Award Insanity

The Grammys were on television last night and I almost never watch them. For the most part, the awards are all given to musicians I don't listen to, or know anything about. But, since my girlfriend was watching them, I sat with her on the couch and played computer games.

Just about every time I looked up I was taken aback. If there was a Grammy for “Weirdest Shit We Can Put on Stage” I think there would have been a lot of serious contenders from last night.

In case you didn't see it, here's the recap.

When it started I had no idea what was going on. I thought awards shows are usually prefaced with “Hey, you're watching this award show, honoring this, and now let's start.”
But last night they just kind of gave it the go signal, and started singing Aretha Franklin songs.

Several lengthy music performances later, they finally gave away the first award.

Then Justin Bieber came on stage, traded some really badly scripted dialogue with Usher, some dancing ninjas came out, one of Will Smith's kids popped out of the stage wearing leopard skin pants, and Usher came back out wearing what I'm pretty sure was one of the outfits worn by The Beatles when they released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

I'm not even lying. That all seriously happened.

Next came Lady Gaga, who stepped out of some kind of egg-alien-pod-mobile. Sigourney Weaver was jealous.
This was followed by Mumford and Sons, who had a really good set. 2/3rds of the way through it Bob Dylan stumbled out with his harmonica in and started rasping about something. You could tell it was him too because you didn't understand anything he was saying.
A Dolly Parton tribute came on featuring John Mayer who looked like he had borrowed Jack White's wardrobe and face.
Then Cee-Lo, dressed as a battle-chicken or something played the radio-friendly version of Fuck You, backed by some muppets and Gwyneth Paltro, all on a set decorated with spaceships.
Some awards were presented somewhere in between here, but the award show organizers obviously took as much LSD as possible while planning the night's itinerary, and consequentially the excitement of winning a Grammy paled in comparison to the hallucinogenic-styled performances.

Seth Rogen showed up, who was obviously as confused as the rest of us about why he was there, and made a joke about Miley Cyrus smoking drugs. Then he left.

Rihanna lip-synced to a song of hers, and then Eminem came on and had a whole bunch of badly timed blackout censors interrupt his genuinely enjoyable song.

Then I left the house and saw The King's Speech.

It was excellent, but the projector wasn't working right so everything was a little blurry. And since I've seen the majority of the Oscar nominated movies now, it got me excited for an award show I'm actually interested in.

So, what was your impression of the Grammys?

CAKE - Sick of You