WHAT OSCAR SAYS ABOUT HOLLYWOOD

ALMOST 90 YEARS AGO, AN ENGLISHWOMAN NAMED ELINOR Glyn wrote a racy best seller called Three Weeks that had it all: Venice! Illicit passion! Making out on a tiger-skin rug! Eventually, inevitably, she was invited to Hollywood to write screenplays and dine out. At some point in her stay the industry entered one of its periods of uncertainty-or perhaps one should say one of its periods of more-than-usual uncertainty-and someone asked Madame Glyn what she thought might happen next. "Whatever will make the most money," she sagaciously replied.

In a sense, that's all you can ever safely say about Hollywood. The...