Television
Mar 10, 2012

IDOL ‘TOP 13’ ELIMINATION (The Nice Guy Finished Last)

It was boys vs. girls in this week’s American Idol elimination and like I said in my previous blog, the girls really dominated the evening.  In a change to the elimination process, the fan voting will only be used to determine the bottom 3 guys & girls and then the judges will decide the contestant to be eliminated. In my opinion, this change is a bad one and could result in a significant reduction in the number of fan votes being cast. Enough about this, let’s get to the eliminations.

As expected, after the fan voting the top 3 girls were Jessica Sanchez, Hollie Cavanagh and Skylar Laine. The bottom 3 girls were Erika Van Pelt, Shannon Magrane and Elise Testone. While I thought Shannon gave the worst female performance of the evening, I was hoping that she would get a second chance and the fans agreed with me. After a little drama (very little), Ryan Seacrest announced that Elise Testone was the girl with the least number of fan votes. While I like Elise, her performance on Wednesday evening was uninspiring.

In a surprise (at least to me), the top 4 guys were Phil Phillips, Colton Dixon, Heejun Han and Deande Brackensick and the bottom 3 were Joshua Ledet, Jermaine Jones and Jeremy Rosado. While Deandre easily gave his best performance in two weeks, I find it hard to believe that anyone thinks he is a better singer than Joshua Ledet. Based on the fan vote, it appears that Joshua hasn’t developed a strong voting base and despite consistently performing better than most of the other guys, he could be in for a fight to stay in the competition. My bottom 3 would have been Deandre, Jeremy and Jermaine. In a mild surprise, Ryan Seacrest announced that Jeremy Rosado was the guy with the least amount of fan votes. Too bad, I was rooting for Jermaine!!!

Now it was up to the judges, after a commercial break and a few minutes of deliberation, Jennifer Lopez announced that the judges had decided to save Elise Testone and that “American Idol Nice Guy”, Jeremy Rosado was going home. The judges got it right. While I don’t believe that either one has a chance of winning, Elise is certainly the better singer of the two. The judges already saved Jeremy once before and while he had his moments, this nice guy just didn’t do enough to stay in the contest. His personality and smile will certainly be missed.

We now have 12 American Idol contestants 6 guys and 6 girls. The girls are clearly the class of the field with Jessica Sanchez and Hollie Cavanagh as the favorites to win it all. Skylar Laine and Phillip Phillips are definite contenders. Another bad performance by either Jermaine, Deandre, Shannon or Elise could result in a “Golden Ticket” home. On a side note, Hollie Cavanagh has a chance to win this thing. She is a beautiful 18-year old girl with a great voice, but she won’t win unless she improves her posture and they stop dressing and doing her hair like she is a thirty years old. While this is a singing contest, those extra items are really important and could mean the difference between first and second place.