THE big day has dawned. By lunchtime we will all know what we have known for many months: that Schindler's List will win the Oscar for Best Picture, that Steven Spielberg will win for Best Director and that Hong Kong cinemas will be laughing all the way to the bank by charging $60 so we can see it. It's not a brave prediction but I would like to thank everyone who has had a part in helping me make it. My colleagues, my wife, the man who wakes me up when I fall asleep on the midnight ferry to Discovery Bay,all of whom have been a tremendous support, etc, etc . . . Pearl has snapped up rights to the ceremony in Los Angeles and is showing a large chunk of it in The 66th Annual Academy Awards at 9.00am. If you overslept you have missed it. TVB will also be breaking into Pleasure And Leisure (Jade, 1.15pm) if anythingexciting happens after the main show runs out of steam at noon. Pearl, determined to get its money's worth, is repeating everything in the evening from 6.55pm, continuing at 8.30pm after the news. This year Billy Crystal has declined to host the orgy so instead we get Whoopi Goldberg, actress, comedian and old flame of Ted Danson's. BEFORE Steven Spielberg made serious films about The Holocaust he made films for families. Remember the halcyon days of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (World, 9.30pm)? It seems a long time ago. It was a long time ago. Twelve years. E.T, despite the wrinkles, is not showing his age. This is still a memorable experience. The flying-bike scene has been much-mimicked. Spielberg had already come a long way - E.T. followed Close Encounters Of The Third Kind - and has come further since. Sad to think that Drew Barrymore, the cherubic child who plays one of the alien's earthbound friends, did grow up, and painfully. She discovered drugs, kicked the habit, and attempted a comeback in 1992 as a sassy young blonde surrounded by dead bodies in the terrible slasher-thriller Doppelganger: The Evil Within. AT least Mr Spielberg had no part in Universal Soldier (Pearl, 10.10pm), which might explain why it is not a masterpiece. Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren are both despatched to meet their maker - whoever he was - during the Vietnam War. The government decides to use both corpses in an experiment and cobbles them back together as cyborgs, which cynics might say is what they were in the first place. But they hated each other when they were alive and they still hate each other now they are dead. What follows, as you might expect, is a pointless 100 minutes of muscle-flexing, ego-flexing and budget-flexing. THE made-for-television mystery Shattered Silence (World, 1.55am) started life as When Michael Calls. That's because it is about a person called Michael who makes telephone calls. The mystery element comes from the revelation that Michael, having been killed and interned years before, should really be in no position to make telephone calls. Could it be an imposter? It could. AWARDS are in vogue, and Phil Donahue, host of the chat show Donahue (STAR Plus, 5.30am) has won a few. Why a person should be elevated to the status of television genius for standing around talking to a studio full of complete dunderheads is a greater mystery than why people buy Kenny G records. There is no room for real people on television. We can see all we want of the public from the top deck of a bus. Another mystery is what exactly Mr Donahue will be discussing with the public in this episode: the programme's title is Professional AthletesAnd Teen Virgins.
