Brandon's Buzz

The 55th Annual Grammy Awards have arrived, thankfully with much less agita surrounding them this year than last, when my dear Miss Whitney passed away the night before the ceremony, a tragedy that cast an impenetrable pall over the entire event. This year, the focus is thankfully back on the music, and how: for the first time in I-don’t-know-how-the-hell-long, each of the four primary races seems to be a total toss-up heading into the home stretch, which suggests we could be in for some big surprises on Sunday night. (It would also appear to portend that a great many prognosticators will come away from these awards looking and feeling like big ol’ fools; as the great Dan Rather once said on Tom Snyder’s brilliant old CBS chat show, “He who lives by the crystal ball learns to eat a lot of broken glass.”) Still, I have a decent batting average with these predictions — which are made all the more tough by the fact that Recording Academy’s tastes can sometimes be notoriously difficult to pin down — over the history of this blog, and I’m feeling incredibly brave as I type this. Ergo, allow me to break down the major Grammy contests:

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In spite of the fact that 2010 was a reasonably decent year for music, this year’s Grammy race feels even more underwhelming than usual. (You know you’re in trouble when Katy Perry and Lady Gags are both duking it out for Album of the Year.) Handicapping the top races seems pretty cut-and-dry, and my fearless predictions are as follows:

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I’m gonna do this quickly because I am bone-tired and it’s quite late, and in general, the more time I spend trying to wrap my mind around the Academy’s often-baffling choices, the more intensely frustrated I become.

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They invariably end up pissing me off with their unjustifiable inanity, but because I’m a music fan all the way down to my toenails, I always look forward to the annual Grammy nominations. And because I’m an eternal optimist at heart, I always pray that this is the year the recording academy will get it right. Well, I’m not holding out a great deal of hope that the Grammy folks will suddenly correct their typical foolishness tonight by uniformly nominating people who actually deserve the praise, but let me just say this at the outset: if “Use Somebody” doesn’t at the very least nab a nod for Record of the Year, I’m throwing a rock through my television set. Let the concert commence!

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So, there’s an Oscar pool at A’s office this year, and short of rigging it — don’t think I didn’t consider it either — I’ve pulled out all the stops to win it. (I’m still steamed about losing his office’s college bowl game pool by just a couple of points last month, and I’m seeking vindication.) And since I’ve got money riding on these picks, I’ve put far more time analyzing this year’s contests than they ever required. I swear you can take what follows to the bank. (However, if I’m wrong, don’t throw tomatoes at me. To quote that ever-prescient sage Dan Rather, some of these races are hotter than a Times Square Rolex.)

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Yup, it’s that time of year again: the 51st annual Grammy Awards are nigh. And while predicting the outcome is often a painfully useless exercise, simply because the Academy voters rarely use logic in choosing their winners — witness, if you will, Herbie Hancock’s w-t-f Album of the Year victory last year, to name just one bizarro choice — the Buzz has enough opinions about who should win the coveted trophies this year that I am willing to go out on a limb and try to guess who will win.

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The latest contenders for the highest honor the music industry bestows — the Grammy award — are being announced tonight in a special concert (which, as I type this, finds Celine Dion mercilessly butchering Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen”), and I, your humble servant, am here with instant analysis of the big news.

• BEST NEW ARTIST: What an unmitigated disaster this lineup is! I can get with Duffy (whose debut record, the enchanting Rockferry, I loved), and I can even get with Adele (whose breakthrough hit “Chasing Pavements” is causing quite the radio ruckus this fall), but where the hell are the names of Leona Lewis and OneRepublic on this list? I’d even have taken those annoying starlets Katy Perry and Sara Bareilles over the likes of Lady Antebellum, Jazmine Sullivan (who?!), and The Jonas Brothers (!!). Gag me, folks!
• ALBUM OF THE YEAR: Not that I necessarily agree with these selections (although it’s a fair bet that at least two of them will appear in my forthcoming year-end top ten, and that’s two more than the Grammys and I usually share in common), but this is an atypically progressive gathering of nominees for this usually staid category, agreed? You can almost bet on Robert Plant and Alison Krauss‘ brilliant collaboration Raising Sand winning the trophy come February — Krauss is the Academy darling, after all; the woman could hack up a hairball on record and get the gold — but don’t count out Coldplay‘s surprisingly spry Viva La Vida. Also nominated: Lil Wayne, Ne-Yo, and Radiohead.
• RECORD OF THE YEAR: Leona Lewis finally gets some love, as her fabulous smash “Bleeding Love” grabs a much-deserved nod here. She’ll have tough competition from Coldplay (“Viva La Vida,” the band’s very first number one single), who have previously won in this category (in 2004, for “Clocks”), Plant & Krauss (the moving “Please Read the Letter”), M.I.A. (the left-field summer smash “Paper Planes”), and Adele (whose nomination for “Chasing Pavements” pretty much anoints her the front-runner in the Best New Artist category over presumed favorite Duffy). My money’s still on the divine Lewis, though.

More thoughts once I have parsed and fully processed the complete list of nominations….

Who else besides me reckons that poor ol’ Sage Rosenfels is fixin’ to get his ridiculously befuddled ass booed out of Houston after he singlehandedly blew a 17-point fourth quarter lead and allowed those pesky Colts to handily defeat his Texans? Hey Sage, here’s a tip, buddy: leave the hurdling to the Jamaicans and focus on cradling the football.

(** An impossibly busy work week coupled with A’s glorious, long-awaited return to Texas is what led to the Buzz’s unexpected hiatus last week. Normal blog functions resume tomorrow, rest assured.)

“I’m amused at the pundits, you know, ‘He’s gonna pick somebody younger!’ Gee, ya think? Who’s available that’s older? Bob Dole, uh, Lauren Bacall, and Abel, I think, is on that shortlist.”

— Bill Maher, sizing up Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s running mate options on “Larry King Live”