‘AMADEUS,’ ‘PASSAGE’ PACE OSCAR NOMINATIONS

‘Amadeus,” the flamboyant film biography of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and “A Passage to India,” David Lean’s stately treatment of East-West relations in colonial India, paced the 57th Academy Awards Wednesday with 11 nominations each.

This year’s Oscar race is expected to be especially close, with no clear front-runner as in recent years, when “Terms of Endearment” and “Gandhi” seemed predestined winners.

The Academy Award ceremonies will be held March 25 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center. ABC will televise beginning at 6 p.m.

Both “Amadeus” and “Passage to India” received best-picture nominations, along with recognition for the principal members of their casts, their writers and directors.

“Amadeus” also received nominations for art direction, cinematography, costume design, film editing, makeup and sound. “Passage to India” was nominated in all the same categories except makeup, but it was nominated for best score.

Best-actor nominations went to F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce as the musical and moral protagonists Salieri and Mozart, respectively, in “Amadeus.” Judy Davis and Peggy Ashcroft, as English tourists visiting India with disastrous results in “Passage to India,” won nominations as best actress and best supporting actress, respectively.

None of these performers is particularly well known to American movie audiences, and each is receiving a first acting nomination. (The British film career of Ashcroft, 77, began in 1933.) Three of the five best-actor contenders are first-time Oscar nominees, including Hulce and Abraham.

Directors Milos Forman (for “Amadeus”) and David Lean (for “Passage to India”) also were nominated, as were the screenplays of both films: Peter Shaffer’s adaptation of his own play, and Lean’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel.

“Places in the Heart,” a moving story of a Depression-era widow trying to hold onto her family and her farm, and “The Killing Fields,” based on a true story of the relationship between a reporter and his assistant in war-torn Cambodia, received seven nominations each, including best picture.

The other best-picture nominee was “A Soldier’s Story,” a probing look at a murder in a black Army regiment during World War II. But “Soldier’s Story” captured only three nominations in all, a disappointing tally compared to less-acclaimed films such as “2010” with five nominations, and “The River,” which registered in four Oscar categories.

Rounding out the best-actor nominees were Albert Finney as a drunken British ex-diplomat in Mexico in the 1930s in “Under the Volcano,” Sam Waterston as a war correspondent who must flee Cambodia in “Killing Fields,” and Jeff Bridges as a benevolent alien in human disguise in “Starman.”

A trio of performers received best-actress nominations for similar roles in three films examining life on the farm, both now and in the 1930s. The farm movies constituted the major movie “trend” in 1984, although only “Places in the Heart” has fared well at the box-office.

Sally Field played the determined widow in “Places in the Heart”; Jessica Lange was a similarly tough wife and mother in the more contemporary “Country,” and Sissy Spacek also helped keep her farm family together in “The River.”

Vanessa Redgrave, one of the most controversial winners in Oscar history for her fiery anti-Zionist speech at the 1977 awards, was nominated for her role as a 19th-Century advocate of women’s rights in “The Bostonians,” based on Henry James’ novel.

Nominated for best-supporting actor were Adolph Caesar as the bullying black sergeant in “A Soldier’s Story”; John Malkovich as a blind man who comes into his own in “Places in the Heart”; Noriyuki (Pat) Morita as an unexpectedly wise martial arts instructor in “The Karate Kid”; Haing S. Ngor, a Cambodian refugee who brings authenticity to the role of the reporter’s deserted aide in “Killing Fields,” and Ralph Richardson, the late English actor whose final appearance came as a doddering lord in “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.”

The supporting-actress nominees, in addition to Ashcroft for “Passage to India,” were Glenn Close as a baseball player’s true love in “The Natural”; Lindsay Crouse as a comforting relative in “Places in the Heart”; Christine Lahti as a home front factory worker in “Swing Shift,” and Geraldine Page as a salty and hard-drinking policeman’s mother in “The Pope of Greenwich Village.”

Those nominated for best director, along with Lean and Forman, were Robert Benton for “Places in the Heart,” Roland Joffe for his first feature film, “The Killing Fields,” and Woody Allen for “Broadway Danny Rose,” a black-and-white comedy about an aspiring nightclub singer in New York.

Allen was a surprise nominee, replacing “Soldier’s Story” director Norman Jewison from the Directors Guild of America nominations announced last week. The two lists usually concur, and the winner of the directors’ award almost always goes on to capture the Oscar. Allen, Lean, Forman and Benton have previously won Academy Awards as best director.

Otherwise, there were few outright surprises in this year’s Oscar balloting, although Jeff Bridges was not expected to be nominated in the best actor category. (He has been nominated twice for best supporting actor, in 1971 for “The Last Picture Show” and in 1974 for “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.”)

Steve Martin won several critics’ awards for his androgynous portrayal in “All of Me,” but came up empty-handed in the Oscar race. Perennial nominee Jack Lemmon, who is hosting this year’s telecast, was passed over for his role in “Mass Appeal,” as were Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage, the young stars of another critical hit, “Birdy.”

