HOW OSCAR GHETTOIZED POITIER

ON Sunday night, this nation and the world were subjected to 41/2 of the most excruciating hours ever broadcast on television. The 74th Annual Academy Awards program was so excruciating in so many ways that it might be instructive to enumerate them.
Excruciatingly self-serious: Tom Cruise, who opened the show, and Kevin Spacey, who appeared somewhere in the middle, both generously offered the American people permission to enjoy themselves despite the losses of Sept. 11.

That "America has changed forever so we'd better run this show like it was a funeral" tone pervaded the show. The word "bummer" comes to mind. Oh, and while all the tributes to New York were nice (although dated and unwanted, as though the city were in some kind of post-9/11 coma and needed Hollywood's moral support) couldn't somebody have mentioned the Pentagon and Flight 93?

Excruciatingly patronizing: The spin on the evening was that it made history because two black performers won Best Actor and Best Actress on the same night that the first black movie star, Sidney Poitier, received an honorary Oscar.

But there was something terribly retrogressive about the way all this was treated. The Oscar show worked overtime to make us think of Denzel Washington, Halle Berry and Poitier not as unique and remarkable talents but rather as tokens.

Why were only black actors and actresses given a chance to speak in the three-minute film tribute to Sidney Poitier? Did Poitier's career really have meaning only to black performers? Of course not. His extraordinary dignity and power gave the lie to the racist idea that white audiences could only respond to white performers and white stories.

In a magnificent speech that was the highlight of the otherwise-unspeakable ceremony, Poitier himself paid a powerful and modest tribute to the directors, producers and studio heads who made history by casting him in the films that made him a star. They were all white.

So is Poitier's wife Joanna. Poitier had two daughters with Joanna, who are therefore both black and white. He is an integrationist not only professionally, but personally. For him to be seen as an inspiration only to black people is to ghettoize an extraordinary man who simply refused to accept the limits of race.

Then there was Halle Berry. In an acceptance speech so out-of-control that you worried she might actually have to be carted off the stage in a straitjacket, Berry reduced herself to the status of a "vessel." Berry basically said she was worthy of winning solely because other black actresses hadn't won before her and because "nameless, faceless" women of color everywhere needed a role model.

It must therefore have puzzled the TV audience immensely to watch as Berry gave thanks to her mother, to whom the camera cut immediately only to discover that Judith Hawkins Berry is white. Halle Berry is not a representative black woman and not a vessel. She is very much herself, which is how it should be in America.

Excruciatingly politicized: The show's opening film montage featured five political figures talking about the movies. One was Laura Bush. The other four? Jerry Brown, the leftoid Democratic weirdo mayor of Oakland. Willie Brown, San Francisco's Democratic mayor. Lani Guinier, the leftist law professor whom Bill Clinton deemed too radically quota-conscious for his administration. And New York's own Al Sharpton, who intends to be a Democratic candidate for president.

That's a 4-to-1 Democratic, left-wing tilt. Are people still willing to argue that Hollywood doesn't have a liberal bias?

Worse still was a pointed salute during that montage to a little-known 1974 documentary called "Hearts and Minds." At the Oscar ceremony in 1975, producer Bert Schneider read a telegram of thanks from the North Vietnamese government - the same government whose military had just concluded a 12-year war against the United States that led to the deaths of 58,000 young American men.

Oscar-show producer Laura Ziskin knows that perfectly well. She could have had the tribute to "Hearts and Minds" eliminated. In my view, she left it in to send some kind of subliminal message to the country about the war on terrorism.

Here's a not-so-subliminal message to Laura Ziskin: If you're going to run this show in the future, try not to bore America to death, OK? Then maybe we can talk politics.