No Debbie? Get Real, Academy

We wuz robbed. Debbie Reynolds wasn’t nominated for the best actress Oscar last week.

Ordinarily, such things aren’t a big deal to me or to most people outside Hollywood, but this is a different matter. In motion picture-making, an Oscar nomination is a big deal. It is one measure of achievement. And last year, Reynolds really achieved something.

She made her first movie in 25 years--Albert Brooks’ “Mother.” Reynolds played the mother. She played it sassy and sexy and smart. Thanks to Brooks, what could have been a typical whine--where the parents are always wrong and the children are always right--turned out to be balanced and fair, perhaps even favoring the parent. Thanks to Reynolds, audiences saw a detailed, deft portrait of a real woman who just happens to be over 60. (Reynolds is 64.)

American movie audiences are mostly unacquainted with the existence of women over 60, unless such women happen to be held hostage by terrorists who blow things up. This is the only kind of movie they make in Hollywood anymore, it seems. That’s why “Mother” came as such a pleasant surprise. There is a real story here, about a real person.

And Reynolds played it with real honesty--whether she was slicing frozen cheese, fumbling a newfangled phone or breaking your heart.

Maybe she’s been able to do this sort of thing all along, but who knew? Nobody made a picture with her in the last quarter-century. That’s a stunning injustice, to her and to all of us.

Now, a confession is in order here. I know Brooks, and he did play a CBS-style newsman of integrity in “Broadcast News.” And Reynolds was born in El Paso; I do take a proprietary interest in my fellow Texans. But there’s no conflict of interest in these opinions.

You have to understand. I come from a time and place where, if you wanted to show your date what a Sensitive Male you were, you took her to see a Debbie Reynolds picture. “Tammy and the Doctor.” “Tammy and the Bachelor.” “Tammy and the Thermonuclear Physicist.” “Tammy and the Candlestick Maker.” (I don’t know. I can’t remember them all. Maybe it was sensitive enough to take my date to see the show, but I wasn’t sensitive enough to stay awake.) Nevertheless I know this woman’s work.

Sure, she was cute. Sure, she could sing and dance. But it’s taken this long for her to show us what she can really do.

Reynolds has given us a glimpse of the possibilities that are in acting, in movie-making, in life--for anybody who takes a chance, no matter what her or his age.

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For this, she deserves a medal, not merely an Oscar nomination. We need such lessons, well-taught, on our movie screens and in all our American arts.

Since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did not see fit to give Reynolds the nomination she deserves, I would like to offer her an award of my own, one I just invented: In recognition of her outstanding achievement, the first Danny Award goes to Debbie Reynolds for her performance in “Mother.”

Because sometimes, if you want to see achievement honored, you’ve got to take matters into your own hands.

Dan Rather is . . . Oh, come on. You know who Dan Rather is.

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