The Day for Night Stars

Last week TIME'S art critic Robert Hughes decided to take in a live happening, Oscar night, for a change. His report:

It is mildly hallucinatory to attend the Academy Awards for the first time. One flies 3,000 miles to behold the real thing, only to wander onto the set of a long and shapeless parody of the Johnny Carson Show: all has been pre-empted by television, redesigned in terms of the 19-in. screen. The rituals of former years have gone, or at least become so attenuated as to be barely recognizable. In the old days (one remembers from childhood newsreels) the stars used to come out, as they should, at night. Their exits from the black limos would be lit by epiphanic blasts of flash powder, while searchlights wagged their fingers across the suave Los Angeles sky.

Not any more, because--due to the time differences across the continent--the Academy Awards now have to start at 7 p.m., in order to be seen on the East Coast by 10. Performed in broad daylight, the entrance ceremony has not much more glamour than a school fete--especially since most of the stars seemed to stay away this year, preferring to watch the rituals with coke spoon and TV set, at home. (Ray Bolger's dance around the steps of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was taped for TV two nights earlier.) The hordes of screaming fans were diminished too. There were about 2,000 of them, mostly teenyboppers, on the bleachers.

As each limo drew up, one heard a brief, collective indrawing of breath as lungs dilated for the big squeal; generally it was followed by a disappointed exhalation, as the couple issuing from the Cadillac turned out to be unrecognizable. Lip gloss, hair spray, three-tone streaks, cocoa-butter tans, insecure Zapata mustaches and wine red crushed velvet tuxedos: the women looked like tennis club matrons and their escorts like croupiers. The teenies had come for Al Pacino, but he was in New York. Prodded by the eupeptic booming of the outside master of ceremonies, they stayed to squeal at Walter Matthau and (in some puzzlement) at the evening's representative of the muse of irony, Gore Vidal. When Elizabeth Taylor, almost the last survivor of the studio star system for which the Oscar ceremony had been created, appeared on the walkway, it was like the arrival of a galleon in a weekend fleet of fiber-glass runabouts.

Inside, the sense of dislocation increased. From up in the balcony of the theater, not much was to be seen; the actors on the big black stage were too far away, so that the audience spent its time craning for a glimpse of the TV monitors mounted along the parapets. Those who had hired opera glasses in the foyer (deposit $25, or a California state driver's license: realists, the concessionaires) trained them on the TV sets. Where else in the world, and on what other occasion, could an enthusiast spend so much money on limos, hairdresser, clothes, ticket, only to end up watching television through a magnifying lens in the distant but verifiable presence of a real event?

The speeches of congratulation and thanks wore on. The patriotic nexus was established: "A great nation," Walter Mirisch intoned, "like a great film, can stand the test of time and the glare of critical examination." One thing that apparently flunked time's test was the anthem America the Beautiful. When Elizabeth Taylor unaccountably asked the crowd to sing it along with her, no one knew the words.

Following the herd instinct, several stars, including Taylor, Mario Thomas and Marisa Berenson, ordered their gowns from Halston. The popular mode was the strapless wisp of chiffon skirt slit to the waist, that seemed about to fly off or shiver to the floor. Margaux Hemingway, looking like a jumbo stick of red-and-white peppermint candy, stumbled fetchingly over the names she read aloud; Elliott Gould, aware that practically every man present was betting on the results of the night's basketball game, produced the most popular aside of the night by muttering, when his partner intoned the ritualistic "and the winner is ... ," "Indiana 86, Michigan 68" into the mike. It was the happiest night of the expected number of lives, and one of the producers of an award-winning documentary about a crazed Japanese who skied down the flank of Everest came out with the most richly bogus solemnity of the evening: "I just wanna thank my mother, the man and the mountain."

What was it all about? Presumably no one believes that awards have a more than fortuitous connection with quality in film. As a view of a medium laboriously patting its own back, the ceremony is without equal in the world. But how can so much narcissism be combined with so little real glamour? It is the lack of illusion that makes Oscar night look moribund. There is a point when disbelief can no longer be suspended: O.J. Simpson is not Gary Grant, and although Jacqueline Bisset may be the most beautiful girl in the world, she is not Ava Gardner. Without such priests and priestesses, the fertility rite means nothing.

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