Unforgiven

HOLLYWOOD -- Call it a coronation of the common man. Clint Eastwood, an underappreciated foot soldier for much of his career, was king of all he surveyed last night as his "Unforgiven" won Oscars for best direction and best picture at the 65th Academy Awards.Though the success of "Unforgiven" was expected, especially after it walked off with two of the evening's first three Oscars, the evening's climax was no less emotional for that. The audience at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion erupted into roars when his name was announced for the evening's last two awards.

* Picture: "The Crying Game," "A Few Good Men," "Howard End," "Scent of a Woman," "Unforgiven."* Actor: Robert Downey Jr., "Chaplin"; Clint Eastwood, "Unforgiven"; Al Pacino, "Scent of a Woman"; Stephen Rea, "The Crying Game"; Denzel Washington, "Malcolm X."* Actress: Catherine Deneuve, "Indochine"; Mary McDonnell, "Passion Fish"; Michelle Pfeiffer, "Love Field"; Susan Sarandon, "Lorenzo's Oil"; Emma Thompson, "Howards End."* Supporting actor: Jaye Davidson, "Crying Game"; Gene Hackman, "Unforgiven"; Jack Nicholson, "A Few Good Men"; Al Pacino, "Glengarry Glen Ross"; David Paymer, "Mr. Saturday Night."

HOLLYWOOD -- Hollywood's annual film awards marathon got under way last weekend as the Los Angeles Film Critics Association chose Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" as the best movie of 1992.As the first of the major awards competitions, the selection by the Los Angeles critics instantly elevates the movie's chances for nominations in the Golden Globe Awards, to be presented in January by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and in the film industry's own Academy Awards, to be announced in March.

Fourteen, if you count the guy who gets electrocuted. He may have just been stunned, of course, but from the sparks and the way he squirmed, I think he was totaled.Ten, but one or two of them may have survived what appeared to be mortal gunshot wounds, though with frontier medicine (that is, no medicine) this is unlikely.Those are the body counts in two American movies that sit like bookends at both ends of the summer. Fourteen deaths in "Lethal Weapon 3" and 10 in the just-opened "Unforgiven" -- it's summer, bloody summer, at the movies.

"Unforgiven" tells the story of how the West was lost.It was lost, as was the East and the South and the North, to pointless, ugly violence, men with guns who couldn't imagine the pain their bullets would cause and had no capacity to conceptualize the vacuum of loss they created when they killed.It is, in short, the antithesis of all those heroic gunfighter movies and that national anthem of killer as hero. Its characters aren't knights, but mean and squalid psychopaths, cagey as they are obdurate, bitter as snakes and ugly as sin.Only in its final minutes does it somewhat squander its grip on the moral imagination, in a climax that seems oddly to undercut all that's come before and return us to the hallowed sense of violence as cleansing which so animates the world's true killers.

NEW YORK -- In Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven," due in theaters Friday, Gene Hackman has the plum role of Little Bill Daggett, a frontier lawman willing to kill to keep his community free of killers.Mr. Hackman could not care less about the advance scuttlebutt -- a virtual consensus among American film critics -- that his portrayal is among the year's more appealing Oscar bait."I doubt I'll even watch the thing," the celebrated actor shrugged during a visit heralding the opening of "Unforgiven."