Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Did Chris Exploit a Tragedy?

Since Chris is from Virginia and he seemed incredibly sincere, I didn’t give it any thought when he extended his thoughts and prayers to Virginia Tech. But there are some this morning who are questioning the timing of his comments…

This from Michael Slezak at “Entertainment Weekly”: "Even more troubling, though, was Chris' abrupt change of subject from mouthing off to Simon to extending his thoughts and prayers to the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings. Mind you, I'm not saying the Virginia resident's remarks weren't sincere, but the timing felt way off. By sniping at Simon first, realizing he was in a losing battle, then turning the subject to an unspeakable national tragedy, Chris created the season’s most uncomfortable moment.”

Many of the posters to the “EW” site are jumping on Slezak's bandwagon and questioning if Chris used the comments to make up for his lame “nasally’s a form of singing” argument with Simon. I have to agree that if Chris wanted to send out sincere wishes to his home state—and I believe he did—then he should have kept his mouth shut about the nasally singing…

Because now we have two sides—the people who thought Chris was exploiting a national tragedy and didn’t vote for him because of it and the people who thought Chris’ performance may have been affected by the week’s events and voted for him because of it. It could make an interesting evening for Chris…

For me, it was actually Simon’s comments in the middle of his critique of Blake that I thought were badly timed, but “EW” offers up an explanation for that as well. Apparently the cameras caught Simon rolling his eyes at Chris and Slezak theorizes that Simon may have made his comments so he did not appear to be unsympathetic—since he is (I didn’t say his comments were insincere, I just said they were strangely timed.). If Simon did roll his eyes, it was clearly because he was exasperated with Chris thinking that nasally singing was a good thing…

By the way, the Top 7 results show is usually when Ryan unveils his two groups of three trick, where he creates two groups of three and a seventh contestant, who is safe, has to pick which group is the top group. A LaKisha-Chris-Sanjaya bottom three would be interesting…

I’m sticking with my LaKisha prediction, but it’s looking more and more like this could be the night we say goodbye to Sanjaya—especially now that even Jim is losing faith in him…

Since the first half-hour is nothing but filler, I’ll be blogging tonight beginning at 9:30, so I hope you’ll join me then…