Cream of TV crop rebuffed

By Cecil Smith

Los Angeles Times

HOLLYWOOD I haven't the foggiest idea as to who will win the Emmys Sept. 9. But I know who won't.

Gena Rowlands won't. Even though the performance she gave us as the lesbian mother fighting for custody of her son in “A Question of Love" was devastating. When she followed it with the daughter in "Strangers" who went home to mother after 20 years, you would think she'd be a shoo-in. She wasn't nominated.

Derek Jacobi won't. Even though his "Richard II" may be definitive for generations of film students. It's hard to believe Jacobi wasn't nominated. Nor was Tim West for his "Edward the King." Nor, for that matter, was "Edward the King" even though it was to "Backstairs at the White House" as caviar is to turnips. What bloody nonsense.

Francesca Annis won Britain's equivalent of our Emmy for her "Lillie." But she wasn't nominated here. Neither was Gemma Jones for "The Duchess of Duke Street." Nor Joan Hackett for "Mourning Becomes Electra."

Glenn Jordan could win an Emmy for directing. But directing what? The superb production for which he was nominated, "Les Miserables," wasn't. Nor was anyone else connected with it. It's like giving Jordan the honor of directing something that wasn't there. Lou Antonio, too. Nominated for Victory: The Kitty O'Neil Story." But the film wasn't nominated. Colleen Dewhurst is in the running for her performance as Kitty O'Neil's mother. But Stockard Channing's Kitty O'Neil? Nyet.

recting "Silent

The list goes on and on. "The Jericho Mile" was one of the year's most compelling films. The show and star Peter Strauss were nominated, but not Michael Mann, the director (he was nominated as co-author with Patrick Nolan). It's hard to believe that "The House on Garibaldi Street" with Topol and Marty Balsam was ignored but it was. And "Centennial" how could they skip "Centennial"?

These nominations are for the new Emmys, the sleek, slimmed-down version in which, we are told, the number of categories has been drastically reduced (from 75 last year to 58) and the number of nominees (from 378 to 221)

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to make the awards more meaningful. They should be sent back to a fat farm because there's an awful lot of reducing yet to do. (The awards for British television have 12 categories, which is about right.)

The trouble is that the reducing seems to have been at the wrong places. They cut down the muscle tone and left the pot belly, the flabby hips and the bulging thighs that have long made Emmy ridiculous.

What the Television Academy did was to reduce the nominations for the class programs of television the dramatic specials, the television movies, the serialized dramas (like "Roots" and "Lillie" that begin and end over several chapters). But they left the award slots for weekly series, television's bread-and-butter shows, as multitudinous as ever.

The programs that television takes its greatest pride in, the individual efforts that are the most carefully cast and produced and the most costly and powerful products of the medium are the ones slighted in the awards.

I've got nothing against "Alice" and "The Rockford Files" and "Taxi" they are pleasant time-killers; "MASH" is, I feel, a work of art, and occasionally "Lou Grant" deals in depth. But programs like "Friendly Fire" and "Holocaust" and the complete 26 hours of "Roots I and II” and “A Question of Guilt" and "A Death in Canaan" these are the things that a nation talks about the next morning, not what happened on "Mork & Mindy."

Many writers, directors and actors won't work on episodic or weekly television; they only do specials. They include most of the artists in whom the TV industry takes particular pride. Yet in the Emmy nominations, they're secondclass citizens.

It's almost as if (in Edwin Arlington Robinson's phrase), the Emmys consecrate the flicker, not the flame.