On the whole though, moments like that are as scarce as Will Smith on urban radio. Instead, the telecast inevitably degenerates into a record-label-sponsored match of My Diva Is Bigger Than Your Diva. And yes, that goes for the boys too — how else do you describe Sting and his tantric career longevity or (p)opera heartthrob Andrea Bocelli? Like the gladiator matches of Rome, these square-offs aren’t so much about who wins as the game itself — it’s all bread and circuses.

And easily sated they are, these frothing fans with tears in their eyes. First there’s the, ahem, Soccer Moms — women in their 20s and 30s who don’t spend a lot of time consuming pop music, but when they do, they do so largely by group consensus. These are people who buy Vonda Shepard records not just because they relate to Ally McBeal, but because Shepard, with her bossy alto, speaks to them, polishing up the pain of approaching middle age with a neat drop of blue-eyed soul. You can track their purchasing habits on the Amazon.com bestseller list, which features Adult Contemporary (that’s what the folks at Billboard call it) artists who are generally shunned by radio yet still, largely via word of mouth, manage a steady buzz — Aimee Mann, Tracy Chapman, Bocelli, Shepard, etc. It’s practically the Oprah Club for music — white, softy-liberal, female suburbanites sifting through their angst with song. (Oprah, please don’t get any ideas.)

Second, and at fierce odds with the previous group, come the Shrieking Teenage Girls. They abhor their moms’ music for being, well, booorrrinnnnggg. They’d much rather see synchronized boys in tight jeans or bop along with non-threatening girl-stars next door. For them, music is like a Happy Meal — each purchase brings a new toy into their world. The artists this group favors plead earnestness as well, just a far younger, less cynical version of it. Yes, the Backstreeters want it that way, and yes, Christina Aguilera knows what a girl wants. It’s all part of the truth of youth, divine in its naiveti.

On this year’s telecast, both of these contingents will be well catered to — Whitney Houston, Santana and Faith Hill for the older set; Martin, Kid Rock and Britney Spears for the young ‘ns. There’s even Chucho Valdes and Ibrahim Ferrer for those who think the next Latin craze will need a walking stick.

But the nominees — there’s the real rub. Well-appointed in their custom outfits and sporting on-loan jewelry, they’ll sit attentively in their seats waiting for their category, then either exult joyously to the podium or grin and swallow the insult. Sure, winning the statuette is an honor, but to a multimillion-selling act like the Backstreet Boys, it would be nothing compared to the opportunity to get irresponsible with their fans for just one night.

See, if you thought it was about the music or about the respect of the recording community, you’d be wrong. How else does one explain the nomination of Lou Bega, a third-rate Vin Diesel knockoff with a paunch, a scratchy voice and a song almost entirely lifted from mambo king Perez Prado? Running down a list of women you’ve dated over a stolen beat merits a Grammy nomination? OK, then those guys who shouted out all the women they’d slept with in their ad at the back of my high school yearbook better be up for a Pulitzer this year.

Bega’s egregious nomination is not the only one — what about Cher, who mailed it in for her 100-percent synthesized hit “Believe”? And what of this Bocelli character? For all I know, he sings in radio ads for pasta companies in Italy.

“Grammy Nominees 2000,” a collection just released on CD, brings together most of the nominees in three popular categories — record of the year, best new artist and best male pop vocal performance. It’s a testament to the Academy’s startling lack of originality. Bega, Bocelli and Cher are there, as are Martin, Spears and Aguilera. Kid Rock and TLC are there for the teenage “wish I was a rebel but I’ve got it too good” types, while their parents can hum along to Santana, Sting and Macy Gray.

See, the Grammy folks have so thoroughly sorted through the demographics of their target groups that the Grammy album and the nomination process at large miss almost any element of surprise. These nominees merely re-create the charts we’ve been bombarded with all year — Billboard, Amazon.com, MTV’s Total Request Live, radio Top 10s. Watching the festivities will only reinforce the machines that got these artists to their perches in the first place.

