Oscars night begins with a delicious cat fight as uber-comedienne Joan Rivers, doing her annual red-carpet commentary for the E! network, assails ABC for preempting live coverage of star arrivals before the official program is to begin.

Two and a half hours before curtain time, Joan leads off with fighting words as she does a satirical split-screen stunt with daughter Melissa over ABC's peculiar assignment of hostess duties to actress Geena Davis, a second-tier celebrity if there ever was one.

ABC has "pulled off a coup," shouts Joan into her mike, by landing "Bette Davis" to begin its broadcast evening. No, Melissa responds, it's not Bette Davis. "Sammy Davis!" Joan yells. No, not him, Melissa replies, like the altar girl to a high priestess. "Mac Davis!" Joan tries, and then "Angela Davis," a reformed revolutionary to inaugurate the millennium. When Melissa bats back her final ball -- "It's Geena Davis" -- Joan sighs, shrugs and contemptuously mutters, "Semi-coup."

Long live Queen Joan for her radical protest! ABC deserves to be pelted with cow pies for its boring, canned, claustrophobic half-hour prelude to the Oscars, which squelches all the spontaneity and excitement of the star arrivals and forces us to contemplate at nauseating length the bovine features of that awkward, overgrown goofball, Geena Davis.

True, Joan goes a bit haywire when she proclaims that Gwyneth Paltrow on her father's arm ("He's my date," Paltrow says of "Daddy") is just "like Grace Kelly" -- at which I nearly fall foaming to the floor. For the entire evening, big-jawed Paltrow, with her nasal, teeth-clenching Lisa Kudrow style, looks like a Green Bay Packers cheesehead tottering atop a mushy pink Hostess cupcake.

Glamour seems to be in short supply at these Academy Awards. Instead of the grand flourish of the divine Sharon Stone, who usually upstages everyone as she exits her limo, we get Celine Dion in a strange get-up of white slouch hat and reversed tuxedo jacket. Chatting with Joan, Dion looks like a fagged-out drag queen who's emptied her Cher closet. She's saying more career farewells these days than Naomi Judd.

I squirm and bitch throughout ABC's warm-up show, though I kind of like the segment on the gold Oscar statuettes making their tour by van from St. Louis to Tucson, Ariz., to Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Those little guys have a lot more class than Geena Davis, who introduces as her first guest the very bland Helen Hunt, to whom the award for best actress inexplicably went last year, robbing the far more deserving Kate Winslet. Winslet's formidable bust will be much missed this evening.

At last the program begins, with host Whoopi Goldberg (thankfully replacing the fatuous Billy Crystal) emerging in whiteface and heavy brocaded gown as Elizabeth I with a Bette Davis accent: "I am the African Queen!" Goldberg announces, bringing down the house. Goldberg is terrific -- stylish, funny and relaxed as she makes one raunchy double entendre after another without compromising the dignity of the show.

After a blindingly fast and close to incomprehensible series of clips from the entire history of film (educating no one except aging cognoscenti), Goldberg reemerges in one of the best outfits of the evening -- a magnificent, floor-length gold-and-bronze tunic over a low-cut black-velvet sheath. "I am the last 20th century fox!" Goldberg grandly announces, as she hosts the final Oscars of the millennium.

Obliquely alluding to the evening's approaching crisis -- the lifetime achievement award to director Elia Kazan, who named names a half-century ago during the McCarthy hearings -- Goldberg quips, "I thought the blacklist was me and Hattie McDaniel" (the first African-American to win an acting award). The Kazan controversy, telegraphed by a crowd of demonstrators at some distance from the hall, seems to have cast a pall over the evening. The audience is tense and jittery, and Goldberg sometimes struggles to break the ice.

