My First (and Last) Attempt at Live Blogging

Well, I needed something to blog about, and the Oscars were coming up... so I figured why I wait for the Oscars to come and go. I should give my "live" reactions to what I'm seeing in the Oscars telecast. It's a big year for the broadcast anyway; Billy Crystal is back hosting, and I think everyone wants to remember the best of what they remember from Oscar Nights past... in particular, the days when we actually knew and liked the movies that were nominated for major awards. Okay, maybe that's going a little overboard, and I'm not the best person to play movie critic because I don't watch that many movies anymore. But I prefer to think that's because there aren't any movies I want to watch.

As I write this introduction, the Red Carpet show is on... and I missed Sacha Baron Cohen dousing Ryan Seacrest in "Kim Jong Il's ashes", so I'm stuck with a bunch of people gushing about "who" celebrities are wearing. There's a reason I don't get into self-indulgent celebrity culture, and this is it. Talk about not being in touch with the "99 percent..." For instance, Tim Gunn just asked Jennifer Lopez why she rules the red carpet all the time... I've got a simple answer: Boobs.

At this point, I have switched over to The Mike O'Meara Show live online viewing party... and they have momentarily switched to "Hee Haw." How about we just fast-forward to the actual Oscars show...

8:30pm... Morgan Freeman... a great introduction, and would be better if they TURNED HIS MIC UP!

And they are inserting Billy Crystal into the movies... good start. And we have Bieber... just so Billy can pull his Sammy Davis Jr. out of the mothballs. You know what the problem here is... since I don't know half the movies, I don't get half the jokes. But this is what we signed up for when we brought him back, so good job.

8:37... Nice, a Kodak Chapter-11 joke... And yes, they brought back the Best Picture medley! But the mix is still bad... turn his mic up or turn the orchestra down!

8:42... Tom Hanks just pointed out an elderly seat-filler... what?

They always seem to lead with the cinematography awards... I think it's because most people don't really know what the hell cinematography is... a guy with a gray Jesus look won for "Hugo"... but he also won for "JFK", so I can appreciate that. "Hugo" also wins for Art Direction... if this is going to set the tone for the rest of the night, it's gonna be a looooooong one.

Random sighting... is that Sheila E? "Glamorous Life" was a great song from the 80s...

8:51... the first of many montages... uhhhh, why is "Twilight" being shown along with "Avatar" and "Ghost" and "Jaws" and... well, GOOD movies?

The costume/makeup awards... and tuning out... I guess it's easier to win costume design when your picture had no sound to distract from it, right?

Hey look, it's Razzie winner Adam Sandler... and Brad Pitt is talking about "gargantuas"... again, what?

People on Twitter are reporting that J-Lo had a nip slip... can't understand how I could have possibly missed that. There was nothing else to look at during that whole introduction...

9:01... "No baseball movie has ever won Best Picture... will that change tonight?" Nope. Boxing movies win Best Picture; baseball movies don't.

The Academy is trying something new this year... Sandra Bullock is speaking in Chinese. Somehow I can't help feeling this is slightly racist... Maybe I'm hypersensitive after all the Jeremy Lin-related screw-ups recently... Ben & Jerry's? Really? How do YOU make a fortune cookie reference? Oh, and a movie from Iran just won Best International Film...

Hey, Christian Bale sounds just like he does in that tape where he's yelling at the lighting guy!

Your Best Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer from "The Help". Didn't see that movie, but based on everything I've heard and read, it's much deserved.

9:19... Billy Crystal is making focus group jokes... I think only researchers like me are going to get them. And we somehow got Fred Willard and Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara into this show. Well, glad they got onto an Oscars broadcast...

And now the editing awards... or the guys who make you think you can do the same thing with iMovie... and "Hugo" wins again. And the sound editing guys' jokes are as bad as my friends say the movie was...

9:29... "Hugo" Oscar count: 4... and Cirque Du Soleil is up next? Boy, I'm glad I spent my Sunday night watching this...

