'21 Is Going To Be a Good Year?

Okay, boys and girls, here are the nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2021!

 

Some of the names on this list, such as Foo Fighters, Chaka Khan, Carole King, the New York Dolls, Rage Against the Machine, Todd Rundgren, Tina Turner and the Go-Go's (the female Beatles) make sense.  Others, like Devo and Iron Maiden, are more questionable.  And there are names like Jay-Z and Dionne Warwick, which scream, "We'll nominate anyone to avoid inducting Jethro Tull."

Jay-Z is an obviously cringe-worthy nod to political correctness, because pop critics have waxed rhapsodic about what a Great and Significant Artist he is; that's as may be, he's still a hip-hop performer, and hip-hop isn't rock.  It isn't even music. (Any comments left here offering an excoriating dissent will be deleted.)  Dionne Warwick?  Hey, I love the woman.  She's one of my people.  (By that, I mean that she's from Essex County, New Jersey.)  But she's a crooner.  And you could bet that when Aretha Franklin did a Bacharach-David song Dionne Warwick had already done, Aretha did it better.  I could go on.  But I won't.  I believe I've made my point.     

Some of the nominees for this year have expressed indifference to the whole damn thing.  Todd Rundgren doesn't care if he's inducted or not, saying that his fans matter more to him than a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction.  Which makes sense when you consider that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has actually honored Madonna but will not even nominate Joe Cocker.  And why hasn't the Hall still nominated Warren Zevon, for Pete's sake?

My Rock and Roll Hall of Fame T-shirt is getting faded and frayed.  Maybe I should dump it, and maybe it's a sign I should stop caring about the Hall itself, as well.  They're not going to nominate any artistes whom I feel should be nominated anytime soon, like Jethro Tull, and even though there are artistes nominated this year whose nominations I agree with, I suppose the folks who run the Hall really won't mind if I sit this one out. 

The Groves Of the Academy

I haven't really seen any of the movies nominated for Oscars, which will be given out at the 82nd annual Academy Awards ceremony tomorrow, but I hope Sandra Bullock wins the best actress Oscar for The Blind Side. She's never been taken all that seriously as an actress, yet she's getting some of her best reviews ever for playing a white Southern woman who takes in a black teenager and raises him to become a great football player. And it would be a shame if she lost that and won a Razzie for All About Steve. But Meryl Streep as Julia Child in Julie and Julia might provide her stiff competition for the Oscar.

The award for best actor looks like it could be a showdown between Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart - he plays a country singer, and he did his own singing for this role - and George Clooney for Up In the Air. Don't count out Morgan Freeman, though, as Nelson Mandela in Invictus, about South Africans in the days after apartheid rallying around the white-dominated rugby team.

Looking at the ten best picture nominees, I had to ask myself: How did they come up with ten? And why do they think quantity equals quality? Oh, right, this is Hollywood. I hope Avatar doesn't win. Nothing against James Cameron or anything like that, but if a 3-D movie wins, this could have a great aesthetic fallout on motion pictures, and bring to something as kitschy as three-dimensional imagery the artistic legitimacy it shouldn't have. At least give the best director Oscar to Kathryn Bigelow for her Iraq War movie The Hurt Locker, if not best picture.

If Vera Farmiga wins best supporting actress for Up In the Air, this could bring her the stardom that has eluded her up to now.

The envelopes, please. :-)