When Kim Basinger comes out in white as the first presenter, she looks pinched and parched after Goldberg's rollicking warmth. I screech with delight when James Coburn gets the award for best supporting actor over the favored Geoffrey Rush. It's about time Hollywood honored Coburn for his long career as a genuinely macho man of the screen. In his prime, his masculinity was the real thing. Today's actors are a bunch of pomaded pretty boys or scowling poseurs. Comedians Mike Meyers and Chris Rock seem clumsily adolescent when they take the stage (separately), since they can't compete with Goldberg's leonine power. Christina Ricci, normally a quirkily interesting personality, looks disproportioned and uncomfortable in her ill-fitting dress and Vampira mop. Whitney Houston is fabulously elegant in a slim white gown and early 1930s hair, but Mariah Carey, heavily girdled in a white dress with a broad halter strap, looks like a St. Pauli beer garden waitress missing her tray of suds. The two hold hands as they wail a nominated song, while a columnar gold drape unfurls behind them like a rushing fountain or a Morris Louis tapestry painting. But less definitely isn't more at this show: Suddenly the two gals are attacked by a gospel choir so badly filmed as they descend symmetrical staircases that they look like a giant flock of deranged geese. The show's constantly changing sets seem to have been designed by a talentless corn-pone psychotic. There's no logic or consistency. Goldberg switches her clothes so many times -- in sync with the nominations for costume design -- that it gets wearisome. In contrast, Dame Judi Dench, accepting the Oscar for best supporting actress, looks wonderfully dignified amid the glitz. Ex-Sen. John Glenn, introduced by the unexpectedly bearded Tom Hanks, is so platitudinous that I must fight off narcolepsy. Who the hell invited him? At last an adrenalin rush as Sophia Loren, her massive, buttressed bosom leading like the prow of a battleship, comes out to introduce the clip for the Italian film "Life Is Beautiful." She looks a bit like Anouk Aimee these days. What star power! Loren puts all the smirky ingénues to shame. When Andie MacDowell schleps out after Loren, I literally have to turn my head away. Can't American actresses get their damned act together? Now we have a horrendously bad dance routine designed by Debbie Allen, who seems stuck in the 1980s. "Pretty sophomoric," harrumphs my partner, Alison. Is Savion Glover, with his ugly hunch and hackneyed stomping, the face that American dance wants to present to the world? Allen's vapid, pretentious choreography for this murkily lit number is suited neither for the large hall nor the television camera. Hook! The very poised and still sensual John Travolta introduces a selection of Frank Sinatra movie clips nicely edited by Martin Scorsese. They bring tears to the eyes. Yes, once Hollywood overflowed with talent. The sheer variety of Sinatra's skills -- in drama, comedy, song-and-dance revues -- is daunting. His raw intensity, sexiness, authority, sophistication -- oh, I've got to stop before I make myself sick. Now Goldberg is into Elizabethan transvestism, with a beard making her look like Samuel Jackson. An X-rated joke about "beavers" is an odd segue into the dreaded Anne Heche, whom I thought we got rid of last year in "Psycho." Heche's radio mike, clamped to her bodice, keeps flickering out, but whether this is accidental isn't clear. Cutting-edge technology poisoned by her mushroom-like clamminess? Ellen DeGeneres, another victim clamped to the Heche bodice, had a similar fate. Jim Carrey looks great in a Mafioso black-on-black ensemble, but his mock grief goes on way too long over his failure to get nominated for "The Truman Show." Annette Bening purses her lips in the audience and looks peeved. But I applaud Carrey wildly when he attacks PC convention by tearing open the envelope for film editing and boldly announcing, "And the winner is ...." I despise the namby-pamby formulation "And the Oscar goes to ..." Get real! Let's junk all that passé liberal pabulum. Renée Zellwegger, a minor actress who somehow ended up on the cover of Vanity Fair last year, clunks out hobbled by an elaborate purple-and-gold gown that she hasn't the foggiest clue how to wear. "What a big bag of oats!" I cry with disgust. Doesn't she have any gay guy friends to shop with? Someone should slap that girl up and down Rodeo Drive until she learns what fashion is. Now Goldberg comes out in a giant bodice of black ostrich feathers and, with a fey lift of the shoulders, parodies a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds." Naturally, this tickles me as a "Birds" fanatic -- but it reminds me that tonight's Oscars have taken no note whatever of the centenary of Hitchcock's birth. They have a lot of catching up to do next year. I close my eyes when Nicolas Cage appears, since I can't stand his eternal pose of beady-eyed earnestness. But director Norman Jewison, to whom Cage hands the Irving G. Thalberg award, deserves huge applause and gets it when he lectures the crowd, "Just find some good stories!" and never mind the grosses or the demographic. Yes, the competitive balance between commercial and artistic interests in Hollywood has gone badly askew in the past decade. Oh, no, here's that shuffling lunk Liam Neeson, whom Goldberg, caressing her phallic mike, creams over but whom I've never been able to take seriously after watching him heave his melancholy carcass through that Justine Bateman stinker, "Satisfaction." Val Kilmer walks out leading a gorgeous bay horse, who has more beauty and style than three-quarters of tonight's actresses. Its splendid black-and-silver saddle and tack deserve the award for best costume. Then the horse turns its ass to the audience -- which may be the perfect comment about the evening. Dreary, hunch-shouldered Helen Hunt is back. "She looks like Jan Brady," Alison remarks. "She looks like Patty Hearst," I reply. Oh, I'm so tired of that generic kind of pallid, decorous WASP anemia. Take her away! Roberto Benigni is out of control, however, in his Chico Marx conniptions as he accepts the best actor award. I loved him in the fiendishly clever and very Italian "Johnny Stecchino," but this oh-the-humanity Chaplinesque schtick is getting on my nerves. After the very dumpy and bleached out Lisa Kudrow exits, we get the ever-joined-at-the-hip Matt Damon ("He looks like Frankenstein!" Alison declares) and Ben Affleck ("Is he wearing a wig?" I ask). After the studied, weightless affability of that pair, it's nice to get some juicy malice in the long-awaited presentation to Kazan. Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro (his head rooster-shaved like a convict) look awfully tense as they bring on Kazan. The scenes from Kazan's classic films seem to explode off the screen with creative vitality. Perhaps a third of the audience refuses to applaud him, infuriating Alison and me, since we despise moralistic PC crusades against artists.