9:37... Just switched to the closing minutes of a Blackhawks-Ducks game. There really ISN'T anything else on tonight!

Switched back... somebody fell? Oh, and Robert Downey Jr. just Tebowed. So a movie glorifying the eco-terrorists who bomb SUV dealerships got nominated for Best Documentary? I'm actually shocked it didn't win. And we have our first cut-off of the night... but it's just the documentary people so it's okay...

Chris Rock just did a hilarious routine about voicing animation. "Rango" won... didn't see it but probably should one of these days.

They just used Air's "Alone in Kyoto" in a Samsung smartphone ad... I have it on my Blackberry. How's that for irony? Followed by an ad for the one thing Disney hadn't yet swiped for a cartoon movie, a Scottish fairytale...

9:52... Melissa McCarthy is pretty funny. Too bad I don't really like her CBS sitcom.

"Hugo" Oscar count: 5...

Your Best Supporting Actor: Jonah Hill... yeah, right. Christopher Plummer won. Oldest actor to ever win an Oscar. 82 years old and still doing great work. Bravo.

They're releasing "Titanic" in 3D? *smacks forehead*

10:08... Billy Crystal reading minds... hilarious. And he gets a shot in at the president of the Academy.

The music awards... Wow, "Hugo" didn't win... but again, pretty easy for "The Artist" to win when there's no dialogue to muck things up. I'm actually surprised Will Ferrell is fully clothed for this presentation... yay, "The Muppets" wins, and the guy from "Flight of the Conchords" wins Best Song.

And we have women in 1950s-era flight attendant costumes serving popcorn in the aisles... ladies and gentlemen, the America that Rick Santorum wants us to go back to...

10:25... And speaking of which... Angelina Jolie decided to show America just how high up that slit goes... but she looks downright emaciated!

Best writing goes to some ex-members of the Groundlings for "The Descendents"... guys from a comedy troupe win for doing drama. That's kinda cool. And Woody Allen wins for screenplay.

Another celebrity montage... they watch movies just like you do! There's another hour left of this... I might need another beer...

10:39... They just did a series of dick jokes to introduce Best Short Film... that's pretty much what passes for good "SNL" writing these days...

One of the guys who won this award for short film miiiiiight be drunk...

Your Best Director: The French guy who did "The Artist". Guess it's a 2-movie race tonight. Incidentally, is there anything that bores me to tears more than actors talking about directors' artistic visions?

Great Billy Crystal introduction for Meryl Streep... put "The Iron Lady" on the list of movies I want to see. Yay for James Earl Jones winning an honorary Oscar.

10:58... Do they really need to tease the death reel TWICE?

Aw, we lost Gil Cates this year... uh, am I the only one who finds the song in the background a little too eerie?

11:08... So we're down to just Best Actor, Actress, and Picture, right? I'm kinda nodding off here... even Twitter appears to have fallen asleep... oh yay, ANOTHER celebrity montage... oh, wait, Patton Oswalt!

Your Best Actor: The French guy who did "The Artist"... no, different French guy. And he may have just become the first Frenchman to say he loves America.

Billy Crystal zings the French... Your Best Actress: Meryl Streep! And a terrific acceptance speech.

I feel like we're at the end of the NFL Draft... here comes Mr. Irrelevant (a.k.a. Tom Cruise)...

Your Best Picture: "The Artist".

So there you have it... to sum things up, Billy Crystal was pretty damn good and can host for the 10th time any time he wants... how about next year? I was reminded that there are a couple movies I'd like to go see, and there's a lot of stuff that nobody outside of Hollywood watches or likes but somehow gets nominated and wins awards. And Hollywood really loves itself. And I am never doing this again...

