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And the frumps are ...
THE 71ST ACADEMY AWARDS ARE A PARADE OF POMADED PRETTY BOYS AND WASHED-OUT DRAG QUEENS FROM LAME MOVIES. WHERE IS THE GLAMOUR?

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BY CAMILLE PAGLIA

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.

N E X T_P A G E _| Whitney, Mariah attacked by giant flock of deranged geese!

PHOTOGRAPH: AP/WIDE WORLD

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