“TITANIC” HAUL: Celine Dion and her Grammys.
All entertainment-industry awards shows are silly by nature, but the Grammy Awards, which will be on CBS Sunday night at 8, may be the silliest. Yet that’s partly the reason why they’re also the most consistently entertaining — pop knows how to do spectacle in three minutes.
Yes, sometimes the Grammys get their categories wrong. For instance, Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” was nominated for Song of the Year, but not for Record of the Year. Ridiculous.
Even so, the Grammys matter because they’ve reinvented themselves — as a televised live event. As such, the Grammys have stolen the thunder from what was the top televised music awards show, MTV’s Video Music Awards.
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The VMAs pioneered the idea of an awards show that fed off the egomania of its performers. Rivalries and antagonisms became part of the narrative, from Axl Rose challenging Kurt Cobain to a fight backstage in 1992 to Kanye West’s “I’ma let you finish” interruption of Taylor Swift in 2009.
But in the 2010s, the dynamic has shifted. Thanks to social media, performers increasingly stage the most outlandish live segments possible for future YouTube consumption and Facebook embedding.
The VMAs have reacted by trying too often to top themselves and have become nearly incoherent. The middle-of-the-road Grammys, on the other hand, have been forced to up the glitz factor — to the show’s benefit.
The 2011 show was easily the best I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t perfect — no lineup featuring Muse could be — but plenty resonated, from Miranda Lambert’s affecting “The House That Built Me” to Cee Lo Green and the Muppets’ rollicking “Forget You” to Bob Dylan’s blazing “Maggie’s Farm,” backed by Mumford & Sons and the Avett Brothers.
There was even a surprise ending: Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, the soul of Grammy gentility, gasping out the Album of the Year winner: “A-a-a-arcade F-f-f-fire?!” It was a rare thing — a three-hour show that lived up to its own slogan, “Music’s Biggest Night.”
Last year’s Grammys were a televised wake for Whitney Houston, who’d died the night before, but the show still feels more relevant than the Oscars or the Emmys. The Emmys are always uneven, while the Oscars usually collapse under the weight of their own self-importance.
It also helps that music, as a medium, moves faster than film or TV — it’s cheaper to make great-sounding recordings than it is to make good television or movies. The Grammys feel fresher by dint of that, as much as what’s happening onscreen. But even if the 2013 Grammys are a snooze, they’ll keep you more wide-awake than the others.