Week of February 21, 2008, Issue #644

MUSIC
Enter Sandor
As usual, Grammys ignored by everyone

STEVEN SANDOR / steven@vueweekly.com

Even for someone who detests award shows as much as I do, there is something especially wretched about the Grammys.

And, judging by the TV ratings, there are a lot of people who agree with me. This year’s edition of the Grammys, a big 50th-anniversary shindig, got just a little over 17 million viewers. That’s less than half of what an Oscar show gets.

As well, the Grammys, other than with this week’s column, doesn’t get any play in weeklies like this one, even though music makes up a big part of our coverage mandate. Big music mags don’t care about the Grammys, either. 

Meanwhile, the Oscars do matter. Our movie critics do talk about Oscar nominees and the merits of films that should have made the Academy Awards cut. Meanwhile, most veteran music writers couldn’t even recite a list of nominees for the big Grammys like Record of the Year or Song of the Year.

Despite its warts, the serious entertainment media—and I am not including the showbiz red-carpet interview types here—take the Oscars seriously. The Grammys, however, we see as only a self-congratulating get together for music industry types and gossip columnists. 

Why? The Grammys, generally, are selected out of whatever pop fodder made the top of the charts through the year. Imagine if the Oscars nominated the five top box-office performers instead of going through a painstaking nomination process. The award would then be like the Grammys.

Basically, the Oscars and to a lesser extent the Emmys, have trained us to accept the fact that popular entertainment isn’t supposed to win awards. When something popular is nominated, like at the Grammys, we tune out. 

So, while the gossip rags devoted space to Amy Winehouse’s comeback performance, the majority of the public ignored the music biz’s annual fashion show.

But, there is a sign that the people behind the Grammys might get it. While a slew of unimportant pop puffsters won most of the awards—as per usual—Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters won Record of the Year. Maybe someone, somewhere, realized that, if the Grammys are to one day be taken seriously by anyone other than TV networks whose names end in exclamation marks, art needs to be greater than commerce. 

Alas, until that happens throughout all the categories, the Grammys will continue on as being the most meaningless of all the so-called “major” awards shows.