By Ray Cooklis

Every time I despair that classical music has gone the way of the dodo, something proves my fears premature. This year, it is a crop of Oscar-winning movies that rely on music to make their most telling points. Maybe this should not be a surprise. Over the years, pop music has perversely constricted its range of emotional expression into little more than a lewd grunt. Filmmakers seem to realize that to tap the full palette of human experience, their soundtracks must rely on something better. So they do:

• The Pianist portrays a Chopin-playing Polish Jew trying to survive in the Warsaw ghetto. Chopin's music has always given Polish nationalism its voice, and the contrast of its elegant humanity with the grotesque inhumanity of the Nazis gives the film its power. In the climax, Wladyslaw Szpilman (Best Actor Adrien Brody), shaking years of rust from his fingers, desperately plays the Ballade No. 1 - inspired, ironically, by a Polish patriotic poem - to awaken what is left of a German officer's decency.

• In The Hours - also blessed with a time-bending Philip Glass score - Meryl Streep's "Mrs. Dalloway" character is in her apartment, preparing for a party honoring her AIDS-afflicted friend Richard. She turns on the radio, and out pours the heaven-sent voice of Jessye Norman singing one of Richard Strauss' Four Last Songs - the one in which a couple muses about sleep as Death. The music's chilling allure practically screams out Richard's impending suicide.

• At one point in Jack Nicholson's quirky About Schmidt, he is driving his motor home across the flat, featureless plains, despairing his wife's death. In the background is Erik Satie's enigmatic Gnossienne No. 4 for piano. What's notable about the Gnossiennes is that Satie did not write barlines into the scores; rhythmically, the music is rootless, aimless - as is Schmidt. It is a brilliant choice.

Good TV does this, too. In a recent episode of The West Wing, Press Secretary C.J. Cregg is visiting her father, who is struggling with Alzheimer's. Near the end, he sits at his piano playing the "Aria" from J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations - a work that, according to legend, was written to soothe an insomniac nobleman. So a scholar fighting to retain consciousness, to remain "awake," plays music said to help one sleep. The subtle irony would escape anyone not familiar with the Goldberg Variations, but it is comforting to realize that some of the best creative talents in Hollywood know their music.