Winning the Oscar for best costume design, Sandy Powell makes the night's most sensational stage entrance in her flouncy burgundy-red ensemble. Hip British women have amazing flair and style. Poor Jennifer Lopez, who is the genuinely hot and sultry article, got truly awful advice on her muddy makeup and weirdly cramped and balloon-skirted dress. Ugh! Annette Bening, on the other hand, glides to the mike with smart, vibrant class. The show is running long, but here's Colin Powell, of all people, who is as superfluous as John Glenn or Rip Van Winkle. Drone, drone, drone. The stately Uma Thurman sweeps out in a dramatic dress that she knows how to carry off, but she's in dreadful muted colors that make her look unappetizingly bleached out. This low-key color trend is destroying the natural beauty of a host of actresses. The aging but still sizzling Jack Nicholson presents the award for best actress. Oh, God, that overpraised showbiz princess Gwyneth Paltrow gets the crown. (Doesn't anyone realize how lousy she was in "Emma"? She has the Streep trick for accents, and that's it.) Paltrow is blathering on all weepy and twinkly and thanking her relatives with that yappy, trembly voice -- a total replay of her speech at the Golden Globes. She's far, far worse than Benigni, but in a show of blatant protective sexism, the orchestra doesn't start up and shove her off the stage. When will this damned show end? Steven Spielberg is giving a stiff testimonial to the brilliant Stanley Kubrick -- whose immortal film clips make the jaw drop with awe. How far Hollywood has fallen! Now we have to contemplate the wooden Kevin Costner and then the equally wooden Harrison Ford giving the awards for best director and best film, respectively. The excessively elfin Spielberg gives mawkish thanks to his kids, and producer Harvey Weinstein hoves his boorish bulk up to the mike for his moment in the sun for the callow "Shakespeare in Love" -- but is miraculously sent packing by the deus ex machina of the orchestra, which has finally decided enough is enough. Hurrah, it's over. This was a terrible year for films, and the Oscars had to scrape the bottom of the barrel. As for the awards show itself, there were some A-minus moments, but my overall grade is C-plus. See you all next year! But meanwhile, please busy yourself by studying the great films of the past. Filmmaking may be in the pits, but its renaissance will surely come.