Sometimes, when I go to Las Vegas and sit down at a video poker machine, I just have a feeling, an intuition if you will, that this will NOT be the machine that will increase my bank account.
Nope. I stick it out, even somehow knowing that I’ll never walk away a winner. Why? Because the odds are the same no matter the computer chip – it’s all a matter of timing and, of course luck.
That’s kind of how I feel about last night’s “American Idol” finale.
I know in my gut that the little Ewok-Muppet-blinky puppy David Archuleta is going to win. He didn’t display a “knockout” of a night, as Simon proclaimed (I’m starting to think Simon and Randy are being paid off by Daddy Archuleta, because their drooling over this kid is so off base), but, you know, once Randy tells you that you are “molten” and “can sing the phone book” (AGAIN he pulls out the phone book!! And people want Paula fired?!), you’re pretty much on your way to singing “In This Moment.”
I’m not even going to bother commenting on the embarrassingly cheesy theme of pitting the Davids against each other like boxers, right down to luring Mr. Let’s Get Ready To Rumbleeeeeeeeeee opening the show and making those poor young men reveal their weight in front of the bajillion countries Ryan said were watching.
But you just know that Nigel Lythgoe and Co. have been salivating over an all-male finale since Ruben Studdard and Clay Aiken way back in season two – and, well, face it, you really couldn’t pull off a boxing motif with those two.
So back to my luck theory.
Yeah, Archuleta is going to win. But I’m still holding out a teeny bit of Hillary Clinton-like hope that David Cook’s jackpot is going to hit.
Watching the cougar magnet prowl around that rampy thing behind the judges table while singing U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” (nice choice, Clive Davis), he looked like a star. You felt his passion, and saw his rock star swagger. And swagger, but the way, is a lot different from the unappealing cockiness displayed by “Idol”’s other major rock star who shall go unnamed but was surprisingly ousted during Elliott Yamin’s season.
Little David, meanwhile, did what he always does. He gave Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” a smooth texture, added a few too many refrains that aren’t in the song to begin with for good reason, concentrated really hard on not blinking too much (and welcome back, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, the bestest mentor in all the land!) and…yeah…what? He leaves the stage with nothing. No soul. No passion. Just a robotic desire to please.
It is amusing – at least to me – that when it came time for the “songwriter’s choice,” David Cook pulled out the guitar and galloped through a not-entirely-awful pop-rocker called “Dream Big,” at which I jotted in my notes, “Wow, not a gloppy ‘Idol’ ballad.”
But then there it was! Leave it to Archuleta to Disney up the night with “In This Moment,” an insufferable ballad not only, as Simon pointed out, incredibly self-centered, but also as simplistic as a nursery rhyme – without the cleverness ( “Give me a chance and I’ll show you what’s real…I’m stuck in a moment and no one can take it from me.” )
Ack. I think I just coughed up a hairball.
(Oh, I just remembered, I can’t make fun of Disney ballads this week because Elliott Yamin’s remake of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” came out yesterday on the new Disney compilation. Yes. Seriously.)
Anyhoo, to wrap this sucker up, Cooksy performed a pensive version of Collective Soul’s “The World I Know,” sniffed away tears at the end of the song and listened as Simon basically told him that even though he’d been touted all week as the frontrunner, eh, sorry buddy, no deal.
I did love that conspiratorial wink Simon gave David at the end of his slightly stinging critique, almost as if he were saying, “Don’t worry, kid, I made Scary Spice a household name – just wait and see what I can do with you!”
And then Little David pulled out that version of “Imagine” that, when he first performed it months ago, much of the world fell in love with him and I shrugged.
The judges didn’t seem to mind his cracked note toward the end or his habit of emphasizing lyrics on the wrong syl-la-ble (did you catch the “BROTHERhood of man”?). They gushed and praised and Paula said something slightly more coherent than she had to David Cook (“You’re standing in your truth,” she told Scruffy David. Um, what?), Simon continued the dreadful boxing theme to proclaim Archuleta’s performances the “knockout” of the match, the end.
Oh, but wait! The teddy bear himself, Ruben Studdard, was back to atone for Fantasia’s crazy-silly hot mess of last week to perform an appropriately pensive version of Kenny Loggins’ “Celebrate Me Home,” the show’s Stop Crying And Go Home Now song of the season.
I’ll say this – watching those scenes from the season flicker behind Ruben on the massive video screen does remind us that it’s been five months – do you know how much can change in your life in five months? – since we started this year’s journey with these kids.
Yeah, “Idol” has its issues. What show doesn’t? And yeah, some of its past viewers found other things to do during the writer’s strike and never re-committed themselves to watching TV, so ratings have slipped.
But this show is such an emotional investment that even though I say I’m not going to get sucked in, I do. It’s hard to resist.
As for tonight’s winner – well, you know, maybe NOT winning the show will be David Cook’s jackpot after all.
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