COMMENTARY : Yeah, but Will Oscar Remember?

In the midst of the frenzy of Hollywood’s Summer of ‘89, as moviegoers eagerly fork over record proportions of their spendable income at the box office, let’s pause to ponder the ageless question:”Have they seen anything good lately?”

They’ve seen a lot of movies, we know that. “Batman,” “Lethal Weapon 2,” “Ghostbusters II,” “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” and “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” are all in, or about to join, the $100 million club and the film industry is about to celebrate its first $2 billion summer.

But as Mae West said on another occasion, “Goodness had nothing to do with it.”

Despite the giddy critics’ blurbs appearing in newspaper ads, none of those summer blockbusters received anything like a consensus endorsement from the critical community and with the exception of “Batman,” none figures to appear in any of the major categories of next spring’s Academy Awards nominations.

In a business known for its unpredictability, there are two things you can count on--a studio executive will always bend over to pick up a penny, and films released before Labor Day will be forgotten by New Year’s Eve.

Critics who have called “Batman” the “film of the decade” may not have it on their Top 10 list at the end of the year, and those who are raving about the laughs they’ve had this summer will be touting movies that break their hearts this fall.

Warner Bros. will undoubtedly spend some of its “Batman” windfall on a “Batman” Oscar campaign, and seems assured of nailing down spots in most of the technical categories (cinematography, visual effects, film editing, etc.) and at least one of the glamour categories. Jack Nicholson, for the role he was born to play, will be nominated as best actor--providing he doesn’t get more votes for his performance in the scheduled Christmas release, “Two Jakes.”

Whether “Batman” itself is nominated as best picture depends on how grateful the rest of the suddenly flush industry is toward the film that led the way.

As for films and performances that actually deserve to be remembered at Academy Awards time, there have been a few that have inspired thoughtful critics to premature evocation of the O word. In fact, in his review of Rob Reiner’s “When Harry Met Sally . . . ,” Hollywood Reporter critic Duane Byrge was just about ready to concede the election.

Byrge said “When Harry Met Sally . . . “ should “be the odds-on front-runner” for best picture and predicted certain nominations for director Reiner and screenwriter Nora Ephron and “strong possibilities” for stars Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan.

“When Harry Met Sally . . . “ is certainly a crowd-pleaser, and if there was an Oscar category for filmed faked orgasms, Meg Ryan’s groaner-in-the-deli would be hard to top. But if the movie is to be nominated in any category other than best original screenplay, precedents against both summer movies and comedies will have to be broken.

Writers in Hollywood seem to have longer memories than others. Screenplays from films released early in the year often make the final cut, while other creative elements are forgotten. In the absence of big budget Oscar campaigns in the daily trade papers, great work seen in February (Daniel Day Lewis’ performance in last year’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” for instance) is a vague memory in December.

That’s why “When Harry Met Sally . . . “ will have to settle for an original screenplay nomination next spring and “Field of Dreams,” a perfectly executed (by director Phil Alden Robinson) fantasy, will have to settle for a nomination as best adapted screenplay.

If Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” had been held for a fall release, Lee and his executive patrons at Universal Pictures would have been in for a host of nominations. In this strangest of movie years, they may yet.

“Do the Right Thing” is as subtle as a Bronx cheer, but in its meticulously detailed examination of the events leading to racial violence in a New York inner-city neighborhood, it is easily the most socially relevant film of recent years and, as Newsweek’s David Ansen said, the only summer film that provokes discussions that last longer than the movie.

It will be hard for Hollywood to dismiss “Do the Right Thing” with a screenplay nomination. The writing, by Lee, is inseparable from the direction, by Lee. The last film to show off this much talent by a relatively unknown director was Oliver Stone’s “Platoon.”

If “Do the Right Thing” had been released near the end of the year, away from the media hysteria over “Batman” and the soaring box office grosses, it would have held the spotlight alone.

Lee’s publicity campaign for “Do the Right Thing” doesn’t deserve any awards. At the Cannes Film Festival, where the movie premiered in May, the outspoken director volunteered that he preferred Malcolm X’s philosophy of violence in self-defense over Martin Luther King’s philosophy of unconditional non-violence, then accused the press of creating white hysteria for raising the question whether the movie would incite violence.

Nevertheless, “Do the Right Thing” is an extraordinary film, with at least one great performance (from Danny Aiello) and ought to linger as a major Academy Award contender long after the summer temperatures and its box office interest have dropped.

Before they fade completely from mind, here are a few other noteworthy films and achievements from the first half of ’89.

“The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.” There was nothing in Terry Gilliam’s moon-hopping fairy tale to equal the adventures surrounding the film’s troubled production, and when it was finished, Columbia Pictures dropped it like a snake. But there were scenes of immense originality throughout “Munchausen” and its visual style deserved a better fate.

David Jones’ “Jacknife,” a post-Vietnam stress syndrome drama, lasted about as long as a medium diet Coke when it was released in February, but there were three showcase performances--from Robert De Niro, Ed Harris and Kathy Baker--that are worth remembering at the video store, even if they were forgettable on film.

“New York Stories,” the anthology of short films by directors Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola, was a noble experiment by Disney’s Touchstone division and it produced 35 of the best minutes (those directed by Scorsese, and starring Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette) of the year.

Touchstone’s “serious” summer movie, “Dead Poets Society,” has an ending that might have been written by Sylvester Stallone or Abigail Van Buren, but until then, it is a superbly crafted prep school drama that features Robin Williams’ best film work yet.

On the other end of the scale, under the category of how the mighty have fallen, Robert Wise (“Sound of Music,” “West Side Story”) came out of a 10-year retirement to direct “Rooftops,” a candidate for the worst musical ever and Hugh (“Chariots of Fire”) Hudson directed “Lost Angels,” which was sort of yuppie’s-eye look at gang violence.