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Viet Nam was thrust into the forefront of most Americans' consciousness last week in a surprising but somehow fitting manner: at the Academy Award presentations witnessed by an estimated 70 million TV viewers in the U.S. So it was movies and television again that brought the war back: the technological media of illusion fancifully reconstructing what was in some ways the most illusory experience in the national history.
Ordinarily, the Academy Awards are a nice, long evening's wallow in the junk culture; you send out for Chinese food or pizza, make popcorn, keep score, watch for the awful fashions and the stilted soliloquies of acceptance. But this year, beneath the usual wisecracks and show business sentimentality, there was more interesting drama. Jane Fonda, anathematized for years because of her radical politics and trip to Hanoi during the war, won the Best Actress award for her role in Coming Home, an antiwar film focused sympathetically on the suffering of wounded American veterans. (Fonda, who is relentless, gave half of her acceptance speech in sign language "because there are 14 million deaf people in this country." New York Daily News Critic Rex Reed wrote bitchily that it "looked like an audition for The Miracle Worker. ") Jon Voight, who played opposite Fonda as a paraplegic vet, won the Best Actor award.
At the end of the 3-hr. 20-min. ceremonies in Los Angeles' Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, John Wayne himself came on. The old martial role model, looking gaunt but energetic, his stomach and one lung gone to cancer, presented the Oscar for Best Picture of 1978. It went to another Viet Nam movie, The Deer Hunter, Director Michael Cimino's story of young Ukrainian-American steelworkers from Clairton, Pa., who play pool, drink beer, watch football on TV, get drunk at a wedding, hunt deer and then go off to fight the war in 1972. It was the fifth Oscar for The Deer Hunter that night. The audience could only guess at the complexities of feeling that ricocheted around John Wayne's mind as he handed over the prize.
The Motion Picture Academy in years past has displayed a distaste for political controversy; half a decade ago, a streaker was more acceptable than an Oscar winner with the temerity to rail against the war. But as a headline in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner put it last week.
THE WAR FINALLY WINS. The awards to two films about Viet Nam suggested not so much that the academy has gone hot-headedly controversial as that it judged, like the rest of the nation, that Viet Nam has receded enough to keep any discussion of it from exploding into a civil war.