43rd Annual ACM Awards Preview

It’s the old versus the new in the 43rd Annual ACM Awards.

This doesn’t mean that it’s the traditionalists versus the pop stars, which would make for an interesting showdown. Rather, it’s what happens to awards shows when eligibility criteria are too liberal and not enough good music has been released in the past year: mediocre but current work competes with good work that many have forgotten, and that makes the awards very hard to handicap.

This reality is most evident in the Album of the Year category. Fifth Gear, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Just Who I Am: Poets and Pirates are all mediocre to good albums released since the last ACM Awards, while If You’re Going Through Hell and Taylor Swift were eligible for nomination at the 42nd Annual ACM Awards. So why weren’t those albums nominated the last time around, when it would have made more chronological sense?

The answer is rather an indictment of the awards show process and helps to explain why it’s so difficult to prognosticate. A good album is a good album, regardless of whether it’s the 42nd or the 43rd ACM Awards, but a bestselling album at the 43rd ACM Awards was not necessarily bestselling at the 42nd. The extra year has made a difference only in the number of hit singles that each album has spawned and the number of copies that they have sold, and thus I can only conclude that in this category especially, the Academy hasn’t made a serious attempt to assess musical merit; they’ve simply noticed two albums that have had massive radio success and inferred that they must be great.

Thus, I can’t get my head around the Album category. The Brad Paisley and Miranda Lambert efforts stand heads and shoulders above the rest in terms of quality (and, if the 2007 critics’ lists are any indication, Lambert’s would certainly win easily among cross-genre voters), and I have to think that some voters have “forgotten” Taylor Swift’s and Rodney Atkins’ projects, but I can’t get past the fact that they were nominated a year late.

There’s a similar problem in the Vocal Event of the Year category. If this show were held six months earlier, I think that “Find Out Who Your Friends Are” would win in a walk. But this song, along with “What You Give Away” and “’Til We Ain’t Strangers Anymore” have been more or less absent from radio playlists for some time, so I expect that “Shiftwork,” easily the worst of the nominees, will win due to timeliness and star power. Still, I can’t rule out the possibility that voters will remember the more deserving nominees.

The Top New Male Vocalist and Top New Vocal Group or Duo categories are equally anachronistic. In one you have Jack Ingram, a Texas veteran whose brief mainstream radio run may be over, competiting against two true newcomers, while in the other, a duo that has already broken up (The Wreckers) is competiting against a group (Lady Antebellum) that hadn’t even released its debut album at the time that the nominations came out. In this case, the ACM’s glut of new artists categories is more culpable than the idiosyncracies of the awards show process, but it makes the categories rather bizarre nonetheless.

All of this makes this year’s awards difficult to predict, but the editors of The 9513 have done our best.

In the Entertainer of the Year category, the editors disagree about whether the introduction of fan voting will finally give Rascal Flatts the trophy that they so covet, but everyone except Jim thinks the Brad Paisley will follow up on his CMA win with the ACM Top Male Vocalist Award and everyone expects that Carrie Underwood will fend off Taylor Swift to defend her Top Female Vocalist Award. The Song of the Year and Single of the Year categories cause some disagreement: we think that “Don’t Blink” and “Stay” are the top contenders, but we aren’t sure who will win what.

The only way to find out is to tune into the 43rd Annual ACM Awards, Sunday at 7 p.m. central on CBS. While you’re watching, visit The 9513 for our live blog and join in the discussion. Insightful commentary, witty asides and engaging reader discussion is promised.

Feel free to add your own predictions below; any commenters who score better than the best The 9513 editor will be recognized in our post-ACM Awards wrap-up.

For more The 9513 ACM Awards Coverage, be sure to read my article about who should have been nominated and view the full list of nominees.