Oh wow! I’ll only watch this episode tonight but couldn’t resist checking this thread out. This was certainly unexpected! I thought James and Scotty would be our two finalists.
I liked James but I’m not that upset. Lauren should have been gone before Casey and Jacob and it’s wrong for her to stay and for James to go, but he did have two bad weeks in a row. (I haven’t liked anything Lauren’s done since she sang Candle in the Wind, which I thought she nailed.) James, charismatic and fun as he is, still has some serious issues as a singer. He’s frequently out of pitch and he misses the note he’s aiming for in his screams more often than not. It was just painful to hear him singing Living for the City a few weeks back, he so thoroughly messed up the song.. He’s depended a lot on theatrics to get this far and he still needs lots of coaching IMO.
Much as I dislike most of Scotty’s music, I won’t be upset at all if he wins. He’s professional sounding, obviously competent and has grown the most artistically out of all the contestants. I do wish he didn’t look like the bastard child of Alfred Newman and George W. Bush though. Haley I think is great and has been either very good or great every week since they sang Motown.
The problem is this trio of judges is absolutely worthless. Neither their praise nor their (very rare) criticism holds any value. Their criticism because they’re so inconsistent in their reasoning and their praise because it’s so overused and also inconsistent. At this point I cringe every time it’s their turn to comment. I think you could torture and kill a puppy on the stage and Steven Tyler would still say it was crazy and beautiful, J-Lo would still say she loved the performer and Randy would get booed for saying it was a good performance, a bit pitchy, but he disagreed with the song choice. Randy is the only one who offers actual criticism with any regularity, but he’s so off the mark when he does the only rational response by a contestant would be to disregard it. Anyone who followed his advice would have been eliminated weeks ago.