Most Oscarcast Promises Kept

By Charles Champlin | Times Arts Editor

March 26, 1985

From The Times: Tuesday, March 26, 1985

By George, I think they've got it. Almost.

The efforts by its producing quartet — Gregory Peck, Robert Wise, Larry Gelbart and Gene Allen of the academy — to revitalize and shorten the Oscar show paid off almost as well as they'd hoped. They didn't break the three-hour mark as they wanted to, but they were only over it by a tad.

It was a lovely beginning, and the introduction of 10 presenters in less than two minutes at the top of the show was stylish and most blissfully promising. Trimming the walk-ons and the introductions paid off handsomely, and so obviously did all the pressures on the accepters to keep it short. I didn't notice any single accepter saying nothing at all, but you could have printed most of the remarks on post cards and had room left for a weather report. Miraculous.

David Wolper said an eloquent thanks for the Jean Hersholt award in a minute flat (tying the Olympic record), and Frank Hodsoll accepted a special award for the National Endowment for the Arts in under a minute, breaking Wolper's record by roughly five seconds.

One of Gregory Peck's avowals was that the show would eschew nostalgia, that way of looking back over the shoulder at the good old days. It is obvious that that's a promise to be broken whenever the circumstances seem appropriate.

The warmest segment of the show and the night, clearly, was the presentation of the special Oscar to James Stewart, with Cary Grant doing the introduction of a very expert montage of Stewart clips (which will do as a look over the shoulder at the good old days if ever you saw one) and with both men most genuinely moved.

The presences of Gene Kelly, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas also hinted that nostalgia is sometimes everything it's cracked up to be, and is to be ignored at the academy's peril.

But what the new briskness demonstrated, with a certain irony, is that things could go faster yet. Those nominated songs do go on for a lot of choruses, and unless the production is as svelte and exciting as the pas de deux with Ann Reinking and Gary Chryst, what the toes tap with is impatience.

(In some subsequent post-mortem it may be possible to learn what happened with the Willie Nelson-Kris Kristofferson-Lonette McKee country music medley, which seemed to have caught the director by surprise, producing some curiously awkward camera angles.)

Whatever its length or shape, the Oscarcast cannot help being dramatic and can never completely undermine its own suspense, even if the stage waits in the past have been interminable.

But it is a curious and ironic lesson, observable this year as in some others, that the real drama of the evening, the reciting of the winners, is not always equally dramatic. This had looked to be a more suspenseful year than last because there appeared to be no clear-cut sweep in prospect, as for "Terms of Endearment."

Yet the sweep as it developed for "Amadeus," a deserving film beyond all doubt, set up a kind of melancholy, very nearly, because the division of the spoils was growing so uneven. Still, the sheer ecstatic delight of Sally Field for her Oscar for "Places in the Heart" was a memorable dramatic moment.

Dropping the jokes (most of them) in favor of some often eloquent statements about the film arts was a calculated risk, but the 1985 Oscarcast seemed again to be a show about the movies.