THE SHOW

All year long on Late Show, David Letterman had been, in his Dave way, campaigning for Pulp Fiction to sweep the Oscars. He'd loved the bloody idea of Pulp even before he'd seen it, telling bandleader Paul Shaffer in a few of their post-monologue chat sessions that he couldn't wait. And once the movie was released, Letterman praised it to the skies; for a while there, it seemed as if not a night could go by without a Pulp person -- Quentin Tarantino or John Travolta or Uma Thurman or Samuel L. Jackson -- showing up in a Late Show guest chair.

So from the git-go, you kinda figured Letterman was going to be out of synch as the host of the 67th Academy Awards: He was a Pulp guy in a Gump world. Then, too, Letterman makes a big distinction between the Late Show and anything else he does. One reason so many of us like Letterman is that he takes care to distance himself from stuff he has no control over -- his kind of prickly integrity is rare. As Oscar host, he did his best to drag his show into the Academy Awards -- the Top Ten list, the Stupid Pet Trick, the taped comedy bit -- and had the pleasing gall to assume that his billion-plus worldwide audience would actually be interested in his swipes at CBS' current ratings slump.

But Letterman's prevailing mode -- ironic disdain -- was utterly at odds with this year's Oscar broadcast, which was pretty spineless even by Oscar standards. Spineless in what sense? Well, put aside the fact that, during a ceremony like this, the emotional gush of the winners couldn't help but make Dave's saving sarcasm seem a bit sour. Forget (as you doubtless already have) those awful, unceasing montages of great movie-comedy moments, which managed to make me wish for more of those wacky Antonioni clips instead.

No, the true measure of how flat the Oscars were this year was the paucity of the flaming-liberal-jerk pronouncements that always liven things up. Instead, we got meek little defenses of the National Endowment for the Arts that declined to name congressional names, and even Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins opted to make fun of their own real-life political concerns rather than embody them. And, in an evening when the red AIDS ribbon suddenly became last year's fad, why did I get the feeling that we were witnessing the return of AIDS as The Disease That Dare Not Speak Its Name?

As an average-joe moviegoer, I didn't have much at stake in the contest between Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction: I'd thought that, in its own rigidly stylized, '70s-camp way, Pulp was every bit as artistically didactic as Gump, yet I couldn't wholeheartedly join the ''Dump Gump Because It Betrays the Ideals of the '60s'' brigade because I love the way Forrest has proven to be a remarkably prescient metaphor for Newt Gingrich: Life is a box of chocolates -- go buy your own.

I was afraid that Steve Martin was going to show Dave up and prove to be the funniest person of the night, but Letterman more than rescued himself by taking yet another audaciously Dave-centric notion -- his cameo in Cabin Boy -- and turning it into the hilarious bit that featured the best work Martin Short and Rosie O'Donnell have done in years.