As promised, the live telecast had plenty of high-tech razzle-dazzle. It also sucked. The noisy, "futuristic" hip-hop music it opened with didn't jibe at all with the corny "glamour" shots of the contestants it was accompanying. NOTHING jibed in this production: rather than successfully combining the old with the new the two aesthetics just clashed, while the show-offy professional male dancers (ie: a bunch of fruits dressed in tough guy "gangsta" clothes) pranced around and even IN FRONT OF the contestants, totally stealing the limelight from the poor girls as they struggled to remember their cues and markers. I could just imagine the director thinking: "This would be a great show if it weren't for those stupid beauty contestants!"

Then there was "O-Town." OY! What a travesty! These guys' harmonies were as flat as a board, and they were LIP-SYNCING! Even Miss Montana's off-key power ballad to Jesus would have been ten times better than this... And don't even get me started on Donny Fucking Osmond and his Michael Jackson rip-off dance moves. Didn't he undergo therapy years ago to get over his MJ-wannabe complex? If he did it didn't stick. GET OFF THE STAGE, OSMONDS! YOU SUCK!

The Girls were robbed. I never gave a crap about the Miss America Pageant and I still don't, but that doesn't change the fact that this was SUPPOSED to be rare opportunity for a bunch of regular gals to be TV stars for five seconds, only to be shoved aside by a a bunch of hammy GUYS and their "cool" singing and dancing. "Boooo!" is all I have to say. "BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"