Who's There?

Oscar night, once Hollywood's annual town meeting, is rapidly becoming a party for the people who didn't come.

At last week's big show, well over half of the Oscar nominees were not there. Hollywood simply is not one place any more. It is now an earth-circling synecdoche. Its personnel are too far scattered to fly to Los Angeles on the mere chance that they might win an Oscar. The mass meeting, 1947 format, no longer works. Hence no one else can be expected to give much of a damn, and few did.

While klieg lights flared over a shabby curb in Santa Monica, a few famous ghosts may have drawn up in invisible Duesenbergs, but the people who arrived in visible Cadillacs were, for the most part, fat anonymous cats. Only the sex specialists, like Carroll Baker and Eva Six, tried to take advantage of the occasion--Eva in a dress that would qualify for the gatefold of Man-boy Magazine and Carroll in a feathered boa. "Hey, Carroll, take it off!" screamed the fans.

TV Dinner. Where was everybody? A lot of them were in Bel Air at the home of Producer Harold Mirisch, who chose this particular Monday night to throw a party. Mirisch and his spangled crowd--150 people on the level of Billy Wilder, Gene Kelly, Dean Martin, Louis Jourdan--watched the show on ten TV sets while eating a catered dinner.

What they saw was nothing to party about. Jack Lemmon, master of ceremonies, told cardboard jokes and looked somewhat cardboard himself in his rented tails. The only funny moment in the 140-minute show came when Sammy Davis Jr., as presenter of some minor award, was handed the wrong envelope. "Wait till the N.A.A.C.P. hears about this!" he said somewhat obscurely, drawing a sizable laugh.

Best for the First. Britain's Tony Richardson, whose Tom Jones won as best picture and got him an Oscar as best director, was in London getting ready for a new play. Margaret Rutherford, the year's best supporting actress for her portrayal of the dotty duchess in The VIPs, was having her hair done in a London studio when the news reached her. Melvyn Douglas, given the best supporting-actor award for his work as Paul Newman's father in Hud, was visiting Israel with his daughter, who once lived in a kibbutz there.

Patricia Neal, also of Hud, won the best-actress Oscar.* Nearly eight months pregnant, she was asleep at her home in Buckinghamshire when the phone rang; next day she went down to London for a flashbulb greeting at Marylebone Station, with full obsequies by the top-hatted stationmaster.

Only one major recipient of an Academy Award was seen on American TV --the only one to make it to Santa Monica. For this alone he might well have touched off the explosion of applause that followed the sound of his name. But there was a bit more to it than that. Sidney Poitier, voted best actor of 1963 for his performance in Lilies of the Field, is the first Negro who has ever won a top Oscar. If the Academy Awards presentations lacked everything in showmanship, the selection of Sidney Poitier at least coincided with the sentiment of the times.

*Bette Davis claims that when she won this award in 1935, she nicknamed it "Oscar" in honor of her husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson, whose golden posterior resembled that of the statuette. After immortalizing charmin' Harmon, Bette won another Oscar, three more husbands.

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