OSCAR NIGHT: THE FLEETING THRILL OF IT

As a phenomenon, the Academy Awards have several points in common with an extended winter vacation.

Without them, January and February would be even duller than they are. Few new films arrive and fewer still that are worth watching to anyone except popcorn addicts and insomniacs.

Then, too, the Oscars, considered in the context of eternity, are supremely and serenely unimportant. But, like a successful vacation, they may nevertheless be amusing, diverting and restorative, and, in any context briefer than eternity, those are qualities not to be dismissed lightly.

What the awards also have in common with vacations is that once they are over they tend to slide out of mind with all indelicate speed, until the next cycle begins.

By late Tuesday morning, the winners and the also-rans have already begun to blur into one smartly dressed mass. Unless there has been a quite extraordinary sweep, like the one Woody Allen achieved with “Annie Hall,” or an unexpectedly dramatic moment, like Louise Fletcher accepting in sign language for the benefit of her hearing-impaired parents after her victory in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” you start forgetting who won what.

Except for those confirmed Oscarologists, of whom there are many, who have total recall of all 59 award years, a benign cleansing of the memory cells commences, and by late April you need a printed reference to summon up the findings of that indelible Monday night.

Yet the Oscars engender real enough suspense among those who go to movies all the time, and curiosity among those who like to see stars in their finery. Within the industry, of course, they have the urgency of a presidential primary--and the urgency increases each year, as the walk-in movies compete ever harder with the stay-home entertainments.

It is an irony much remarked, and all too true, that the medium that ravaged the movie-going audience is now the movies’ most potent once-a-year commercial. It is, as has also been said, like being helped to your feet by the driver who has run you over.

An exhaustive tracking study of the pre-Oscar and post-Oscar trade done on a selection of nominated and victorious films would confirm what more generalized observations have said for years: Being nominated is a big help and the more nominations the merrier; winning is an even bigger help at the box office, and the more Oscars the better.

“Annie Hall” was not a big hit at the box office before its Academy Award sweep; afterward it was, certainly by the standards of Allen’s other films and indeed by any standards.

Since the Oscars do have significant consequences, beyond the ego-massaging they provide for individuals and for the industry as a whole, it makes sense that they should be conducted fairly and well.

They represent the most secret ballot of any known to man. Despite generations of guesses and speculations, no one has been able to say authoritatively who won what over whom by how many votes. And it would, I think, be dismally anticlimactic to know, tainting the sweet smell of success at no real consolation to the runners-up and with no useful lesson for future voters.

If there was once bloc voting by studio employees in aid of their own products, it is well-nigh impossible to detect evidence of it these days in a do-it-yourself Hollywood.

The Oscar outcomes can be quarrelled with in this and every other year, and detectable are trace elements of sentiment, rancor, political liberalism and aesthetic conservatism (and vice versa), ignorance, xenophobia and hometown pride, tone-deafness and colorblindness and other tremors.

And what remains true is that some unspecified number among the 4,355 academy voters are making choices on films they haven’t seen, drawing instead on a kind of gumbo of hearsay, trade ads, recommendations, explicit urgings, friendship and other sensory promptings. Then again, when was any sizable election significantly different?

But the academy’s effort, now dating back 20 years to the presidencies of Gregory Peck, Dan Taradash and their successors, has been to bring the Oscars into the modern world, giving them all the rigor that can be imposed.

This meant, in the controversial first instance, purging the rolls of voters who had been long inactive in the industry. A system in some technical branches of having a select committee make pre-nominations was scrapped because it denied the full membership of the branches their full voice.

Voters for best foreign-language film must now have seen all five nominated films. In the past, any film that had had a long commercial run in Los Angeles enjoyed an unfair advantage.

An expanded membership now better reflects an industry no longer quite so dominated by the studios and their cadres (although the academy membership is still senior in age to the industry at large by a fair margin).

Nothing is perfect, and in the best of worlds, all the academy voters would have to have seen all the nominated films. Still, the recent history of the Academy Awards suggests how increasingly free form they have become. They are ever less home-centered and more national and international, and, as this year, less dominated by major studio product.

Like vacation travel, the Oscars can be broadening as well as restorative.