The Oscar telecast last Sunday played out more like an old-fashioned variety show than an awards show.

It was as if Hollywood was striving to be nostalgic about movies past rather than celebrating 1999's "best."And, for me at least, the myriad clipfests just served to revive memories of "the good old days," if you will, when films were fun and often uplifting, or would tackle serious subjects with some sense of subtlety, rather than hitting the audience over the head with excess.

Yeah, yeah, I know that for a lot of years filmmakers had their creative hands tied -- they couldn't treat certain subjects "realistically." But these days, we have really gone to the other extreme.

Case in point: When a G-rated adult film like David Lynch's "The Straight Story" comes along, it's such a rarity, such a studio aberration, that Disney had no idea what to do with it. So, without advertising support, this sweet little true-life drama died a quick box-office death.

Perhaps it's fitting that the Oscarcast itself is so filled with excess. (Does it seem ironic to anyone else that Billy Crystal complained about the three-hour length of "The Green Mile" even as he was hosting a four-hours-plus pat on the back from Hollywood to itself?)

And, following the lead of the movies, the Academy Awards TV show continues to get less and less family friendly as the years go by -- the presence of 11-year-old Haley Joel Osment in the front row notwithstanding.

True, commercial television in general is incredibly violent and raunchy these days, but this particular Oscar broadcast seemed to be a deliberate attempt to lower the bar yet another notch for prime-time network broadcasting. Some of the film clips were surprisingly violent. One clip (a scene from "The Cider House Rules") let a heretofore taboo profanity slip through. And even some of the acceptance speeches were laced with vulgar connotations . . . not to mention the scripted gags, like the jokes that accompanied Crystal as he was placed into scenes from "The Graduate" and "Psycho."

How much lower can actresses' necklines (and backlines) plunge before ABC has to let the show go to HBO or Showtime? Or the Playboy Channel?

All of this just made the amazing number of old-movie clips included in the show all the more appealing -- from Crystal's opening bit, interacting with Charlie Chaplin, to the montage of those who died during the past year to yet another delightful Chuck Workman mini-documentary that lined up an amazing number of classic movies in a brief historical retrospective.

Seeing scraps of classics from an era gone by just reminded me of some great movies I haven't seen for a while -- from "The Gold Rush" to "Casablanca" to "Lawrence of Arabia," etc. And while the characters in those films could be described as dysfunctional, the material was handled every bit as artistically as "American Beauty," Oscar's big winner this year . . . but without resorting to sleaze.

Mind you, "The Straight Story" is also about a dysfunctional family, with a central character who is aged and infirm, a recovering alcoholic and chain-smoker who must care for his somewhat slow adult daughter. But he's also determined to reconcile with his estranged brother before one of them dies.

Not only is "The Straight Story's" resolution more positive, the film has none of the in-your-face violence, sex, nudity, profanity, etc., that permeates "American Beauty."

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As the Chicago Tribune said this week in an editorial: "This year, Hollywood gave its highest honors to a movie that seems to have been made to comfort Hollywood with the notion that the rest of the nation is as dysfunctional as Hollywood is."

Of course, this is a message that Hollywood has been sending out for a long time now, and not just in movies.

And since "American Beauty" has crossed over the $100 million blockbuster mark, maybe we're beginning to believe it.

Entertainment editor Chris Hicks may be reached by e-mail at hicks@desnews.com

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