DIRECTOR POLANSKI ENTERS ONE ELITE GROUP, EXITS ANOTHER.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

So the Hollywood establishment organization that dares to call itself the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has belatedly gotten around to honoring one of the era's greatest filmmakers with a best directing award.

All due congratulations to ``The Pianist'' director Roman Polanski for finally receiving the statuette you deserved to get for ``Repulsion,'' ``Rosemary's Baby'' and ``Chinatown.'' But we also offer our condolences for no longer being in the sublimely good company you enjoyed prior to Sunday night.

That's because the academy has also managed to overlook more of the art form's finest directors than it's managed to award.

We can begin at the top, with America's pre-eminent cinematic genius, Orson Welles. He got a writing award for the consensus best movie ever made, ``Citizen Kane,'' but not one for filling his 1941 classic with innumerable innovative techniques that are still influencing filmmakers more than 60 years later.

Right up there with Welles in the no-directing-Oscar pantheon are Alfred Hitchcock (whose ``Rebecca'' won best picture in 1940, and who accepted an honorary statuette decades later with a curt ``Thank you''); artists of silent film slapstick Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton; elegant masters of early sound comedy Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges; the wittiest director of movie musicals, Stanley Donen; ``Rebel Without a Cause's'' Nicholas Ray; and irrepressible Hollywood rebels Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman and John Cassavetes.

And, of course, Sunday night's fellow nominee, Martin Scorsese.

And those are just the overlooked directors who worked in American cinema. Of the hundreds of great auteurs who've emerged in the non- English-speaking world, only Czech Milos Forman and Italian Bernardo Bertolucci have won directing Oscars (and isn't it pretty pitiful that not one foreign language directing effort has been recognized in and of itself over the course of 75 years?).

All that acknowledged, the fraternity of Oscar-winning directors boasts some eternally impressive names: John Ford (the academy's most honored director with four awards, though none was for his masterpiece ``The Searchers''); Frank Capra (three, but not for his masterpiece ``It's a Wonderful Life''); Lubitsch protege Billy Wilder (for ``The Lost Weekend'' and ``The Apartment'' when it should have been ``Sunset Boulevard'' and ``Some Like It Hot''); and the often extraordinary likes of Frank Borzage, John Huston, Elia Kazan, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, David Lean, Vincente Minnelli, Mike Nichols, Bob Fosse, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg.

Not a bad bunch to hang with. But if you were a hero of uncompromised cinematic artistry, would you really rather have your name associated with the officially sanctioned group or the gang that boasts Welles and Hitchcock and Kubrick (and Kurosawa and Truffaut and Bergman and Fellini and ...)

So, Roman, enjoy your Oscar; you earned it a long time ago. And you, Marty, can be just as proud that you're still a member of a stellar band of outsiders, who were always committed to making the greatest films that they could.

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2 photos

Photo:

(1) POLANSKI

(2) SCORSESE