I caught about half of the Country Music Awards last night in a desperate bid to broaden the appeal of this blog. OK, not really. I was curious about the whole thing, and they had a lot of interesting artists promised for the show.

I think a lot of other awards shows could learn something from this show.

* All acceptance speeches were time limited and those time limits were enforced without favor. You got cut off when the time ran out, period. When Alabama accepted their Hall of Fame entry, the second guy to speak had nothing to say and kept taking long pauses between thanking the little people. He got cut off. Hopefully, they also cut him off at the bar or the prescription counter, whichever he had just come from.

* The show moved, and featured the musical performance. You’d have a performance, then cut straight to a presenter. There would often be one or two lines of painfully not-humorous dialogue (see Shania Twain’s dialogue with Billy Joel, or anything involving James Gandolfini - UGH), before getting right to the award. And guess what? There were no clever and elaborate video montages and applause breaks for each nominee. The presenter gave a list of all five names and opened the envelope. All you’d get for the later awards was the screen with cameras in the faces of the five nominees sitting in the audience or backstage. That’s it. Simple, fast, effective. After that, you’d go straight to the next performance.

* There was no one-upmanship games going on for spectacularly disgusting performances, slutty clothing, or perverted imagery. This was not, simply put, MTV.

* Man, Faith Hill has seen better days, hasn’t she?

* The performances included “pop” stars and country stars. Bon Jovi even played a ditty. Elton John did a painful duet with Dolly Parton, that was interesting only for its curiosity value. (She butchered “Imagine,” but I never much liked the song much, anyway.) But for a genre trying to bring in new fans, they had a good idea in this cross-pollination.

* And, in the end, I was exposed to a bunch of artists I would never otherwise find on the radio here in the NYC area, a portion of the country notoriously devoid of a country music station. The Country/Western world thinks that this show being hosted at Madison Square Garden might be a step towards that, but I tend to doubt it. They weren’t all winners, but there are two or three names I plan to look up on iTunes soon for a listen.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 16th, 2005 at 10:28 am and is filed under TV, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.