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Snubs, surprises & other Grammy tidbits
The Grammy Awards was nearly four hours long, so no judgment if you skipped some (or all) of the show.
The bullet points: Country star Kacey Musgraves won album of the year, the biggest prize of the night, for Golden Hour. She tied with Childish Gambino for four awards, the most of any artist. Alicia Keys was the host, and she skilfully moved the show along while also, at one point, playing two pianos simultaneously.
There were 18 performances, but here are 10 things to know from the evening:
the show. Gambino skipped
One of the night’s biggest winners was Childish Gambino (known in his many other artistic endeavours as Donald Glover), but the multitalented auteur was nowhere to be found, leading to a couple of awkward moments — such as when his song This Is America became the first hip-hop track to win song of the year and record of the year, and he wasn’t there to take home either.
He wasn’t the only star to skip the ceremony this year. Beyoncé, Jay-z, Kendrick Lamar, Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande all watched on television, if they watched the ceremony at all. Gambino’s absence is particularly unsurprising. He reportedly turned down the opportunity to perform at the awards, although it’s not clear why. Perhaps his experience from last year was to blame: He sang onstage during that telecast — when he was up for the two biggest Grammy awards — and won neither.
takes aim at the Grammys, and the Grammys cut Drake off.
Although Drake has been tirelessly promoting Scorpion since the double LP dropped this summer, he was among the artists who reportedly turned down the opportunity to perform during the awards show. So it was fairly surprising to see him in attendance to accept his trophy after he won best rap song for God’s Plan. Why he decided to show up seemed clearer when he gave his speech, a withering critique of the Grammys, which has been criticized for doing a poor job of honouring hiphop outside genre-specific categories.
“I want to take this opportunity while I’m up here to just talk to all the kids that are watching this that are aspiring to do music, all my peers that make music from their heart, that do things pure and tell the truth. I want to let you know we play in an opinion-based sport, not a factual-based sport,” Drake said. “This is a business where sometimes it’s up to a bunch of people that might not understand, you know, what a mixed-race kid from Canada has to say or a fly Spanish girl from New York or anybody else.”
surprise Michelle Obama cameo.
So ... what was the former first lady doing at the Grammy Awards? While there was no explanation given, it’s worth noting that her former chief of staff, Tina Tchen, runs the Recording Academy’s diversity and inclusion task force. Either way, the audience was thrilled when she took the stage for a segment with Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, Jada Pinkett Smith and Alicia Keys. After the other three talked about their appreciation for music, Obama started to speak, but the crowd’s applause drowned her out.
Gaga’s speech about mental health.
Lady Gaga had a great night with a headbanging performance of Shallow, the signature ballad from A Star Is Born — not to mention three awards: pop solo performance for Joanne (Where Do You Think You’re Goin’?) and visual media song and pop duo-group performance for Shallow. She also got serious in her speech as she talked about how A Star Is Born addresses mental health (specifically, Cooper’s character, who is an addict.) “A lot of artists deal with that, and we gotta take care of each other. So if you see somebody that’s hurting, don’t look away,” she said. “And if you’re hurting, even though it might be hard, try to find that bravery within yourself to dive deep and go tell somebody, and take them up in your head with you.”
of that singing.
The Grammys telecast is mostly just one big concert, and there were some pretty amazing performances. Dolly Parton is such a hard worker that she headlined her own career retrospective medley that featured goddaughter Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Maren Morris, Kacey Musgraves and Little Big Town, and closed out with a rousing 9 to 5, which brought the crowd to its feet.
On the other end of the spectrum, Diana Ross paid tribute to herself, by herself, with a 75th public birthday performance that came six weeks before her actual birthday (only she can do this). Alicia Keys took a break from hosting to play two pianos at once while covering eight songs. J. Lo, for some reason, took the lead on the Motown tribute. Travis Scott scaled a fence. Janelle Monáe brought out the vagina pants. And Ricky Martin went to Havana with Camila Cabello.
Lipa called out the Grammy president right before a Grammy president tribute.
In accepting the award for best new artist, British pop star Dua Lipa said it was an honour “to be nominated alongside so many incredible female artists this year, because this year I guess we really stepped up?” — a direct shading of Recording Academy president Neil Portnow.
Last year, when asked backstage about the lack of women performing and winning at televised awards, Portnow said it has to begin with “women who have the creativity in their hearts and souls, who want to be musicians, who want to be engineers, producers and want to be part of the industry on the executive level ... to step up because I think they would be welcome.”
Savage’s absence was barely mentioned.
