You can't wear your cardie in Tinseltown

THE suspense was intolerable. Then, at about 9.50 Dublin time on Tuesday morning, Louise switched on her ironic smile and soared like a bird over the Grand Canyon. She landed to lashings of applause; her knees were a bit wonky but her face was lit up with the excitement of her achievement.

Louise, of course, is Susan Sarandon, who took the best actress Oscar for Dead Man Walking in Hollywood on Monday night/Tuesday morning. The cut to Emma Thompson in the audience showed stoic Emma at her stiff, upper lip British best, clapping energetically with the rest.

Just a week before the lottery of the Oscars, Sarandon told The Irish Times's Michael Dwyer that if she did not make it this time, she would quietly give up and disappear. The wait for the laurels was proving too long, too tiresome and too goddamn tough in an industry whose capital is not called Tinseltown for nothing.

Is not the Oscars the greatest show on Earth? As well as dripping glamour and famous faces, it has all the endearing ingredients of the Rose of Tralee plus the nervous apprehension of a school concert where your child has one vital line to say. Some of the most world weary millionaires of the silver screen suddenly turn into jibbering idiots on Oscar night: the winners thank everyone in the world, starting with the Academy, through a cast of thousands down to Ma and Pa - simply for having them. And they get only 45 seconds to say it all. Last night Mira Sorvino's dad (she was best supporting actress for her part in Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite) burst into tears in the audience when his little girl collected her award. The cameras lingered. It all seemed so real.

Suddenly they are not the people you read about in Hello! or smutty magazines. They are not frantically marrying and remarrying. They are not snorting coke for breakfast or shooting up in their limos. They are not booking in and out of Betty Ford at the rate of knots. For one night, at least, they are simply people for whom the American dream has come true.

In fact it seemed so real that when the paralysed Christopher Reeve, aka Superman, came on stage in a wheelchair, you more than half expected him to stand up and walk. What is real and what is illusion is a tricky thing.

SOME seem more real than others. Meryl Streep, for instance, looked more or less as she did in The Bridges Of Madison County - maybe showing a bit more flesh but less flirty. And Sarandon is another who always manages to look and sound as she does in the parts she plays.

Despite Sarandon's considerable range of acting over more than 20 years, for me she will always remain the taut, anguished half of the triumphant survivors in Thelma And Louise, in which she starred with Geena Davis. In that movie, they broke new ground and created a classic that all Samanthas will be playing again and again. It was the movie that easily provided two of the most inspiring portrayals of women in the 1990s. It crossed all age barriers, uniting worn out libbers with the generations of shrugging discrimination doubtfuls - "our mums did it all, we can do anything we like". Thelma and Louise brought the young ones to their senses and made them realise the barriers had not gone away. The film was done with such skill, glamour, panache, wit and weariness that almost every woman could relate to it. It made us think. For a while, at least, it stopped us sinking into comfortable, stultifying beds of smothering feathers.

Geena Davis was great but it was the super Saradon role model that lit the spark, igniting in women viewers the inspiration to refuse to give in, and to turn the caoining into action.

At the Academy awards, Sarandon was one glittering, tinselled babe with acres of taffeta or tulle or some other glitzy, swishy material in a Scarlett O'Hara-ish dress that swept her along with a regal, knock-'em-dead air. I am convinced there is something to the psychology lore of cutting your hair and having a make over: where Sonia O'Sullivan led, Susan Sarandon was not far behind.

Poor old Em, on the other hand, only needed a head band to make her look the part of the games mistress on an inservice break. Between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the commentators repeated at least 50 times in tones of downright puzzlement - why had Em come in her cardie and skirt?

She only needed the pearls to complete the afternoon tea with the vicar outfit, one hitched.

"And her hair!" another bleated. Em's blonde, silky tresses swooped around her shoulders like an advertisement for shampoo.

I could happily live in a world without an Emma Thompson. Can she really be as bad as she comes across? Or is she acting all the time? Her voice has the same reedy, Home Counties ring whether she is saying her marriage is over, or reciting Jane Austen-ese. She has a teacher-ish edge to her tones that make you want to bash her over the head. Even when she looks the charming part in a costume drama, the voice still has those awful, accent less English tones.

One think I do know is what is, and what is not, a cardie. The latter suggests the faded, well worn, once good woollie number indispensable in everyone's life. But the cream coloured number Thompson wore to the Oscars, with matching skirt, was not a real cardigan: it was an attempt at a designer something. I suspect she was trying to make an I am a true blue Brit statement. Why else, when she finally got on the stage, did she start yammering on about visiting Austen's grave in Winchester?

WATCHING the Oscars recalled for me the Sunday afternoon matinees at the cinema in Ballybunion - the only times we were allowed, to go except in the holidays. There were two lots of seats - the four pennies under the screen or the shilling-ees. We could sometimes smoke with our heads down if there was enough of a crowd. Those in the courting corner at the back could do a bit more.

Mostly, we got an unending diet of westerns will not one woman in them. Once Mise Eire came, we got to see Judy Garland in A Star is Born because they thought it was a religious film. Very often the "small" picture was best; a short, daft comedy with Movietone News thrown in. As the credits rolled for the big picture my heart would drop at the unending list of men's names. It just meant wars, guns, good cowboys, bad Indians and generally, men beating the lard out of each other.

If there was a woman it meant a bit of fashion - even if it was just a long dress and a bonnet. A woman meant a bit of passion and romance. A woman meant those panic scenes when she would go into labour and everyone would run around shouting for boiling water. Then there would be silence until you heard the baby's cry.

So Emma Thompson should wise up. Hollywood and movies spell something big, beautiful and outrageous - talent, class and style and escapism. I do not want movie stars to be sensible and to look as frumpily ordinary as every other woman in the supermarket queue. They should be and look different. And even if they are dead ordinary, they can act, cant they?