The best-actress category contained more familiar names, with Lange, Field, Spacek and Redgrave all previous Oscar winners. Those spurned by academy voters include critics’ favorite Kathleen Turner for “Romancing the Stone,” Anne Bancroft for “Garbo Talks” and Shelley Long for “Irreconcilable Differences.”

Once again, this year’s nominations indicated a fascination with India, continuing a trend apparent in the eight Oscars won by “Gandhi” two years ago, and reaffirmed by the currently popular TV miniseries, “The Jewel in the Crown.” Two other of the best-picture nominees share foreign locales: “Amadeus,” set in Austria, and “The Killing Fields,” most of whose plot unfolds in Southeast Asia.

Another recent tendency among academy voters was continued this year, as most of 1984’s box-office blockbusters were generally ignored as Oscar contenders. “Ghostbusters” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” each received two nominations, including ones for best visual effects, while “Beverly Hills Cop” was recognized only for its original screenplay. “Gremlins,” also a huge commercial success, did not receive any nominations.

Nominated for best screenplay written directly for the screen were Daniel Petrie Jr. for “Beverly Hills Cop”; Allen for “Broadway Danny Rose”; Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas for “El Norte”; Benton for “Places in the Heart,” and Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel and Bruce Jay Friedman for “Splash.”

An unusual aspect of the original screenplay nominations is the appearance of “El Norte,” the story of Guatemalan refugees emigrating to the United States, and one of the few independently produced and distributed films ever to be nominated in a major category.

The original-screenplay category was also dominated by film comedies, perhaps because most of the best-picture nominees were based on other works. The nominees for best screenplay based on material from another medium were Shaffer’s adaptation of his play “Amadeus”; Charles Fuller’s adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play “A Soldier’s Play”; Lean’s adaptation of Forster’s novel “A Passage to India”; Bruce Robinson’s adaptation of Sydney Schanberg’s New York Times Magazine article that inspired “The Killing Fields,” and P. H. Vazak and Michael Austin’s reworking of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Tarzan” books into “Greystoke.”

The nominees for best original song are “Take a Look at Me Now” from “Against All Odds”; “Footloose” and “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” from “Footloose”; “Ghostbusters” from “Ghostbusters,” and “I Just Called to Say I Love You” from “The Woman in Red.”

One of the year’s other popular music hits, “Purple Rain,” was nominated for best original song score, along with “Songwriter” and “The Muppets Take Manhattan.”

None of the foreign language film nominees is particularly well-known, although one, the Israeli film “Beyond the Walls,” has stirred a political controversy in its native country. The other nominees were “Camila, A Gea” from Argentina, “Dangerous Moves” from Switzerland, “Double Feature” from Spain and “War-Time Romance” from the Soviet Union.

The likelihood of an Oscar sweep of the kind registered in recent years by “Terms of Endearment,” “Gandhi,” “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Ordinary People” seems less possible this year because of the diversity of nominees.

The two stars of “Amadeus” will be competing against each other, each a first-time nominee, as is Waterston. Only Finney has been in the best-actor category previously, with four nominations, most recently last year for “The Dresser.”

In the best actress division, Judy Davis is the lone debutante, with Field a winner in 1979 for “Norma Rae,” Lange taking home an Oscar in 1982 for best-supporting actress in “Tootsie,” Spacek a winner as best actress in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” in 1980, and Redgrave a five-time nominee (four as best actress) and a previous winner in 1977 for “Julia.”

The supporting-actor category is dominated by non-white performers, with Caesar, Morita and Ngor all receiving their first nominations, as is Malkovich. Both Ngor and Malkovich also made their movie debuts with “Killing Fields” and “Places,” respectively--if either won, he would be the first male actor in either category to win an Oscar in his first screen appearance. (Harold Russell had appeared in a documentary prior to his Oscar-winning role in “The Best Years of Our Lives” in 1946.)

Richardson was previously nominated for his supporting performance in “The Heiress” in 1949. A win would make him the second actor in academy history to receive a posthumous Oscar. Peter Finch won as best actor in “Network” in 1976, two months after his death. Richardson died in October, 1983, at the age of 80.

Glenn Close is in the unusual position of being nominated for the third consecutive year in the supporting-actress category, having previously lost for “The World According to Garp” in 1982 and “The Big Chill” in 1983. Page is receiving her seventh nomination, and the fourth in this category, although she has never won. Her most recent nomination came as best actress in “Interiors” in 1978. Crouse and Lahti are first-time nominees.

The directors constitute this year’s heavyweight division, with Allen having won the Oscar in 1977 for “Annie Hall,” Benton in 1979 for “Kramer vs. Kramer,” Forman in 1975 for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and Lean twice, in 1957 for “The Bridge On the River Kwai” and in 1962 for “Lawrence of Arabia.” Joffe is a first-time nominee, and made his directorial debut with “Killing Fields.”