Fade to Black : Memorable movies that didn’t make the cut at the Academy nominations

With the official slate of Academy Award nominations announced, a lid was shut on the film year of 1989. Movie lovers of the future will squint at these lists, whittled down further by the awards themselves on the 29th of March, to get the shape of the year cinematically.

So, before the films that didn’t make the cut fade away entirely, before they go into the video vault and emerge with a little something ineffable missing, let us remember a handful of the special ones a final time, commend them to memory like a filmic “Farenheit 451” so that we stretch out their time with us a little longer.

From the murmurs I’ve heard around, there are more than a few people wistful that Reizl Bozyk wasn’t nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category. It’s always fun when, in all cheerful naivete, American movies “discover” a performer who’s been an open secret in another country or in the theater--which might as well be another country to most Americans. Those who fall into this category this year include: Klaus Maria Brandauer (back this year in the foreign film nominee, “Hanussen”); Alan Rickman, “Die Hard’s” suave villain; last year’s big noise, Olympia Dukakis (who has one scene in “Working Girl”); and the Yiddish theater’s Bozyk, who wrapped up “Crossing Delancey” and tucked it into her apron pocket.

There are favorite scenes and favorite scenes in “Crossing Delancey” between Bozyk as this sturdy grandmother and Amy Irving as her adoring granddaughter. One of my own is the self-defense class, which pairs off a dozen or so of these feisty Lower East Side bubbies , practicing being victim and attacker. Heaven help the misguided purse-snatcher who mugs one of these one-woman burglar alarms; he’ll deserve what he gets. Bozyk is sparrow-bright and not what you might call unschooled in matters of scene-stealing, yet her heart seems as vast as her craft and her creation of a universal, nurturing grandmother (Jewish has only a little to do with it) is a classic.

That supporting actress category this year was a melee; there were probably more deserving performers left out at the cut here than in any other group. Apparently, not enough Academy members got to see the year’s only bona fide sleeper, “Bagdad Cafe,” writer-director Percy Adlon’s off-beat observations about the triumphs of tenacity. If they had, you might have expected a nomination for Marianne Sagebrecht, one of its two electrifying stars.

Fortunately, the music branch was alert to the film and because of the nomination of its haunting song, “Calling You,” (one of only three selected this year) “Bagdad Cafe” will turn up again during the membership screenings. Voters can then see what they overlooked, although Sagebrecht’s unique and delicate comedic talent may yet have its day, since she and Adlon are finishing a third film together right now, “Rosalie Goes Shopping” for which Bob Telson will again do the music.

In its gentle, uninsistent way, “Bagdad Cafe” is about communication among strangers and about finding and building on one’s bedrock talents, no matter how humble. Affluent Austrian traveler Sagebrecht (whom some may remember as the love-besotted star of “Sugarbaby”) is stranded in the Mojave desert; she speaks no English, through a suitcase mix-up she has only her husband’s clothes and, seemingly, her only useful talent is for cleaning and orderliness. From those simple-enough beginnings, she creates magic, spreading a bounteous and enveloping warmth and love around her. CCH Pounder, her co-star, is formidable as the stressed-out young grandmother who owns the Godforsaken motel where Sagebrecht lands. But, the tremulous delicacy and inventiveness of performance artist Sagebrecht, making love bloom in the desert, is the film’s most powerful memory.

Among the notable errors of omission this year was “Dead Ringers,” which failed to show in any category--not even its profligately beautiful art direction or its seamless special effects. It’s another hint that anything un-cheerful may have a rough time of it today, and David Cronenberg’s exploration of the darker recesses of twin souls was far from light. But the non-nomination of Jeremy Irons’ dual performance is the real shocker. Perhaps he did it with too much ease, with a brilliance that was almost offhand, creating two identities so subtly and so surely that without clues from clothes or haircuts, that only from seeing the face or the body of one of his twin doctors, you knew which brother you had before you.

In another case of avoidance of serious subjects, the complete shutout of “A World Apart” left three exceptional performances unnoticed, as well as the direction of Chris Menges and the screenplay of Shawn Slobo, writing with eloquence about South Africa and her murdered mother, Ruth First. Barbara Hershey as the indomitable First, called Diana Roth in the screenplay, the first white woman jailed under South Africa’s infamous 90-day detention law, was perhaps not a showy enough role for the taste of the voters. (Or, pragmatically, perhaps the fact that, like “Bagdad Cafe,” it was not a widely screened film during “for your consideration” time had something crucial to do with its fate.) But it was a brilliant, controlled and biting performance, another in the growing sequence of achievements by Hershey.

Johdi May, who played her daughter, Molly, was another of those bitter disappointments among no-show supporting actress nominations. Sweet-shy, translucently true, May’s slow maturing from sheltered little girl to clear-eyed knowledgeable teen-ager was exquisitely calibrated.

And finally, “A World Apart” had Linda Mvusi, as the Roth family housekeeper, second-mother to the lonely Molly and one of her conduits to understanding the real horrors of life in one of South Africa’s segregated townships. It is perhaps a tribute to director Menges that Mvusi, a working architect in Zimbabwe, who unlike young Jodhi May, had no acting training before this film, was as wrenchingly effective as she was as the sister of a young slain African National Congress leader.

Like Reizl Bozyk, Barnard Hughes went beyond the stereotype of “the Irish father” to create a parent everyone could identify with in “Da.” Garrulous, a master of platitudes, a political Neanderthal and a barroom blowhard, this is the sort of father you honor because you must, but whose biggest roadblock to letting himself be loved is the man himself. What gave the film its undeniable tug were the complexities with which Hughes colored this dear, trying man--that and the marvelous interplay between Hughes and Martin Sheen as his exasperated Americanized son, left struggling to sort out his emotions about his “da.”

Perhaps “Bird’s” single nomination (for sound), a shameful omission on any number of other levels, will at least spotlight the sweet power of Forest Whitaker’s Charlie Parker and the utter fascination of Diane Venora as Chan. The meeting of these two was one of 1988’s high points of subliminal erotic tension, along with the triangle set up by Keith Carradine, Linda Fiorentino and John Lone in “The Moderns.” It’s as sad that Christine Lahti’s magnificently moving performance as the ex-activist mother in “Running on Empty” went ignored as it is appalling that its imprecise and superficial screenplay was nominated. (Over the screenplay of “Bagdad Cafe,” or “Married to the Mob,” over “Punchline,” or “Working Girl”? Please!)

There’s one reference point to use in considering this year’s list of nominations: David Lean’s restored “Lawrence of Arabia.” It’s the hottest ticket on both coasts. When you can get in, you hear more talk about its freshness, its grandeur than a single other film in recent memory--and that, despite the fact of its serious subject and its all-male cast, two of today’s supposed anathemas. Which movie from 1988 can you possibly imagine resurrected or even watched, 27 years down the line? A film if not of grandeur, at least of authoritative inventiveness? You might put your money on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”