And the Winner Is....

THE Academy Award nominations, as usual, are perversely inconsistent. There's always one movie that's favored to sweep the Oscars and comes up with a giant zero on Nomination Day. Usually these unpopularity candidates are Steven Spielberg movies, and this year Academy members greeted Empire of the Sun with the same resounding raspberry they offered E.T. and The Color Purple.

The Academy also spurned a movie that was at least as good as most of the nominees and left the others in the tinseled dust--John Huston's The Dead. This exclusion is utterly perplexing since there is almost invariably one bid for sympathy. After giving Oscars to Henry Fonda and Paul Newman more for distinguished careers than for dubious performances in their nominated roles, and after honoring Marlee Matlin with the best of intentions for what was an adequate performance, John Huston would seem to be an irresistible choice. A posthumous award to a beloved director directing his daughter seems scrumptiously suited to the appetites of sentimental Academy members. But they passed up him and his movie and his daughter.

And for what? Now, Fatal Attraction is a fun movie. But so was Friday the 13th. This is indubitably the first time a slasher film has been up for best pic. If the Academy wanted to select a truly good shocker, it should have picked River's Edge.

True to form, the members selected one "arty" film. Hope and Glory is a fine movie without a snowball's chance in hell of winning. Unlike Chariots of Fire, the Academy's last successful arty flick, it doesn't even have a hit song.

And the Academy gave the Best Director nod to five foreign directors. Yet it also nominated everyone who even walked by the set of Broadcast News except for the coffee and donuts boy, without nominating James Brooks, the film's director.

In perhaps its greatest demonstration of reverse ficklehood, the Academy didn't nominate any of the actors (except William Hurt) who starred in movies up for best picture. Not Nicholas Cage from Moonstruck, not John Lone from The Last Emperor, not Sebastian Rice-Edwards, the charming moppet who starred in Hope and Glory. Michael Douglas was nominated for Wall Street, not Fatal Attraction.

The Academy must have been on automatic pilot to make such choices as William Hurt, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep and even Cher, all of whom have been nominated countless times in the last few years.

Other choices seemed to come from outer space. Comic actors traditionally fail even to be nominated, much less to win, yet the Academy put up Anne Ramsey of Throw Momma From the Train, who played a character so devoid of redeeming human qualities that she was more disgusting than funny, and Robin Williams, who played Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam. Overlooked was the best comic performance of the year, Steve Martin in Roxanne.

Because of these and other examples of the Academy's customary inconsistency, predicting the actual winners is notoriously difficult. But fools rush in, and our panel of experts herewith offer their prognostications (see below).