All At Once

We're never sure anymore when one of these things happen... there were the erroneous accounts of Joe Paterno's passing 12 hours before he actually died, and god knows Twitter tries to kill a new celebrity seemingly every other week. But when you see it's from the AP, that tends to lend some credibility... and so it was that I learned of Whitney Houston's passing last Saturday. It was between games of a women's/men's basketball doubleheader at my current university, and when you're hopping on Twitter to see if there are any more goofy post-game tweets from Syracuse fans/bloggers, and instead you see "BREAKING NEWS: Whitney Houston dead at age 48," it can only be classified as a "whoa" moment. As in that's what I said to my friends... "Whoa..."

If there's one thing we know about our celebrity culture, especially the music industry, it's that the culture tends to eat its own, and often at a relatively young age. Pete Townshend once said in a documentary on the history of rock music that rock 'n roll was like a blazing fire, but that the fire is "stoked with bodies." In other words, part of the allure of the music is the fact that so many of its best voices and musicians leave us far too soon. And we shake our heads when it happens, all the way from Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix, through Kurt Cobain and Biggie and Tupac, to Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, and Whitney Houston. And the first thing you have to do is separate the great music from what ultimately did these people in. It's tougher in some cases than others, particularly when you don't see it coming.

Most people acknowledge that Whitney's was one of the greatest, if not the greatest voice of her generation. Honed in gospel music, it burst out of your speakers and made women everywhere wish they could sound like her. This had both good and bad consequences. On the good side, without Whitney there may have been no Mariah Carey or Christina Aguilera... on the bad side, a lot of American Idol contestants and national anthem singers have tried and failed spectacularly at sounding like Whitney Houston. It was only a few weeks ago that some of us were scratching our heads at the negative reception Steven Tyler received for his rendition of the anthem before the AFC Championship Game. We LIKED what he did because he was singing it his own way and not trying to be Whitney. There was only one Whitney, there was only one Whitney version of the "Star Spangled Banner." Let it go, people.

And let's face it, that 1991 Super Bowl rendition of the national anthem is the definitive one for many Americans. Jimi Hendrix had his moment at Woodstock, and then Whitney Houston matched the power of his guitar with the power of her voice. I can't think of anyone who disliked that performance... yeah, there are some Buffalo Bills fans who hear it and immediately think of Scott Norwood missing the game-winning field goal a few hours later, but that doesn't take away from Whitney.

Something about Whitney Houston's career that kinda gets taken for granted today... she was an African-American singer who crossed over to mainstream success at a time when few could. The post-disco backlash had whitewashed the Top 40 airwaves, Michael Jackson had only broken MTV's unspoken color barrier a couple years earlier. "The Cosby Show" was in its first season when Whitney's debut album came out in 1985, and the cumulative effect on pop culture was transformative. America could now accept a middle-class African-American sitcom, and it could now accept a young African-American pop star. Sure, as with Cosby, there was a backlash... Whitney was booed at the 1989 Soul Train Awards, but she was eventually and rightfully accepted and lionized.

As for that first album... I'm certainly not the most knowledgeable R&B/Soul listener on this planet, but I do know what I like, and I think Whitney Houston's debut was her best album. I actually mentioned it here a few months ago when talking about those songs of the mid-1980s that stick in my head. I pretty much believe that 1982-1985 was a "sweet spot" for music that we may never experience again... when all genres of popular music created some amazing music, that was live and real and required great musicianship, if I may go all "Dave Grohl at the Grammys" on you. Yes, there was also a lot of "guilty pleasure" crap from that period, but I digress. "Whitney Houston" sounds like an album that came from the R&B/Soul scene of 1985, so in that sense it might sound dated, but it sounds great to me, and her voice set it apart from all the rest. Prime examples are the breakthrough single "You Give Good Love", and her first #1, "Saving All My Love For You"; in the latter, Whitney gives one of the all-time torch singer performances. Even the much more pop-inflected "How Will I Know" has something extra-good about it... the way the opening bars of the song build up momentum until the song becomes and all-out attack on your ears, and then on top of that, Whitney's voice comes in and blows the doors off.

