Cinema: The Oscars

In a sort of shotgun wedding, Hollywood and television got together last week for the 25th annual presentation of Oscars. It was easy to predict who would wear the pants in the family. Master of Ceremonies Bob Hope, bowing to the cathode ray by wearing a blue dress shirt with his dinner jacket, cracked: "With Oscar 25 years old, it's high time he got married. While it's true he has a child bride, the kid is loaded. In fact, the bride's father is picking up the tab." (The show cost the Radio Corp. of America $250,000.)

To the movie fans outside Hollywood's RKO Pantages Theater, the show looked familiar: klieg lights crisscrossing the wet night sky and Cadillacs disgorging jeweled and ermined cargoes. But inside the palace, surrounded by TV cameras, zoomar lenses, floodlights and monitoring screens, the 2,800 top-drawer movie folk were acutely conscious that times had changed.

For the first time, some 34 million televiewers got a look at Hollywood's most ballyhooed annual event. The TV technicians, bossing the whole show, did a slick job of switching back & forth between Hollywood and Manhattan's International Theater, where a junior edition of the ceremonies was under way. All the cinema queens, some appearing for the first time on TV, looked as gorgeous as they ever did, but a few seemed to miss the careful direction they get in films. The cameras might have been less rigid (the losers in the audience were ignored, even though Bob Hope had advised watching them: "You'll see great understanding, great sportsmanship—great acting"). But the show was still fascinating in an unrehearsed, star-studded way.

Oscar for 1952's "best actor" was presented in absentia to durable Gary Cooper for his performance as the cow-town marshal in High Noon. In Manhattan, Broadway's Shirley Booth, whose slatternly housewife in Come Back, Little Sheba was her first screen role, stumbled excitedly up the steps to the stage. But the Hollywood audience, watching the big-screen TV, also saw her gracefully walk off with a well-deserved award for "best actress."

Perhaps in a sentimental mood, the academy gave the Oscar for "best picture" to Cinema Pioneer Cecil B. DeMille, 71, for his moneymaking circus extravaganza, The Greatest Show on Earth (already No. 2 on Hollywood's list of all-time big grossers).

Among other Oscar winners:

¶ Best supporting actress: Gloria Grahame, for her southern belle in The Bad and the Beautiful.

¶ Best supporting actor: Anthony Quinn for his desperado role in Viva Zapata!

¶ Best direction: John Ford for The Quiet Man (his fourth Oscar).

¶ Best foreign-language film: France's Forbidden Games.

¶ Best two-reel short subject: Walt Disney's Water Birds (Disney's 18th Oscar).