Quick But Dull / Disappointing lack of gaffes, tears during shorter show

The Oscar telecast has become the one show everybody hates to love.

Last night included. Was there a hair out of place, a cue missed, a busted bodice, anyone stinking determined to stretch his acceptance speech into the orchestra pit?

There was not. Even with a rookie host, Steve Martin, the Academy Awards show was long on decorum and disappointingly short on verve.

All of it leading up to one foregone conclusion -- Julia Roberts.

The lengthening absence of spontaneous messes is getting disturbingly routine. The show hasn't slipped on its own banana peel since 1995, the wonderful, error-prone year of David Letterman.

Larry Gelbart wrote years ago that Oscar viewers "want mistakes, they want embarrassments, they want a flasher, they want somebody to cry -- they want reality."

And they're not much getting it anymore.

To put it more concretely:

Oscar elegance in 1974 meant Connie Stevens singing "Live and Let Die" in full Aztec regalia. Do that, and the world groans with you, happily.

Last night -- Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma. Maybe the academy is thinking about starting a subscription series.

We didn't even get a repeat of last year's sole distraction, mammillary extravagance.

Jennifer Lopez threatened. She kept things covered, filmily, but still got her points across to the extent that ABC's cameras were wary. Much like Elvis' hips on the "Ed Sullivan Show."

And sure, the Icelandic singer and actress Bjork made her run at a fashion felony. Draped around Bjork, the fake bird was supposed to be dead. Or possibly quite drunk and in need of a ride home.

"I was going to wear my swan," Martin quipped after Bjork left the stage. "But to me, they're so last year."

Martin didn't seem to mind letting us know that he was, more or less, renting the tux, if not the bow tie, of seven-time host Billy Crystal.

"You know what I just realized," he said. "It's that hosting the Oscars is like making love to a beautiful woman. It's something you only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town."

After some opening nonsense from the space station Alpha, Martin stepped onto the Shrine Auditorium stage in Los Angeles and did a 12-minute monologue, without flaws and not entirely without taste.

Just jokes. Martin didn't try to replicate Crystal's opening circus acts, with their song-and-dance routines and video gimmickry.

Martin is long past his arrow-through-the-head stage, though flashes of his old I'm-a-jerk routine still seep through.

The monologue scored almost immediately, with Martin's observation that 800 million people around the world were watching the show on TV.

"Every one of them is thinking exactly the same thought -- that we're all gay," he said.

The camera cut to Russell Crowe in the audience. He looked as if he really was thinking something along those lines.

But chances are, a hefty portion of the 800 million weren't thinking gay so much as dull.

All the participants minded their pleases and cues. Almost all were beautifully coiffed and wonderfully attired. (All right, Tom Cruise might have bothered to dress up, just a little. Nicole got all the neckties?)

They moved through the show so sleekly that, with just a little more hustle,

they all could have kept 8 o'clock dinner dates.

And not one of them said anything worth remembering a week later.

But come to think of it, that's pretty much in keeping with the kind of movies Hollywood is making these days.