The only voice of dissent on the Grammy collection is left-field best new artist nominee Susan Tedeschi. A blues-folk singer from Boston, her song “It Hurt So Bad” is a fresh, sparkling ode to raw anguish with debts to early blues singers as well as pure ’50s rock ‘n’ roll. On an album brimming with insipid, overproduced schlock, her guitar twangs and crystal voice are a welcome reprieve. Sure she won’t win, but it’s nice to have this moment with her before her dissent is fully commodified and she ends up doing a guest spot as a stand-in for Shepard on “Ally.”

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.

Nevertheless, just when you finally decide that all awards shows must
be officially destroyed, they finally crank out a semi-entertaining one.
They seem to have that sixth sense, like obnoxious dogs, that if they act real
charming once in a strategic while you might not have them carted away
and/or put to sleep. This Oscars, for once in a blue moon, wasn’t another
groaning night of relentless unworthy bastard fondling; it was actually kind
of entertaining and all of the winning decisions didn’t make your head spin
with outrage and venom.

For example : I fully expected that my favorite movie of the year,
“Pleasantville,” a soulful, unexpected delight, would get all the
nonattention of a 9-year-old’s first efforts on the
camcorder, but was pleasantly shocked to see it get nominated for a series
of technical yawner awards. Hey, it was something!

And Whoopi Goldberg was surprisingly good. Very funny, even. She said “shit” a lot!
Too quickly to be bleeped! It made the whole event seem almost warmly human
for a minute or two.

The big question of the night was: What the fuck were the makeup artists
thinking, with this Damp Actress look? Was this glittering,
unpowdered facial effect supposed to simulate a youthful dewy fecundity? It
looked like the malaria sweats from where I was sitting, and no white woman
was immune; La Paltrow, Helen Hunt in her Ally McBeal anorexia scare dress,
Christina Ricci, Lisa Kudrow, monotone-ing off the cue cards like she was
reciting the eye chart at the DMV, Uma with her new bad Grace Kelly faux
Americo-Brit-snob enunciation efforts; they all looked like their foreheads
were runny. Nobody’s going to be happy when they see the tape at home. It’s
going to take more than a SWAT team of AVID editors to fix THAT fashion
travesty. Coiffed heads will roll down Rodeo Drive Monday, mark my words.

That Captain Luc Picard guy! That fucker shore is British! Cate Blanchett is
a real fox and she’s British, and that Geoffrey Rush guy (well, they’re
Australian, but close enough) and Dame Judi and
Christ, Queen Elizabeth was British too! And Emily Watson with her big sad
eyes and frowny little mouth, and wonder-homosexual Ian McKellen, and that
Redgrave chick who was the Weight Watchers lady before Fergie! Why do the
Brits have their own Academy Awards when we slobber all over them just fine
right here in our own frisky little country?

Well, at least we had Gwyneth. She’s not a Brit, she just played one on the
Big Silver TV. She was there, moist and nervously lovely and shellacked,
trying to look happy with no boyfriend.

James Coburn received his Coveted Verge of Death Award, and they let him
ramble a bit with his painful-looking arthritic fists. He dedicated the
award to his 19-year-old wife, Paula, who had outrageous EE-cup
techno-hooties. The music came on to drown him out. It got slowly louder and
louder.

And then there was Roberto Benigni, Italian, leaping around like a big pink
bunny, twizzling in the air like St. Groucho, effusing goldly all over the
place, spitting candy and emeralds and foolish cardboard hearts. Watching
him win for best foreign film was a spectacle like Baby’s First Christmas, with
puppies and Big Wheels for all. Sophia Loren, wearing a demure breast
maturity veil, burst into hysterics. So did Goldie Hawn; Roberto Benigni
freaking out is a great thing to watch. Everybody would listen to him
talk and stop crying, and their plucked eyebrows would bend up and assume a
puzzled “Huh?” expression. It happened every time.

