DAMN THE TUXEDOS!

I have one lingering question about the way the men attending last week's Academy Awards were dressed: Aren't these people worried about what the guys they went to high school with are saying?

I'm thinking, for instance, of an actor who showed up wearing a shiny silver garment that peeked out from what looked like the uniform of a cabin boy on an ocean liner. Or one who combined an open-neck shirt of the sort worn by Coca-Cola deliverymen with what appeared to be a tuxedo jacket owned by a much larger man in 1938. In this country, fear of being ridiculed by high school buddies is about the only governor we have left on the behavior of the celebrated; around Oscar night every year, I feel even that slipping away.

The signs have been there for some years. In the '70s, the Canadian writer Mordecai Richler tried to rent a tuxedo in Hollywood for the Oscars and, he later wrote, confronted "rack upon rack of outrageous evening wear. Purple velvet, ruffles, suede." Richler described what happened when he asked if the store had such a thing as a conventional black tuxedo:"'Yes, certainly,' the tailor said, bringing something out of the back room. 'And now tell me, sir, will you be wearing high heels or low?'"

Six or eight years later, I was watching the Oscars on television, when someone who had just won for Best Screenplay went up to collect his Oscar wearing a white silk scarf around his neck.

"Look at that," I said to my wife. "The poor guy was so nervous that he forgot to take off his scarf when he came in. He's probably going to end up thanking the wrong wife in his acceptance speech."

Not at all. As I remember, he was composed enough to make a speech of surpassing pretentiousness. He was wearing his scarf indoors on purpose and not because the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion had developed some bad drafts.

This year the first time you saw an actor who was sporting only an oversize silver button where a bow tie is normally worn, you may have surmised that he'd somehow lost his tie on the way over. As this actor had made his way past the cheering crowds toward Oprah Winfrey's microphone, you guessed, a particularly impressionable fan swooned at the sight of him, cut herself on the curb and was saved from bleeding to death only by his quick action in whipping off his bow tie and pressing it into service as a tourniquet.

Apparently not. The people without ties were without ties on purpose. The people who wore long neckties of the sort you'd expect to see with a ratty blazer wore long neckties on purpose. That's the way these people dress.

If someone showed up at a family wedding in one of the outfits I saw at the Chandler Pavilion the other night, he'd be taken aside by his Aunt Ida and lectured about showing some respect. Yet these outfits were put together by professionals. I read in the paper that big-name designers of tuxedos compete furiously for the privilege of dressing the stars in attendance.

The strategy is presumably based on the assumption that, one, people in the television audience can actually tell which tuxedo was made by which shmattemeister, and, two, once they do, they're going to rush out to buy one just like it because the unemployed flamenco-dancer look is just what they've been striving for.