Her second album may have spawned more #1's, but by then, we had entered a period were music became more artificial, and it became more about drum machines and synthesizer approximations of instruments. On later albums, she would go more "Urban Contemporary", but what passed for that didn't do it for me in the 1990s, and of course there were all the movie soundtracks. But there would be one more standout moment... "I Will Always Love You" from the soundtrack to her first movie, "The Bodyguard." The song was all over the radio at the end of 1992, well past the point of oversaturation. At the time, I was more interested in hearing the latest Stone Temple Pilots single, but looking back now, I appreciate the song and its amazing success (#1 for an astonishing 14 weeks)... and there's a damn good reason for it. Musically, it was a return to the first album. Listen to "I Will Always Love You", then listen to "Saving All My Love For You"... you'll get what I mean. The same saxophone and keyboard splashes, the same soulful delivery, the same power. The fact that Whitney Houston could blow our minds whenever she wanted to in those days was what makes us remember her music. It certainly makes the damage she did to her "instrument" over the years that much more startling.

As we say goodbye to Whitney Houston with her funeral today, I once again go back to that 1985 self-titled debut album, specifically the first single, "All At Once." I was listening to that song the other day, and although the song is about heartbreak and romantic loss (as many a good Pop/Soul ballad is), the lyrics point to sudden realization, a specific moment when it hits you... that "whoa" moment. That's what happens when we lose someone who made so many people happy and had such a profound influence. I think we all had a collective "whoa" moment last Saturday night.

This is Why I'm Not a Rock Critic

"Look again, rock is dead" - The Who, 1978

"The King is dead, rock is done" - The Kinks, 1978

"Rock and roll is dead" - Lenny Kravitz, 1995

"Rock is deader than dead" - Marilyn Manson, 1998

From the above quotes, you can discern one truism about rock music: people like to declare it "dead" a lot, and most of those people are the ones who make rock music. However, music critics also like to do it, and Jon Caramanica of The New York Times was the latest when he gave his review of rock in 2011. Well, first he termed 2011 "The Year Rock Spun Its Wheels", but after panning veteran bands who may have hung on too long and terming the up and coming groups "generic," he said that there wasn't a single great rock album in 2011 and that the genre has "been left to rot." Stating (in that elite, "music critic" way) that calling rock dead would be a cop-out, he called it "zombified." Okay, yeah, whatever... you declared it dead. Worse than dead. Walking Dead.

Of course, this isn't the first time the Paper of Record has done this. 15 years ago, the New York Times declared rock to be dead because Soundgarden broke up and Pearl Jam's "No Code" and STP's "Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop" were both considered disappointments. But I guess this is why newspapers pay to have music critics... they stir up debate. Usually by stating something that cannot help but make people howl in disagreement. I wouldn't consider Foster the People's "Torches" and the new Black Keys album to be the greatest albums of the last 5 years, but they certainly are better than the dull retread characterizations they got from Caramanica. Calling Blink-182's comeback album a flop? Their fans would disagree, as would I. Saying that Sum 41 and the Chili Peppers were "well past their sell-by date"? I think "Rain Dance Maggie" was a better song than anything on "Stadium Arcadium" and "Screaming Bloody Murder" was Sum 41's best album in nearly a decade. And gee, I'm sorry the Foo Fighters just keep making solid albums. Now, I'll admit there were some disappointments last year (The Strokes' "Angles" and Death Cab for Cutie's "Codes and Keys" were a step down from their past work), but if you judge a year by the presence or absence of instant classics, you're bound to be disappointed.

And if he thinks rock died in 2011, I can only imagine what Caramanica thinks of 2012 so far. I have heard very little so far this year that I would find to be worth my time or money. Disappointing follow-ups to hit songs, and new bands on which I'm just not willing to go all in yet. Unless some bands raise the bar with their upcoming releases, Caramanica may state that 2011 killed rock and 2012 pissed on the corpse.

