Those Little Music Awards from Last Night

I hadn't intended to talk any more about the Grammys, but I noticed something last night that nobody else seems to be talking about. Maybe it was just me, but I figured I'd pass it along if anybody else wants to get into conspiracy theories.

There were various show pieces on the broadcast last night, and one of the most noticeable was Gnarls Barkley doing an unfortunately slowed-down version of "Crazy." Cee-Lo and DJ Danger Mouse started out on a small platform, and they were wearing airline pilot uniforms. At one point Danger Mouse disappeared (and could be seen hightailing it up to the stage in the background), and Cee-Lo continued alone until he, too, started walking up to the stage. Once he got there, the scrim (or whatever it was) lifted, and a huge orchestra and choir of background singers could be seen.

Okay, it's all fine so far. From what we could see, the orchestra and singers seemed to be dressed to match the same airline milieu. But it was hard to tell, because the broadcast director shot it so oddly that, at least as far as I noticed, we never got a close look at the details. We saw a few cutaways to the drummer, who seemed to be dressed as an airline steward, but the actual strings and such of the orchestra seemed to be wearing something else that I couldn't quite catch. It would've made sense for the singers to be dressed as stewardesses, but it also looked like they might be all in orange such as what a ground crew might wear. But we never got a close-up of them. Instead, the show mostly kept an extremely, almost uncomfortable tight close up on Cee-Lo. That was sprinkled with shots of the drummer and then long shots of the entire stage. This was clearly a huge production number, but the Grammy broadcast was insisting on keeping us from seeing it. Was there something there that we shouldn't have seen? Was something not approved for broadcast?

The other musical numbers were jammed full of medium shots, so why not this one--especially when there was something to actually look at. I probably wouldn't have noticed anything unusual if the close ups of Cee-Lo weren't just so very, very tight, and if we'd ever had any variation, if we'd seen Cee-Lo from any other angle or distance. Rather than having a comfortable close up, these seemed framed to make sure that we saw nothing in the background. But it didn't look like the airline theme was risque in any way. It didn't seem like there was some unapproved message they were trying to get across. If this wasn't intentional on the part of the Grammy broadcast director, it was certainly some really awful directing.

Since I'm already talking about the Grammys, I'll weigh in on the Dixie Chicks. I've never been a Dixie Chicks fan, and from what I've heard of and about their "Album of the Year," I'm not interested. But I've got nothing against them and I did think hey got a raw deal with the reaction to Natalie Maines's statements. It seems to me, though, that they were celebrated last night not so much for the work they did and the album they produced but for having been dissed by the country music establishment. Giving them Grammys in this context does not celebrate the message they wanted to impart as much as it gets their back after people were mean to them. I'm as happy to get their back as anybody else, but last night there just seemed to be too much of a self-congratulatory, almost narcissistic tone from the Grammy voters themselves. If they were sending a message to Nashville (and trust me, I am so fine with that), don't worry--they got it when the Chicks won for Best Country Album. But to make the whole evening a celebration of a fair-to-middling album by a group that was scapegoated unfairly was going overboard.