Let’s face it, we really don’t expect much from the American Music Awards. It’s always a relentlessly corny affair, and the entire point of it is to celebrate whatever artists have sold the greatest number of albums in that year. It is utterly lacking in terms of credibility and gravitas, and it somehow manages to make the Grammy Awards seem cool in comparison. Any given AMA ceremony is going to be filled with cringe-inducing moments — like, say, opening the show with a twelve-minute performance featuring Fergie, Will.I.Am, and that one girl from the Pussycat Dolls — but the ceremony really outdid itself this year with Jimmy Kimmel’s unscripted anti-monologue. Basically, Kimmel respectfully noted that, as a member of the Writers Guild, he is technically on strike, but he offered to entertain us with his “little-seen dancing ability.†The joke really should’ve stopped there, but the guy had some time to kill, and so he recruited some former American Idol contestants from the audience to do the Soulja Boy dance with him on the big stage. While the search for willing celebrity participants felt like an eternity in and of itself, the actual dance was so slow and painful that we’re reasonably certain that it was a violation of the Geneva Conventions. We can only hope that this performance was a protest of sorts and that Kimmel was only trying to demonstrate that writers are utterly essential to creating humane forms of entertainment. —Matthew Perpetua
