COMMENTARY : Oscarcast: Long Day’s Journey Into Night

The Academy Awards show inevitably has a different pace when you’re watching it over your shoulder, when you’re trying to write about it while it’s in progress. It’s a twin curse being an Oscar buff staring at the monitor of a word processor while Kim Basinger is on the air with half a dress on.

But I did see enough of the 62nd Academy Awards show to know that it isn’t the format that is weighing down that ship; it’s the ballast of the academy’s growing self-importance. Each show is stored in the hold like a brick, raising the waterline and straining the engine.

This year’s program was an improvement over last year’s, if only for the fact that there was nothing like the Snow White/Rob Lowe number to chase us under the table in embarrassment for our species. It was also nice to see a star being born in best actor winner Daniel Day-Lewis, a fresh face seemingly in wonder over his own victory and caught short by the audience’s extraordinary demonstration of appreciation.

For once, nothing came between the academy voters and their good judgment. Small film, foreign film, independent film. It made no difference; Day-Lewis gave a performance in “My Left Foot” that will be recalled in acting courses for decades, and he was acknowledged for it now .

There were few other exhilarating moments on a show so precise in its movements that you have to assume no one will ever be able to bring it in under 3 1/2 hours. If they’re committed to advertisers for that amount of time, the least the academy should do is move the starting time up to 5 p.m. and let the thing end on the same day it begins in the East.

First-time producer Gilbert Cates took the 62nd show in a completely different direction than Allan Carr took the 61st, but they got where they were going at about the same time. Paula Abdul came up with some spunky choreography for the costume nominees number--dirty dancing in pre-Victorian taffeta is something I wanted to see--but I’ve seen better sets in Ricky’s club on “I Love Lucy.”

The question is whether the quality of the production even means anything to the success of the show. Do people really tune this in to see dance numbers that would be laughed off Broadway, or to see a good man like Geoffrey Holder do a bad job of lip-syncing “Under the Sea”? Was anybody dazzled by the people-fish in tutus dangling from wires above Holder’s head?

Not for nothing did the TV variety show die.

Once a year, the movie industry puts itself in the hands of its once mortal enemy, and you get the impression there are still hard feelings on the other side. ABC-TV, with the help of an assigned academy producer, each year manages to make trivial what they purport to canonize.

There is no going back to a small dinner in a hotel ballroom, but the academy’s board of governors would do well to remember that while the show has grown into this massive pop centerpiece, a media circus that thumbs its bright red nose at all detractors, film hasn’t changed much at all. Few new skills have been added to the process since the talkies and the Oscars were introduced--almost simultaneously--and there is no more cause for celebration now than there was then.

Only the celebration and the ego of its celebrants have grown. Having live satellite remote presentations from Moscow, Buenos Aires, London and Sydney was nothing more than an electronic stunt, and only an organization with an exaggerated sense of its importance would have pulled it. A vodka company trying to exploit the Moscow remote surveyed Soviet citizens and found out that only a handful could name a single American star.

Sure, as Jack Lemmon said, the world can be served up today in a satellite dish, and Hollywood is still the major overseas supplier of filmed entertainment. But if a billion people were really tuned in to live feeds of the Oscar show Monday night, all it proves is that you can turn a light on in a dark room anywhere and people will look at it.

Next year, the awards return to the Shrine cavern near the campus of USC, and the academy has hinted that it will house the show in another large venue after that. The Coliseum? Don’t count it out. It has been abandoned by the Raiders, another franchise built on self-image, and just think of the productions they could put on there.

The movies and people being honored will still be about the same size, and their achievements will fade ever further into the background.

When are the Grammys?