THE DAY BEFORE THE ACADEMY AWARDS this year was spent in front of the television set. Americans watched again and again the same few minutes of action outside the Washington Hilton: and the next night it was just a matter of settling back into their easy chairs to tune into the Oscars. And, eerily, as the ceremonies got underway, the familiar glitz and glamor began to resonate with echoes of the previous day's tragedy. "Hooray for Hollywood," sang the chorus-line that opened the show and their refrain became a bizarre theme-song for the events of the day before; there really was a lot of Hollywood mixed in with the shooting of President Reagan, and it all seemed to come together at the Academy Awards.

Reagan himself kicked off the ceremonies, in a message taped the week before the shooting. Calling the movies "the world's most enduring art form," he recalled his own acting career with a chuckle and a smile that contrasted strikingly with the image--still fresh--of his wince the day before as secret service agents shoved him into his limousine. The president's reference to his Hollywood years brought to mind another startling contrast: exactly forty years earlier, the American public had seen Ronald Reagan stretched out in a hospital bed in the movie "King's Row." The film produced Reagan's single memorable line as a movie star--a line that later became the title of his 1965 autobiography--uttered upon awakening to find that a vengeful surgeon has amputated his legs: "Where's the rest of me?"

Now the hospital bed was real, but the president was still speaking lines from a B-movie. "Honey, I forgot to duck," he told his wife Nancy. "I hope you're all Republicans," he quipped to his doctors before the operation. The movies could never have been far from Reagan's mind after the shooting because, as Johnny Carson reported during the Academy Awards, the president had requested a bedside television for the specific purpose of watching the Oscars.

The president fell asleep after an hour so he missed seeing Robert de Niro hoist his Oscar for best actor into the air and tell the audience he was especially glad to win the award in the face of "all the bad things in the world." De Niro's Oscar came for an unusually violent role--boxer Jake La Motta in Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull" : but the actor had no idea of the role he would come to have in the previous day's violence. The morning after the Academy Awards, newspapers published the hypothesis of federal investigators that the suspect in the shooting was inspired by a character from the movies--a deranged ex-marine who arms himself to the teeth and stalks a United States senator. The movie was "Taxi Driver," and the gunman's prototype was played by Robert De Niro.

Still another actor entered the scene in the investigation of the shooting--18-year-old Jodie Foster. De Niro's co-star in "Taxi Driver" (a role that won her an Oscar, nomination). In the suspect's motel room after the shooting, detectives uncovered an unmailed note to Foster that read, according to one account, "If you don't love me. I'm going to kill the President." It turned out to be only the most recent of a series of pathetic letters to the actress.

SO HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD. The land of celluloid has finally hit the big time, finally created a spectacle that will spawn sequels, and spinoffs and sell popcorn for ever. And the most fitting irony came at the conclusion of the Oscars: the award for best picture of the year went to a movie that tried to enter the world of ordinary people. The shooting of President Reagan was the horrifying result of ordinary people trying to enter the world of the movies.