Diane Wiest Winner of Supporting Role Oscar : Woody Allen Honored for ‘Hannah’; Academy Also Salutes ‘Room With View’ Adaptation

On a night many expected the Vietnam movie “Platoon” to be a major winner, Diane Wiest of “Hannah and Her Sisters” won the Oscar for supporting actress.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s film version of E.M. Forster’s “A Room With a View” won an award for best screenplay adaptation while Woody Allen won the third Oscar of his career for the script of his “Hannah.”

Neither was present for the awards. The choice of the awards surprised many, no doubt including Oliver Stone, a Vietnam veteran who wrote and directed the much-nominated “Platoon,” a grim, grunt’s-eye view of the war in which he fought and won a Purple Heart for wounds 20 years ago. However, in the early ballots, his film won the oscar for best sound.

For Jhabvala, it was her first Oscar. Allen previously won for writing and directing “Annie Hall” in 1977.

As the 59th annual Academy Awards ceremonies got under way at the Los Angeles Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, veteran actor Paul Newman, an honorary Oscar-winner last year, was a sentimental choice to win his first acting Oscar in seven tries, a best-actor award for “The Color of Money.”

Ironically, Newman, who was not at the ceremonies, accepted his honorary Oscar last year in Chicago, where he was filming “The Color of Money.”

This year, Newman’s strongest rival was thought to be William Hurt of “Children of a Lesser God.” Hurt won last year’s best-actor Oscar as an imprisoned homosexual in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

Wiest’s Oscar was her first. Her rivals in the supporting-actress category were were Tess Harper, the meddling cousin of “Crimes of the Heart”; Piper Laurie, the mother in “Children”; Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Tom Cruise’s tough-talking sweetheart in “The Color of Money”; and Maggie Smith, up for her third Oscar as the maiden cousin and chaperone of the heroine of “A Room With a View.”

The supporting-actor category featured two deadly rivals in “Platoon” -- Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe -- as well as Michael Caine, the wayward husband in “Hannah and Her Sisters”; Denholm Elliott, the outspoken Mr. Emerson of “A Room With a View,” and Dennis Hopper, the town drunk of “Hoosiers.”

Although Stone’s “Platoon” was favored to win in the best-picture category, two other films -- “Hannah and Her Sisters” and “A Room With a View” -- were considered in the running against Stone’s grim, grunt’s-eye view of the Vietnam War in which he fought 20 years ago.

The other best-picture nominees: the Hesper Anderson-Mark Medoff adaptation of Medoff’s “Children of a Lesser God,” about an unorthodox teacher of the deaf who falls in love with an embittered former student, and Roland Joffe’s “The Mission,” a haunting, passionate story of the Portuguese and Spanish empires battling Jesuit missionaries trying to help Guarani Indians in 18th century Latin America.

Stone, awarded a Purple Heart for wounds suffered in Vietnam, won his first Oscar in 1979 for his “Midnight Express” script. With Richard Boyle, he also was nominated this year for an original-screenplay Oscar for “Salvador,” a high-voltage tale of a hard-drinking, pot-smoking gonzo reporter-photographer covering rebels and right-wing death squads in the corrosive civil war of El Salvador.

“Platoon” and “View” -- Jhabvala’s adaptation of Forster’s lighthearted Edwardian-era novel about a young woman and love -- were the leading Oscar nominees with eight, followed by seven for Allen’s “Sisters,” a bittersweet comedy-drama about the lives and loves of three sisters in upscale Manhattan.

Sisterly matters also were the stuff of Beth Henley’s adaptation of her “Crimes of the Heart,” an earnest film version of her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1980 Broadway play, a Mississippi Gothic comedy about three sweetly loony sisters and their meddling cousin.

Sissy Spacek, one of the three-star sister cast that included Jessica Lange and Diane Keaton, was a best-actress nominee for her role as Babe McGrath, the one who shot her husband because, as she explained, she did not like his looks.

Others nominated for best actress: Jane Fonda, seeking her third Oscar, this time as the fading, alcoholic actress in “The Morning After”; Marlee Matlin, a deaf young woman who is Hurt’s real-life love and portrayed the woman he loves in “Children of a Lesser God”; Kathleen Turner, the time-tripping estranged wife in “Peggy Sue Got Married”; and Sigourney Weaver, who battled the forces of slime in 1979’s “Alien” and did it again in this season’s sequel, “Aliens.”

In “The Color of Money,” best-actor nominee Newman reprised his Oscar-nominated 1961 role of Fast Eddie Felson in “The Hustler,” this time with Felson as a middle-aged liquor salesman reliving and reviving his pool-shark skills through a young protege (Tom Cruise).

Other best-actor contenders were first-time nominee Bob Hoskins, the chauffeur-protector of an elegant London prostitute in “Mona Lisa”; James Woods as the rowdy journalist of “Salvador”; and tenor-sax jazzman Dexter Gordon, who never has acted before but won critical acclaim as the burned-out, alcoholic expatriate of “Round Midnight.”

The black-tie ceremonies were televised nationally by ABC. During the ceremonies, previously announced awards were made to two major Hollywood figures--producer-director Steven Spielberg and veteran actor Ralph Bellamy.

Spielberg, 39, whose mega-hits include “E.T., the Extra-terrestrial” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” but whose “The Color Purple” failed to win any of 11 Oscar nominations in 1986, was given the Irving G. Thalberg Award for consistently high-quality films.

Bellamy, 82, whose 103 films over 65 years have ranged from “The Front Page” and “Sunrise at Campobello” to “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Trading Places,” received an honorary Oscar--he never has won one--for “his unique artistry and his distinguished service to the profession of acting.”

More than 4,300 Academy members were eligible to vote for Oscar nominees, with last Tuesday the deadline for ballots. The votes were tabulated by the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse.

John M. Wilson contributed to this story.