[Palance Picture]

Jack Palance

Palance wins Oscar for supporting actor

From staff and wire reports

Los Angeles (AP)

Lattimer native Jack Palance, the crusty trail boss in "City Slickers," won his first Oscar Monday for best supporting performance.

The 72-year-old actor - saying earlier, "I just had a shot. I feel great," - swaggered to the stage and kicked off the evening's first trophy with a bawdy acceptance speech.

"Billy Crystal, God, I crap bigger than him," said Palance, referring to his "City Slickers" co-star and the Oscar ceremony host.

"You know," Palance continued, "there are times when you reach a certain age plateau where the producers say ... 'Well, what do you think? Can we risk it? Can we do it? Can we use him?' The other guy says, 'I don't know let's get some younger ones. We can make them look older.''

Then the veteran actor delighted the audience by showing off his vigor and agility with a few one-arm and two-arm push-ups.

"ThatŐs nothing really," he said. "As far as the two-handed push-ups, you can do that all night and it doesn't make any difference if she's there or not," Palance said.

At 6-foot-4, Palance has been an imposing presence in films since receiving his first nomination as the husband who tries to murder Joan Crawford in 1952's "Sudden Fear."

He got another Oscar nomination the following year as Allan Ladd's tormentor in "Shane."

An elated Palance, who owns a farm now in Drums and was nominated twice before for performances, related a story about when he was shooting his first film in 1949 as he accepted his Academy Award.

"The producer came to me and said Jack . . . Jack, you're going to win the Academy Award,'' Palance remembered. "Can you believe it? Forty-two years later he was right."

Later in the ceremony, awards show host Billy Crystal, who was Palance's co-star in "City Slickers," joked that Palance had just "bungee jumped off the Hollywood sign."

One of Palance's closest friends in Hazleton, James Ustynoski. said he "jumped out of the couch a mile high." Ustynoski predicted that no matter how casual Palance approached the ceremony beforehand, the actor was "thrilled" to get the Oscar.

"I think he was pretty confident," said Ustynoski, who was in New York City with Palance recently, ''In New York, everyone was saying, 'Good luck.' He said, 'Jim, I'm surprised so many people know about the Academy Awards,' "

"He never gets down on the floor like that and does push-ups," Ustynoski added. "He knew what he wanted to do, and he did it."

Palance, 72, was the sentimental favorite after being nominated in the early '50s for performances in "Sudden Fear" and "Shane."

Mercedes Ruehl, the warmhearted video store owner in "The Fisher King," joined Palance as a winner as she took the Oscar for best supporting performance for a female.

"Bugsy," Warren Beatty's gangster epic that had the most nominations with 10, picked up awards for art direction and costume design early in the proceedings at the 64th Annual Academy Awards.

Another best picture nominee, "JFK," 0liver Stone's assassination polemic, won for film editing.

Last year's box-office champion, "Terminator 2: Judgement Day," won three early awards: makeup, sounds effect editing and sound.

The races for best picture and the top acting prizes created more than the usual suspense because there were no clear favorites.

"For the first time in years, it's a horse race," said Gilbert Cates, producer of the ceremonies, which were televised live on ABC.

Miss Ruehl, a first time nominee, recounted her early days as a struggling actress, and added, "At this moment, all of those sort of doleful memories ... suddenly transformed themselves into nothing more than the sort of charming and amusing anecdotes from my memoirs."

Best foreign film was "Mediterranco," an ltalian comedy set during World War II.

Other best picture nominees included "The Silence of the Lambs," which despite its release in early 1991 won the bellwether Directors Guild award for Jonathan Demme, as well as the Writers Guild Award for Ted Tally.

"Beauty and the Beast" - the first animated feature nominated as best picture - bid for consideration as the feel-good choice in a year when other top nominees dealt with murders, gangsters, presidential assassins and homosexual rape.

Barbara Streisand's "The Prince of Tides" and "JFK" were considered dark horses, benefiting possibly from a split vote for the others.

"Silence" also had two unusually strong performances, by Anthony Hopkins in the brief but mesmerizing role of Dr. Hannibal (The Cannibal) Lecter, and Jodie Foster as the fledgling FBI agent Clarice Starling.

Billy Crystal, host for the evening, got things off to a lively start by entering in the same hockey mask that Hopkins' character wore in the film to restrain his cannibalistic tendencies.

"l'm having some of the academy over to dinner " Crystal told the actor. "Care to join me?"

From: Hazleton Standard - Speaker, March 31, 1992