Nothing has changed

Passover is over, and thus after getting home late tonight, I don't have the time to do a full blogging rundown of tonight's Idol. But my quick summary would be that absolutely nothing surprising happened tonight that changes the competition in any way. Adam was the best, Lil brought up the rear and everyone else pretty much fit tonight where they basically are in the general scheme of things--Kris and Allison near the top, Danny getting great judges' reviews even though I didn't think he was that great, Matt making me wish he hasn't gotten saved last week, etc. I guess Anoop was kind of disappointing, considering he'd been getting better the last few weeks. Tonight, I thought he was bland and off-tune.

A few more quick notes:

Back in season four, they changed the theme name from "Disco Night" to "70s Dance Night" because they didn't want to lose Bo Bice--who had a rough week the night before and was likely to not be comfortable doing a disco song. It allowed him to do "Vehicle," he survived and he ended up going to the finals. That seems so long ago--now, contestants just take a disco song and revamp it as an acoustic guitar-based, Santana-like song (like Kris), or a ballad (like Adam) or a jazzy mess (like Matt). When the show started tonight, this annoyed me--after all, disco isn't about a certain type of song, it's about a certain beat. By the end of the show, I was just resigned to the fact that American Idol has changed and this is the way it is now--and I liked both Kris and Adam's performance, so it wasn't that bad. It still feels not quite right, though.

Also, I said this last week, but it was even more of an issue tonight--When will the judges stop lying to Lil? This week, Kara again went with the "you didn't show us the kind of artist you are" crap. Please, Kara, stop with that and just tell her she sang the song poorly. Simon managed to say it, why does everyone else keep telling her this nonsense?

Amazing what getting rid of the taped pieces did for the time issue, huh? They were pretty much right on schedule tonight. By the way, there was an article this week in which one of the AI producers said they were happy with four judges and weren't thinking of going back to three judges. Gosh, I hope this was just "well, what else can we say during the season" kind of stuff, because I don't think America will be able to take another year of this.

Now, I'm going to go to bed while trying to get those frightening vocal runs from Matt Giraud's "Staying Alive" out of my head. I think he and Lil and Anoop will be the bottom three, and Matt and Lil will go home--although if someone like Allison or Kris or Danny ends up going home and they can't use the judges' save, I'll laugh and enjoy what the judges' stupidity last week will have wrought. Yeah, we all find enjoyment in strange places.

Fingerhut out.