This is why even though I joke that I'd love to get the pay for being a music critic, I wouldn't ever actually want the job. I know that people won't like what I say, and I care too much what people think of me (call it a weakness). I never even made value judgments about the songs I played when I was a DJ. Of course, it's standard procedure not to criticize the music you play, but I never even said that I thought something was good. I never bought into being called a "tastemaker" when I chose the songs my station played; I was playing what I thought my audience wanted to hear. These days, I say what I want on this blog and on Twitter and Facebook, and that's good enough for me. Mass audiences aren't reading what I say and thumbing their noses at it.

But one thing I will do is make my Grammy picks. If you've read this blog before, you know that I don't just predict who will win the major awards, I also suggest who SHOULD win the awards. There are times when Grammy likes things that leave people scratching their heads (Esperanza Spalding and Herbie Hancock, for example), so never count out the unconventional winners on Grammy Night. So without further ado...

Best Alternative Album... Who Should Win: My Morning Jacket for "Circuital". A longtime favorite on the indie scene, this is their chance to break through.
Who Will Win: Foster the People. Hit songs trump indie cred.

Best Rock Performance... Who Should Win: Tough decision between "Walk" by the Foo Fighters and "The Cave" by Mumford and Sons. I go with Mumford and Sons.
Who Will Win: Grammy loves Mumford and Sons... they performed with DYLAN last year, for Christ's sake.

Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance... Who Should Win: Interesting that Sum 41 and the Foos are among the nominees this year, but it's just not their category. Therefore, Megadeth should win.
Who Will Win: Really, Megadeth winning a Grammy? Are you kidding me? They're 0-for-9 with the Grammys. Make it 0-for-10. Dream Theater wins.

Best Rock Song... Who Should Win: It's the same nominees, so that makes it easy. Mumford should, and will, win.

Best Rock Album... Who Should Win: Well, "Wasting Light" was my pick for best album last year, so naturally I gotta go with the Foos.
Who Will Win: The Foo Fighters have won this category 3 times, so logic dictates they'll win a 4th. But I wouldn't be surprised if you get one of those classic "lifetime achievement award" moments and Jeff Beck wins.

Best Solo Pop Performance... Who Should Win: A lot of good songs in the category this year, but I have feeling this is Adele's year, so "Someone Like You" should win and will win.

Best Pop Duo/Group Performance... Who Should Win: Foster the People's "Pumped Up Kicks" was everywhere this year, and even though the hook sounds an awful lot like "Cleveland Rocks" by Mott the Hoople, I give them the nod.
Who Will Win: I almost went super-snarky and said it would go to Tony Bennett and the late Amy Winehouse, but I think it goes to "Moves Like Jagger."

Best Pop Vocal Album... Who Should Win: Gaga or Adele? Gaga or Adele? I think Lady Gaga should win.
Who Will Win: Gaga or Adele? Gaga or Adele? Adele will win.

Best New Artist (a.k.a. "The Kiss of Death")... Who Should Win: Nicki Minaj. Plain and simple, the biggest splash in music this past year.
Who Will Win: It's the "Kiss of Death", isn't it? Why would I wish that on Nicki Minaj? The Band Perry will win.

Song of the Year... Who Should Win: My heart wants Mumford and Sons to get this one for "The Cave", but I know better. Like I said, it's Adele's year. She should and will win.

Record of the Year... Who Should and Will Win: Again, it's Adele.

Album of the Year... Who Should Win: Uh-oh, it's between Lady Gaga and Adele again. I think we know where this one is headed... "Born This Way" should win.
Who Will Win: Adele.

And speaking of picks, I must also pick the S**** B*** (SOPA/PIPA didn't pass, but I'm not taking any trademark infringement chances), so I'll remind you that I'm 15-9 in picking these games (15-5 when the Bills are not involved), but I took a rare loss last year by picking the Steelers over the Packers. However, I DID pick the Giants over the 18-0 Patriots 4 years ago. Now we have a sort-of rematch tomorrow at the World's Largest Applebees, and looking at the matchup, there is no way I don't take the G-Men to do it again. Giants 34, Patriots 28.