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By Melinda Newman
Special to MSN Music
To paraphrase Forrest Gump, the Grammy nominations are like a box of
chocolates: You never know what you're going to get.
Sure, just as you know there will be the chocolate-covered cherry or the
peanut cluster no matter what the arrangement, you can similarly bank on a few
things with the Grammys: Some revered group/act who has never gotten its Grammy
due will get nominated (and possibly win) for a project that in no way captures
its best effort (think Album of the Year wins by Tony Bennett's "Unplugged" or Herbie Hancock's "River: The Joni Letters").
But then there are those complete surprises that you don't see coming: the
Brazil nut masquerading as the chocolate-covered almond, or that one piece that
always looks so inviting but makes you recoil when you bite into it and kick
yourself for wasting your turn at the box. Like the two horrible misfires the
Grammys will likely never live down: giving Jethro Tull the first ever Grammy Award for Best
Hard Rock/Metal Performance Vocal or Instrumental and handing Milli Vanilli the Best New Artist award, only to have to
revoke the trophy when it came out that they were just lip-synching pretty boys.
Just like those chocolate boxes have little dividers, we've split our
observations into different sections.
Snubs & Surprises
We could almost hear the anguished screams in the corridors of J Records when
Leona Lewis didn't receive a nomination for Best New Artist,
and rightly so. We know the Grammys are meant to reward artistic excellence and
not sales receipts, but she was the breakout artist of the year. Her debut album
was the first by a British female solo artist to enter the Billboard 200 album
chart at No. 1; "Bleeding Love" was the first single by a British female solo
artist to hit No. 1 and was the biggest selling single in 2008.
It's a big blunder on the part of the Grammy voters. It's not as if they
decided to go solely for critical favorites because how would that explain the
presence of the Jonas Brothers in that area? Other notable omissions in that
category are Jennifer Hudson, MGMT and Katy Perry (whom, we figure, too many Grammy
voters still consider a novelty act), but Lewis' exclusion is the one that made
jaws drop. (Story Continues On Next Page...) |
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