Oscar Through the Years: You Oughta Be in Pictures : Movies: An anthology of Academy Award moments, including some of Monday night’s, might make a nifty film.

Ever since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bit the bullet in 1953 and elected to join forces with the electronic enemy, the Academy Awards telecast has hovered between being a television show that happened to be about the movies and a movie event that happened to be seen on television.

Too often the demands of television to make the Oscars a variety show have neglected something of what makes the movies the movies: its great stars and all those pieces of time, as James Stewart calls them, the bits of movies that are by now part of the collective national (or world) memory.

Monday night’s show came closer than any in recent years to reconciling Hollywood’s pride with television’s particular appetites. There was a lovely richness of excerpts, from those classic first flickering images watched by Paris audiences in 1895 to extensive clips from the nominated work done in 1990.

One of the more warming features of the night was the fast survey of film folk remembering the first films that persuaded them the movies were where they belonged.

There was a nice abundance of movie stars, the elegant Jessica Tandy and the everlastingly vibrant Sophia Loren conspicuous among them. For a wonder, the presenters knew their lines and the often difficult names, foreign and domestic. Some wonders never cease.

As always there are moments of real excitement in the auditorium, victories that were clearly very popular, notably Kathy Bates as best actress. For television, the production numbers had verve and style and Madonna clearly delighted the watchers at the Shrine, for whom the evening is live theater. That impact is, I think, not fully transmitted to the home audience, which evidently did not catch Whoopi Goldberg’s breast-pounding gesture of prideful triumph as she walked to the stage.

One day I hope it will occur to someone that an anthology of Academy Award moments might make a stunning motion picture in the tradition of “That’s Entertainment I and II” or “That’s Dancin’.” It could be envisioned as a stretch version of those powerhouse short compilations of film clips that Chuck Workman has put together.

I think I haven’t missed attending an Oscar night since I joined The Times in 1965 a few weeks before that year’s running, a very chilly April 5 at Santa Monica Civic when “Mary Poppins” and “My Fair Lady” fought it out. Julie Andrews won best actress, “My Fair Lady” got best picture and George Cukor was best director for it.

In two or three of the early years I wrote the main news story, in rushed increments, sitting in a tuxedo in the press room, which is like enjoying an Atlantic cruise from the boiler room.

A movie called “That’s Oscar” would, I hope, capture some of the often stylish (if just as often bizarre) production numbers, which reflect a creative intersection where Busby Berkeley, Agnes de Mille and “Cher” collide head on.

I remember a night when the rules of the Price, Waterhouse game were explained musically, and delightful it was. Some of the special lyrics fly by so fast you can’t catch them all, but memory says that the spriteliest of them (poking a little fun at the night and its tensions) would not too much embarrass Lorenz Hart or Ogden Nash.

No one who saw it will likely forget the 1972 show when composer-performer Isaac Hayes, nominated for the theme from “Shaft,” roared on stage festooned with gold chains and riding a motorcycle for the song presentation, staged by Ron Field. The razzle was never more dazzling, and Hayes won the Oscar.

The decline of the movie musical has meant a decline in movie songs that make whatever passes for the hit parade these days, movie songs tending to be on the soundtrack over the titles rather than before your very eyes. The production numbers for the nominated songs are often more memorable than the music, and they give the producers a chance to bring on some pop stars, like Madonna, to enrich Oscar night’s identity as a TV variety show.

But for all the production values, the solemn special awards and the whole fabric of emcees and stately if tongue-tangled presenters, it is the human moments that stay in mind and give the evening its surprises, its pleasures and the emotional impact that transcends the glitter.

I think above all of a show I didn’t attend but watched on television, the April night in 1961 when Gary Cooper, dying of cancer in a hospital, received a special Oscar, presented by his old friend James Stewart. “We’re all very, very proud of you, Coop,” Stewart said in tears. It was friend speaking to friend through the camera, and it seemed only incidental that both were stars of legendary magnitude. Cooper died a month later.

The academy’s tribute to Charlie Chaplin in 1972 had its own emotional force. After years in self-willed exile in Switzerland, the man George Bernard Shaw thought was the only genius movies had produced returned in triumph to Hollywood to receive a special Oscar. He was nearly 83 and the fires of controversy that drove him away had cooled (though not entirely). Chaplin, who had entered through the underground garage as a precautionary measure, did not speak but walked on stage to a huge ovation, joining hands with the whole cast of presenters and winners, who with the audience sang the song he wrote, “Smile.”

It was never decided whether the famous streaker incident at the show in April, 1974, was pre-planned with academy consent. David Niven, emceeing at the time, had a splendid ad lib: “Just think, the only laugh that man will probably ever get is for stripping and showing off his shortcomings.” Then again, Niven was a fast man with a quip and was his own best writer. It made a welcome interruption, even if the producers were in on the act (the academy denied it). It was, possibly appropriately, the year of “The Sting.”

(If the moment had a Preston Sturges flavor, the ending was by Nathanael West. After a brief outing of fame as a stand-up comic, the streaker, Robert Opel, was killed five years later in a sex shop he was operating in San Francisco.)

There have been other moments of comedy bordering on farce, including a woman who identified herself as Sacheen Littlefeather (her real name was Maria Cruz) accepting Marlon Brando’s Oscar for “The Godfather” at the 1973 awards. It was Brando’s protest against the screen treatment of Indians.

Much more often, visible even through a burble of thank yous, there is evident and affecting sense that receiving an Oscar is a milestone, even to the most jaded and much-honored performers. Few accepters have been more touching than Louise Fletcher, speaking to her hearing-impaired parents in sign language after she was named best actress for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” at the 1976 ceremony.

Occasionally the awards have veered so far toward television that the motion picture heritage--in the form of its legendary stars and its unforgettable pieces of time from the films themselves--has had short shrift. In this centenary year of the motion picture (dated from Thomas Edison’s request to George Eastman of Kodak for film in long, thin, flexible celluloid strips) the balance has been righted and there will be material for that so far imaginary assemblage called “That’s Oscar.”