Prize Day at Global Village

If media hot and media cool have shrunk the world to the dimensions of Marshall McLuhan's global village, then last week's Academy Awards made a certain amount of sense. Hollywood's annual orgy of self-adulation was really the commencement exercises at good old Global Village High, complete with prizes, dull speeches, strained humor, amateurish entertainment--and one hell of a party afterward, for winners and losers alike. At least two things made this year's ceremony, silly as it always is, a little bit different: the most popular girl ended up winning none of the prizes, and one of the biggest awards of all went to the truculent dropout of the class.

The lovely loser, of course, was AH MacGraw, whom many figured a shoo-in for the best actress award. To be sure, there were complaints that her performance as Jenny Cavilleri in Love Story wasn't quite up to her Brenda Patimkin in 1969's Goodbye, Columbus. But--by Academy standards--didn't the film deserve a big prize for being one of Hollywood's all time runaway box-office triumphs (well over $30 million so far)? And hadn't Ali's husband, Bob Evans, earned an Oscar or two for his contributions to Paramount's growing profits?

Sheer Merit. Ali, as it turned out, knew better than a lot of insiders. A week before the awards ceremony, she and Bob and another couple had written down their predictions and sealed them in envelopes, with a bottle of champagne to go to the winner of their contest. Ali missed only one of the eight major awards: she picked Karen Black (Five Easy Pieces) as best supporting actress instead of Winner Helen Hayes (Airport). Otherwise, though, Mrs. Evans was as prescient as could be: she correctly named Patton for best picture, best direction (Franklin J. Schaffner), best actor (George C. Scott), and best original screenplay (Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund North); Glenda Jackson (Women in Love) for best actress; John Mills (Ryan's Daughter) for best supporting actor; Francis Lai (Love Story) for best musical score. It was too much to expect that she would also have picked the Oscar ceremony's best decolletage, which clearly and defiantly belonged to Sally Kellerman (M *A* S*-H). The major surprise was the unwanted Oscar that went to Scott, whose well-publicized determination to snub Hollywood's "meat parade" was the butt of what passed for the evening's jokes. As for Scott himself, he slept through the televised ceremony at his New York farm; his sons woke him up to accept a mock substitute award from some friends: a statue of Abraham Lincoln with the words GOD A'MIGHTY, FREE,

FREE AT LAST.

Grudgingly, most of moviedom had to concede that Scott had won his Oscar on sheer merit. Much less grudgingly, they had to say pretty much the same about the relatively unknown British housewife (see following story) who duplicated the 1969 Oscar success of her countrywoman Maggie Smith by walking off with the best actress award.

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