But what is wrong with Tom Hanks? He was wearing a thickness of unsightly
hair on both cheeks. Is he turning into a weird patriot, or a Rasputin-like
recluse à la Matthew Broderick? He doesn’t even seem affable anymore. Has he
embraced a backwoods snake-handling cult? He looked Serious and disturbed,
with the flat nail-head eyes of someone who has suddenly learned to fear
Jesus. This World War II thing got him all spooky; he looks like he wants to
salute astronauts or wade bravely through billowing flags. Snap out of it,
Tom.

Whoopi made a couple of pussy jokes, and every time, the cameras cut to
Warren Beatty, looking sculpted out of raw beef! Caving in from his own four-decade struggle with the dread Pussy Sickness! Anybody who gets that much
pussy becomes gradually rotten and demented; Beatty is jittery with it; so
is Nicholson.

The appalling parts of the Oscars were the ones that were the same goddamn
hack musical embarrassments that we sat through at the Grammys — Celine
unctuously meowling with her pet blind opera guy again, the desiccated mummy
of Aerosmith, in danger of collapsing into small piles of ash. Whitney
and Mariah were fighting in mortal diva combat, clawing each other’s
wrists, trying to arpeggio each other into pulp, with another gratuitous
gospel choir in holy robes of soft-jam holiness.

What the fuck was that all-wrong, Debbie Allen music-interpretation
jazz-dance boner?! We were all howling when that sweaty ridiculous Red Hot
Chili Pepper guy started his staccato Irish breast dance to that incongruous
piece of swoopy film music! Then they made Savion Glover tap out the
beat-less violin mush of the “Saving Private Ryan” song! And that long brown
ballerina’s vinyl hot pants rode all up her butt and there was nothing
anyone could do about it; it was super bad art and everybody had to shudder
through it and look appreciative.

I thought Costner would be doing Chuck Wagon commercials by now; you know,
expressionless commercial cowboy jobs. Loathsome polystyrene egomaniac
hick-honky dunce stuff.
He presented for best director: Spielberg again?! The sky above the stage opened and a mystical sun came streaming through the hole in the jellyfish-like Bat Dome: “Look!” my
friend D. screamed. “God has come to collect his favorite Jew!” That was
just what it looked like, no Jewish offense intended.
Costner was muttering in the back, not listening, hitting on the tall boobie
girls who escort the stars on and off the stage.

Roberto won again. “I wish I was Jupiter!” he screamed. “I collect you and
lie you down in the firmament and make love to you all!!” Whadda joy bomb.
What a human treat that man is.

The whole Elia Kazan mess turned out to be a non-event, but De Niro had a
frightful toupee hairdo. He looked like a fat mean pineapple.
If people left for the award, you didn’t know it because extras took their
places; Nolte scowled with his arms crossed, but that was the only visible
dissent. Kazan mumbled a couple of old man words, took his little statue and
slunk away.

Nicholson was there, leering Nicholsonesquely. They must keep him in a big
tank of grain alcohol like a giant, prehistoric frozen squid, then lift him
out by crane once a year and wring him out, ironing the tuxedo directly on
his fearful body and letting him be that scary spike-toothed Nicholson
thing he is, in that aisle seat. He Nicholsoned the best actress award to
the Lady Gwyneth. She was shivering and stuttering and being sweaty and
weepy and awfully lovely, despite the fact that her dress was designed to
look like she zipped it on and promptly sweated six pounds off, all in her
chest, from nerves. She had to get the award; she’s our only legit,
American, young, beautiful, gracefully romantic, big money movie star. She’s
our new Grace Kelly, and she’s the only one we’ve got.
(I personally dig the feisty tang of Reese Witherspoon, but she’s a
different creature altogether.)

Well, “Shakespeare in Love” was the only nominated movie I saw, and I really
liked it. It was driven by all the right things; a real knowing, mature
reverence of theater and Shakespeare and poetry and romantic love. It had
great writing, and it won. So unlike the smarmy horror of “Titanic.” So I
guess we’ll let Oscar live to see 72; he’s still on probation, but we won’t
Kevork him just yet.