COMPUTERS : On-Line Oscars

“AWARD-WINNING Films of the Silver Screen” is a program for film buffs, Trivial Pursuit fans and students of popular culture. It lists movie titles alphabetically--by year and by Academy Awards won in 31 categories. It displays a profile of each film and shows which movies won the most awards (there have only been four films since 1927 to win more than eight Oscars: “Gigi” in 1958, “Ben-Hur” in 1959, “West Side Story” in 1961 and “The Last Emperor” in 1987.)

If you ask it for all Oscar-winning films beginning with the letter “P” from 1927 to 1988 (the last year currently in the data base), it gives you a list that includes “The Paper Chase,” “Paper Moon,” “A Passage to India,” “Patton,” “Phantom of the Opera,” “Pillow Talk” and “Platoon.” If you ask it for the last 10 winners for Best Picture, it gives you “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Ordinary People,” “Chariots of Fire,” “Gandhi,” “Terms of Endearment,” “Amadeus,” “Out of Africa,” “Platoon,” “The Last Emperor” and “Rainman.”

There’s nothing fancy here, just lots of information and lots of ways to look at it. With every film, the program tells you who were the stars, what awards it won and what movies it beat to win the awards. (If you look up “Midnight Express,” for example, you’ll see that it won the Best Music and Best Writing categories for 1978. Principal cast members were Brad Davis, Randy Quaid and John Hurt. Oliver Stone wrote the screenplay, beating out Neil Simon for “California Suite” and Warren Beatty and Elaine May for “Heaven Can Wait.”)

Award - Winning Films of the Silver Screen, CWI Information Services, P.O. Box 4851, Anaheim 92803. Published by Gage Productions, (818) 884-2159.