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OSCAR FAN REELING OVER HOLLYWOOD

February 25, 2007 12:36 am

In 1961 Minoo Shapurian was 19, newly sprung from boarding school and crazy for all things American--especially movies.

She and younger sister Haida had grown up watching American films in their native Iran and in Pakistan, Iraq and Turkey during their father's diplomatic postings.

At last the family was posted to the United States, and the Shapurian girls delighted in the culture of bobby socks, Elvis Presley and Hollywood.

That year, living near Washington, they watched the Academy Awards on television with their parents, Ali and Djia Shapurian. "West Side Story," a family favorite, won best picture.

Forty-five years later, Minoo Shapurian Binda of Stafford County is proud to say she's never missed a broadcast of the Oscars.

She'll watch again tonight from her North Stafford home, as the 79th annual Academy Awards are televised on ABC beginning at 8. Thanks to a digital video recorder, though, she'll skip the commercials and speed through windy thank-yous.

She's neutral on first-time host Ellen DeGeneres and on Chris Rock, Whoopi Goldberg, Steve Martin, David Letterman and most other the hosts over the past 20 years or so. Billy Crystal is all right, but Minoo Binda misses the days when Bob Hope and Johnny Carson ran the show with class and humor.

Still, she's loyal to the Oscars as an annual event, and still avidly follows the movies that inspire them.

When she goes to the cinema these days, it's often in the company of her sister, who's married and still lives in Northern Virginia.

They avoid the megaplexes, with their small screens, sticky floors, chair-kickers and audience gabbers.

To them, movies are still an event, meriting a trip to the Uptown Theater on Connecticut Avenue in Washington.

The sisters, often in the company of their movie-loving adult children and tolerant husbands, sit quietly among other polite film fans who wouldn't dream of chattering over the dialogue. They clap at the end of worthy movies, and they wait till the last credits roll before they get up to leave.

"You cannot say a word when we're watching a movie," Binda said. "It requires 100 percent focus."

Afterward, they go out to eat somewhere and discuss, processing every aspect of the experience--story, acting, scenery, costumes, music.

That's a habit the sisters developed as children. Most of the films they saw were without subtitles and in English, which the Shapurian family spoke at home.

But Minoo remembers seeing a Jerry Lewis film once with a Farsi translation, and watching Elvis in "Love Me Tender" at an outdoor theater in Baghdad, where a private box was four seats nestled amid some hedges.

Though she still likes comedies and musicals, she's cooled toward those genres in recent years. She finds many modern comedies inane, with "Nacho Libre," "Deuce Bigalow" and "Click" making her least-favorite list. She's also lukewarm about recent musicals like "Chicago" and "Dreamgirls," preferring the song-and-dance spectacles of an earlier time.

But she's welcomed one change wholeheartedly: the availability of movies on DVD. She owns more movies of every genre than she can count, and she watches them avidly at home, sometimes two in a day.

Her husband, Rudolph Binda, occasionally watches with her, but he's nowhere near the movie buff she is, she says.

Unless a movie just has to be viewed on the big screen--"Star Wars" or "Raiders of the Lost Ark" for example--she's happy to wait till it's released on disc and watch it on her 60-inch screen at home.

She tries to see any Oscar-nominated movies that way, though the timing doesn't always work out for her to see the pictures before the Academy Awards ceremony. She's still waiting, for example, to see best-picture nominees "The Queen," and "Babel."

When there's nothing new out that she wants to see, she'll put on one of her old favorites such as "Lawrence of Arabia," "Silence of the Lambs," "Gone With the Wind," "Black Orpheus," "Gladiator" or "Spartacus"--a movie that inspired her to name her only daughter Varinia after the Jean Simmons character. (She has three grown sons as well, including former professional baseball player Byron Binda.)

And if it ever comes out on DVD, she'll buy "Up in Arms," a 1944 Danny Kaye-in-the-Army movie that managed to be funny without any of the sex gags, scatological humor and ridiculous plot lines that pop up in 21st-century comedies.

In the meantime, though, she'll wade through newer releases in hopes of finding a rare gem, a movie that hits everything just right and captures the magic of the movies from an earlier time.

Laura Moyer: 540/374-5417
Email: lmoyer@freelancestar.com