-- Sunday, March 26, 2000 --

11:45 p.m. I'd like to thank the Academy for this fine award show. Not. Can I get my five -- wait! -- approximately nine hours back again? Yes, I watched it all.

If I'm lucky enough to be able to stay home, I watch the Academy Awards with the intensity of a pre-teen. I like to watch people who are extremely overdressed and tense as they pretend to have fun and live in the moment. My specialty is watching the people who are not being interviewed but who are just out of camera range. It's a human drama.

Most of all, of course, I look for interesting dresses, jewelry, hair arrangements. Hilary Swank wins for best necklace. Most disintegrated guy would have to be Jack Nicholson. He now has jowls and a pervert mustache. Most disintegrated woman would be Karen Black, but only those people watching the absolute beginning of the E! pre-show with the lovely and melodious Joan and Melissa Rivers would have had the opportunity to see her.

One of these years, I'm going to go to the Awards. I just know it. It's inevitable if you live in this town and work in this industry. Meanwhile, I treasure my chance to stay home and watch it quietly, with the nibbly items of my choice. This year it was those little chocolate donuts.

For the first time in a long time, the show felt old, out of touch, straining to be hip and with it. Billy Crystal is morphing into Bob Hope. Jane Fonda was curtsying and bowing, firmly on the down side of the generation gap. Decrepit guys were on the stage while movie clips of their own gorgeous youth played on a big screen behind them.

Michael Caine was once Alfie with the most beautiful, lazy eyes. What's that all about? And to look at another beautiful man, rent Shampoo, if you've never seen it.

Time moves us around on the old playing board ... kings and queens one day, pawns the next.

I hope our turn to walk down the actual red carpet comes before too many more years have passed. I'll wear my own jewelry instead of borrowing something gaudy from a store. And I'm going to make my own dress -- but not out of leather and raffia.

One of these years. By then, Melissa will have turned into her mother and I will get the award for the most disintegrated wife. But that's ok. With gravity comes maturity -- or is it the other way round?