What I Watched Last Night

Um, excuse me, but who on God's Green Earth thought it would be a sterling idea to turn last night's two-singer showdown finale of American Idol into the goddamn Oscars? The Academy Awards telecast is a boring, drawn-out affair with a lot of extraneous crap the world could do without occupying 99.9999 percent of the show. So how did we end up with the same thing with last night's Idol?

I've never been an Idol fan, or even a casual follower. For people like me, following Idol is like following Chicago's professional sports teams or the Indy 500: You might tune in a few times in the beginning just to see who's crashing and burning, but you're only there for the big season finale for the free beer and food at someone else's house. And if the commercials interrupting your eating and drinking and socializing don't suck, that's even better.

All the Lost fanatics were at home for that show's season-ender last night, so that left ESPN baseball diehards and Idol fans to duke it out over TV time at the two gin mills I visited last night. Consequently, I didn't get to see the whole two-hour Idol finale in its entirety, and the sound was off for most of the snippets I did manage to see. But that didn't stop me from making some observations anyway.

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Actually, I didn't even know Idol was on until roughly a half hour after it began, when all the bar glassware around me began shattering and every dog within earshot started howling. This coincided with a trophy being presented to - I gather - whoever Paula, Simon and Randy voted as the universe's most dreadful singer from the opening episodes of this season.

Also coincidentally at the exact same moment in time, previous-season Idol washups William Hung and Chris Daughtry were too busy counting their royalty money for it to occur to them that the Idol finale was on TV, either.

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Paula Abdul's recovery from a reportedly broken nose a scant two days ago - no black eyes, not a scratch to be seen - was nothing less than miraculous. Sources tell me the Chicago Police Department's Citizen Torture Division will be sparing no expense to find out exactly how she managed it.

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Aerosmith's Joe Perry appears onstage with a whole bunch of other people playing guitar to, I think, Ruben Studdard's cotton-candy version of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. Joe celebrates the loss of respect from every Aerosmith fan in the nation by announcing he is replacing Esteban as Home Shopping Network/QVC's shill for badly-made guitars and instructional DVDs.

To their credit, Ringo Starr, Pat Travers, and Alice Cooper were nowhere near the stage for Ruben's big number.

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Is it just me, or is Ryan Seacrest looking more and more like Tom Hanks in Philadelphia? I'm not sure which Ryan needs more, a shave or a sandwich.

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High fives were being exchanged by the creators of the Oscar-like Idol extravaganza until the announcement in the show's closing few minutes that Jordin Sparks won all the marbles. It was at this point that they realized they spent so much time stuffing all sorts of extraneuous bullshit into the show that they deprived Jordin of a big Oscar-like Halle Barry-esque acceptance speech where Jordin might have publicly thanked God and Billie Holiday for making this moment possible.

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The Idol finale was so Oscar-huge and astoundingly electric that WFLD/Fox News sent a dressed-to-the-nines correspondent to stand there on the red carpet in front of an empty runway promising to be back later in the newscast with exciting comments from, uh, someone.

Yet, not a single minute of the newscast was devoted to the full-blown plague of man-eating cicadas now in progress that every newscast has been warning us about for the past week.

Local Chicago news. Serving and protecting the citizenry.

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Read the What I Watched Last Night collection. It's good for you.