OSCARS: THE BRISK AND THE BEST OF HOLLYWOOD

Just before the 1986 Academy Awards shuffle off to that great statistical cupboard in the sky, a couple of parting remarks should be made.

Yes, yes, the show is still too long, and it is still an uneasy compromise between movie show, TV show and stage show. But it’s not likely to get much shorter, as long as the network can sell those massive blocks of commercials, which are in fact what make the program seem as long and intermittent as it is. The producers and the academy take the rap for conditions not entirely within their control.

In its own, commercial-free terms, the show Stanley Donen produced this year was one of the briskest and best of the 20 or so I’ve attended.

The interminable crossovers and the dazed cross talk (by actors who seem inexplicably to have forgotten how to read lines) keep getting pared away. If the academy will take one more bite of the bullet gratitude-wise and ruthlessly limit each team of winners to one designated hitter, there is no telling what savings might result.

At that, it’s the Teleprompter as much as the improvisation that wants stern editing. All sermons on film technique should be shot down first and questioned later. As an old padre once remarked, you don’t save any souls after the first five minutes.

What the Donen show got exactly right is that the telecast is a celebration of film present but also, equally, of film past. The show’s litany of movies that never got the Oscar was a knockout, and so was that visitation from the MGM pretties in their bouquet of solid pastels.

There was a wonderful high foolishness about the movie musicals, particularly in the early days, and the MGM tribute, like the “Flying Down to Rio” opening, managed to share the fun without poking fun.

A certain schizophrenia does develop as you sit in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, dividing your gaze between the live events on stage and the monitors (adjusted, it seemed the other night, by the makeup men from “Revenge of the Long-Dead Ghouls”), to see what the home viewers are seeing.

It was a dazzling stage show. I’m not sure it looked nearly so impressive reduced to the close-ups and waist-high shots of the small screen. Lionel Richie, singing in his easy chair before that black-and-white cross-hatchery of moving spotlights, was a striking tableau. I couldn’t be certain from the monitors that the broadcast caught the full visual excitement of the staging.

You could make a good case for television going wide screen, as well as big screen.

On the other hand, the home audience may have made more of the antique Muppets, chortling away their commentary in the balcony. They were indecipherable in the hall.

Still, it’s an awards night first and last, and while there were a few surprises, born of those hunches that have a way of escalating into certainties, it seemed to me that the 4,000-plus academy voters stayed close to the general, the almost philosophical, patterns you can detect in their choices over the years.

The voters are by definition artists-craftsmen, with a high appreciation of traditional film craftsmanship, of which “Out of Africa” was clearly a principal exemplar this year. Its difficulties and its aspirations as well as its achievements were perceived to be high; its success is no more complicated than that to explain.

The academy also votes its honorable and usually liberal sentiments--liberal in the sense of expressing social concerns, not necessarily specific political persuasions.

The problems of Native Americans (“Broken Rainbow”), the horrors of war (“Witness to War”), the stresses on a young Soviet immigrant settling in (“Molly’s Pilgrim”), the glimpse at the cruelties of life under a military dictatorship (“The Official Story”) were all acknowledged and honored by the voters.

The plight, and the essential dignity, of a gay man in a hostile society I think gave William Hurt a symbolic as well as a personal victory for his strong performance in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

In the television age, when the studios are no longer quite so major and bloc voting no longer a significant factor, the Oscar sweepstake is more and more a free, untethered election. (Two major winners, “Kiss” and “The Trip to Bountiful,” were in fact independent productions.)

And I continue to find that the votes are positive rather than negative. The decisions may be arguable, but I doubt that you could find a conspiracy if you tried. It will not ease Steven Spielberg’s pain at having come away empty-handed, but there seems no reason to believe it was not a fair contest, whose results he accepted with great dignity.

The voting may be tinged with sentiment (although sheer sentiment would have given John Huston an Oscar), but the prevailing impulse is still to identify what is thought to be the best. The voters do not easily embrace discomfort, cynicism, despair or black comedy (thus, I think, the difficulties of “Prizzi’s Honor”). They certainly are no longer impressed with grosses as such.

But a warming, humanitarian excellence, with a touch of grandeur if it’s appropriate, is as near to a formula for Oscar as can be devised. That, of course, is a formula that could be said to embrace both “Out of Africa” and “The Color Purple,” which is why, you could also say, there is an Oscar vote.