HAS anyone mentioned the Oscars? They are being dished out on March 28 and E! Entertainment Television, the television programme for the hard of hearing, is not going to let us forget. Invitation To The Oscars (World, 8.35pm) is one of six Oscar shows from E! Television.
As excitement mounts to fever pitch we can take an inside look at how the Oscar show is produced in The Making Of The Academy Awards '95. In Live Academy Awards Pre-Show '95 we can watch stars arrive for the ceremony in Los Angeles while reporters from E! TV get trampled in the crush.
There is more, much more, but you get the picture. Invitation To The Oscars '95 is a preview. It looks at nominees in all categories and includes interviews with many of the hopefuls. THE only Oscar Police Academy 4: Citizens On Patrol (Pearl, 9.30pm) was in the running for was the one for the most old jokes in one film. Steve Guttenberg and Bubba Smith (and Sharon Stone, briefly) continue doing what they did in the first three films, but make an even bigger hash of it. Guttenberg did not bother turning up for Police Academy 5. THE Jewish comedian Mort Stahl was at the premier of Otto Preminger's over-long Exodus (Pearl, 12.35pm). He is said to have stood up after three hours and said: 'Otto, let my people go!' Exodus is long, it is about the early days of the state of Israel, and it is sometimes heavy going. There are, however, a number of memorable sequences, notably the bombing of the King David Hotel, the capture and subsequent rescue of the terrorist Irgun leaders, masterful crowd scenes and Ari Ben Ganaan's final speech. Preminger took over the screen-writing when he sacked Leon Uris, on whose novel the film was based. The great director said Uris had no eye for cinematic dialogue.
The film focuses on Ganaan, leader of the Hagannah faction, played by Paul Newman, and Israel's struggle for independence in 1947. Ganaan's affair with Kitty Fremont (Eva Marie Saint) is overwhelmed by the struggle.
Preminger is generally faithful to history and pays special attention to the ragged survivors of Nazi death camps on board the vessel Exodus, blockaded in Cyprus harbour by the British navy. BLACK humour dons its darkest robes in Terry Gilliam's Brazil (World, 9.30pm). This film is blindingly obtuse and excessively morose, but dazzling in its inventive and massive sets and dazzling in its techniques.
The theme is latter-day George Orwell, well beyond 1984. The place could be anywhere in the future, where citizens of the regime live a subterranean existence. One of these punctilious moles is Jonathan Pryce, a mundane statistician working in the Ministry of Information. When the computer system goes haywire it alters the arrest record of a criminal called Tuttle (Robert De Niro) to read Buttle. Pryce investigates the mistaken identity and discovers the girl of his wildest fantasies (Jill Layton).
