Wallflower at the Oscars.

THERE'S BEEN HIGH dudgeon recently about the decision that was made to omit the dance number from this year's Oscar telecast. So much dudgeon, in fact, that perhaps by the time you read this the producers will have been persuaded to change their minds.

But the whole question of what's happening to dancing in the movies and at the Academy Awards--not to mention in the hearts and minds of the moviemakers--is still worth looking at.

Frankly, when the dancing portion of the Oscarcast came in for a high-profile dissing on Today by the noted dance critic Katie Couric, it was hard to disagree. The dance segment of the Academy Awards telecast has been by and large the weakest part of an annually feeble enterprise. The dance production number takes all the worst qualities of the show and bloats them--the vapidity, the overlongness, the gaudy tackiness.

And yet, and yet. How can you omit dancing from one of the few remaining events that bind the world together as a community? How can you drop the possibility that some child somewhere will be watching and see people moving, and decide that this is something he, she wants to do and must investigate? Will we be left with only the verbal choreography of an emcee like Billy Crystal?

The popularity of the telecast shows that we will, because we must, take our entertainment where we can get it. Removing dancing takes away a big chunk of what has passed for entertainment on the Oscarcast. All that's left would be the singing of various nominated tunes of various levels of mediocrity, the grimly determined repartee from the pairs of presenters, nostalgia (old stars in funny toupees), and scandalia (bold stars in funny dresses).

Which brings up another point. If, as the new producers and impeccable tastemakers Darryl and Lili Fini (as in the dancing is fini, fahgeddaboudit) Zanuck had the gall to proclaim, choreography is no longer relevant to the movies, what on earth is?

Not plot, certainly. Never mind the blow-`em-ups. Even the highbrow, high-end "films" often sacrifice storytelling in their haste to make for the bedroom. Take The End of the Affair. Sure, it's compelling. Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore are marvelous actors. But maybe I missed something in the tale of Sarah and Bendrix's illicit relationship. Seems to me that they met, went out to a movie, whispered a few words to each other in a darkened theater, touched each other on the hand, and fell into the sack, where we viewed them in various stages of the buff for hours to come.

Sarah and Bendrix met at a '30s cocktail party that did not include dancing. Astonishing that a movie about love included so much passion and so little courtship. In the tune whose title I cribbed for the name of this column, Frank Sinatra sang, "But what is dancing but making love set to music ... ?"

Would the Zanucks have been so cavalier in their dictum if Gene Kelly were still alive, or Fred Astaire? As Larry Billman of the Academy of Dance on Film, a non-profit Hollywood foundation, notes in a marvelously persuasive letter to the dance community, the Academy has not bestowed best dance direction awards since 1937; they were undone by Directors Guild factionalism and jealousy. Today, there's no such category as a best-choreography Oscar. In Oscar's lifetime, Billman writes, only six special awards have been granted for dance-related achievement, to Astaire, Kelly, Jerome Robbins, Onna White, Michael Kidd, and Stanley Donen. Sort of like allowing the hired help to sit at the table.

It's amusing that the Zanucks are getting ready to tap the last nails into dance's Hollywood coffin when some of the most popular movies, even since the demise in the '50s of the big movie musical, have been strong on dancing: The Turning Point, Flashdance (my personal nomination for tacky-supreme) Saturday Night Fever, Dirty Dancing, Fame, and what about, for pete's sake, the fabulous The Full Monty? Now, as we go to press, comes Center Stage. And of course there's more heading this way: Savion Glover's doing a movie. So, rumor has it, is Patrick (Dirty Dancing) Swayze, about a modern dance company. Billman writes that more than sixty films released in 1999 contained choreography, including the aerial work in The Matrix and Brendan Fraser's swing trio number in Blast from the Past.

At the moment when the Zanucks are deeming dance irrelevant to the world's greatest pop culturefest, dance in pop culture is booming. Hip-hop is huge; people who once thought dance too wussy for words have taken it into their lives, and hip-hop has drawn them to the dance studios, as well as to the clubs, the streets, and the Gap commercials.

Broadway (whose Tonys acknowledge that choreography does not spring full-blown from the minds of the producers) is chock-full of dance-rich hits, from Fosse, Swing, and Chicago to Contact and Kiss Me, Kate, and, at presstime, The Music Man. The trail has tended in the past to lead from the Broadway stage to the Hollywood backlot. What a weird time, then, to proclaim dance irrelevant.

And of course there's the vital question of employment. Writes Billman, "Participation in the live Oscar telecast was the last association film choreographers had with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the prestigious group which awards excellence in film." What would choreographers, and Hollywood's dancers, do without the Industry?

But there is another, not-so-friendly question: Is there also a painful lesson here? Where was the choreographers', and dancers', own sense of outrage when they became enmeshed in the dance-schlock endemic to the Oscar shows? Where were their own artistic standards? Why didn't they set about to improve the quality of the dance segments before the great Snow White production number fiasco a few years back made it an article of faith that they weren't worth saving?

People who love dance and give their lives to it have a universal (and paramount) responsibility not just to defend their right to earn a living through dance, but to defend the right dance, to encourage the best dance; to make of it something as golden as that dopey, coveted statue.

Janice Berman, Editor in Chief