpful (although the clip from “Hannah and Her Sisters” seemed peripheral to the main thrust of the film).

But the Oscar show is at last an evidently impossible dream of perfection, to be achieved on that distant day when the jokes are all funny, the acceptances are brisk, amusing and affecting, the choreography dazzling, the nominated songs rememberable. Some day but, despite some useful advances, not quite yet.