Sha Yaa Bin Abraham-joseph, the 26-year-old rapper better known as 21 Savage, was taken into custody by U.S. Immigration last week for overstaying his visa. Savage, who was born in the U.K. and brought to the U.S. as a child, is being held in a Georgia detention centre and, as a result, couldn’t attend the Grammys — even though he was nominated for two awards for Rockstar, the Post Malone song on which he’s featured. Post Malone even performed their song without mentioning Savage.
was felt history Miller’s absence
Mac Miller’s mother reportedly went to the Grammys on behalf of the late rapper, who died in September at the age of 26 from a mix of fentanyl, cocaine and alcohol. Miller had been nominated posthumously for best rap album for Swimming, which was his first Grammy nod.
B makes Grammy
The Bronx rapper became the first solo artist to win best rap album (Lauryn Hill was the first woman, who won in 1997 along with the rest of the Fugees). Cardi B thanked her daughter and said, “When I found out I was pregnant, my album was not complete. I had, like, three songs I was for sure having. And then you know how it was: We was like, ‘We have to get this album done so I could shoot these videos while I’m still not showing.’ And it was very long nights.”
random cameo from New England.
Excuse me, Patriots stars Devin Mccourty and Julian Edelman, what are you doing at the Grammys? Didn’t you get enough attention last week? The answer: CBS, which hosted the Grammys, also broadcast the Super Bowl, so this was a way to get some cross-promotion. Unfortunately, given the Grammys were in Los Angeles — and the Pats beat the L.A. Rams — there were some jeers from the crowd.
Director Hans Petter Moland would like you to know that his new movie, Cold Pursuit starring Liam Neeson, is not just “Taken in the snow.” “In broad strokes it’s a revenge movie,” says the Norwegian director of his first Englishlanguage film. “But take a closer look; there’s no one to salvage or rescue, because his son’s already dead. This is a particular way to mourn rather than to save somebody.”
Point taken. Early in the movie, Neeson’s character’s son is killed during a robbery. The culprits make it look like a drug overdose, and the police buy the story and refuse to dig further. And so Neeson, playing mild-mannered Colorado snowplow driver Nels Coxman, goes looking for the truth. Much blood is spilled during his quest.
“He has no special set of skills,” says Moland, referring to the Taken franchise. “He’s just an amateur who’s highly motivated, who’s saddened by what has happened, and who doesn’t care (for his own safety).”
Cold Pursuit is actually Moland’s second take on the movie. In 2014, he made In Order of Disappearance, starring Stellan Skarsgard and set in the snowy mountains of Norway. The film premièred in Berlin and did well on the festival circuit, which is when producer Michael Shamberg suggested a do-over.
“Conventional wisdom says somebody else would do it,” says Moland. “But one of the particular qualities of the original was the tone, and it’s hard to duplicate another filmmaker’s tone.” And so the director’s own “special set of skills” were put to use.
The plot of Cold Pursuit is faithful to the original, but rewriting took more than translation software and the removal of Scandinavian letters by first-time screenwriter Frank Baldwin. That’s because there are elements of race and nationalism that wouldn’t play the same way in Colorado as in Norway. Among other things, says Moland, Skarsgard’s character is teased for being “an immigrant from Sweden, which is, like, 80 metres away.”
So whereas In Order of Disappearance features a gang of native Norwegians and another comprised of Serbians, Cold Pursuit turns the Norwegians into casually racist Americans, while the “outsider” Serbians are recast as First Nations. (Parks Canada, troubled by this, refused to let the film shoot in Banff, even though First Nations actor Tom Jackson, playing the gang leader, lobbied on the movie’s behalf. The production eventually found new locations in Alberta and B.C.)
Moland says the remake allowed for some new narrative possibilities, such as a misunderstanding when Jackson’s character shows up at a fancy ski resort and is told he needs “a reservation.” We also see the First Nations group enjoying ski slopes as the Serbs did in the original, “but here there’s a certain wistfulness and irony because of the Native Americans’ relationship to the landscape they’re standing in.”
The director brought some of his regular collaborators with him on Cold Pursuit, including cinematographer Philip Ogaard, his costume designer and a few stunt performers. But he relished the novelty of making things anew. “The chance to work with Liam was interesting, and making the film for a whole different audience who hadn’t seen the original and transplant it to a new culture was fun.”
But the biggest draw was probably Shamberg, a septuagenarian producer whose credits extend back to such classics as The Big Chill, A Fish Called Wanda and Pulp Fiction. “If it hadn’t been him asking me to consider it, I don’t think I would have.”