As of this writing, here are the top rated performances of the week. All ratings out of 10. Let your voice be heard by putting in your votes here!
Up-to-date ratings can be found here.
I stumbled upon this thread out on the American Idol forums. It’s really interesting to see who people thought would advance, based entirely on what the American Idol producers wanted us to see.
Predictions at the American Idol forums
There didn’t seem to be much bias in which contestants were chosen to go first, and which were chosen to go last. Two early favorites started 1 and 2 (Lil Rounds and Danny Gokey), while two others went somewhere between the middle and end (Anoop Desai and Adam Lambert).
I don’t know if it’s my growth into adulthood, but my memory sure ain’t what it used to be. I can’t remember exactly how good or bad the first 4 or 5 performances were. I thought Lil was pretty good, but not great, I thought Danny was great, too. But if I’m comparing against Adam or Alexis Grace, can I accurately say that I liked Lil more than I liked Adam? Fact is, I remember Alexis because she went last. Later on, I want to do a more formal analysis on performance order, because with the level of talent fairly high this season, I think smaller factors like performance order and air time will play a larger role.
Did you know you can save your ratings every week by logging into your Facebook account?
I really hate remembering all my usernames and passwords for every freaking website I visit. I hope this more “universal” log-in makes this site easier to use. I’m also looking into implementing Google Friend Connect, which will allow you to save your ratings with either your Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenId accounts. Facebook just happened to be the easiest to implement.
PRIVACY QUESTION: What personal information do I use?
Answer: Just about nothing. All I do is take a number that uniquely identifies you, and assign it to each of your ratings. I don’t save any other information, per the rules of Facebook. I don’t really care what your name is, or what’s on your wall, or any of that. This is simply an easy way for you (and me) to track your American Idol ratings.
One of these days, I might think about using your city to see the distribution of rankings by region. Perhaps age and gender one day, too. But I would NEVER save that info, or have it personally identifiable to you. I only care about general trends, and it would be interesting to see those cuts of data.
Hope the Facebook login gives you one less password to remember!
And here is the amount of screen time given to Group 1 contestants prior to the Top 36 round:
Michael Sarver and Anoop Desai
The most interesting thing to note is that Michael Sarver had TWICE the air time of Anoop Desai! That’s amazing to me! The big difference in air time between the two is that Anoop’s air time focused almost solely on his singing (with a digression about his BBQ thesis), while Michael Sarver’s included both his singing AND his backstory.
Could it be possible that Michael received a few more votes, because the audience is more emotionally connected to Michael’s inspiring backstory? What if Anoop was given an equal amount of screen time, not only about his performances, but also about his personal story? Would the results have been different?
Ricky Braddy and Danny Gokey
Of all the contestants, I believe Ricky Braddy suffered the most from lack of screen time. He sang very well, and I would even say that he sang just as well as Danny Gokey (also remember that Paula called Ricky’s performance “flawless”). Ricky received a whopping 6 seconds of airtime, with exactly 0 seconds of actual singing from him!
What if we had seen AND heard Ricky prior to his first performance? Personally, I believe he would have gotten many more votes. American Idol is a huge game of perception, and voters’ perceptions are influenced by knowing the backstories of the contestants. For example, we feel Danny Gokey emotionally connect to his performances, because we know the sad story about his wife. In the absence of this knowledge, would we still hail Danny as a front-runner? Probably yes, but not likely to the same degree.
My issue is we don’t have equal information about all the contestants. Through their editing and comments, the American Idol editors and judges have a huge influence on how much we know about each contestant, and therefore which contestants we ultimately vote for. The disparity of air time among Group 1 definitely exhibits these biases.
From highest to lowest, here was the amount of screen time allocated to each of the contestants up to the last Hollywood Week episode, for contestants in Group 2:
Given that 2 of this group’s winners ranked #9 and #10 in screen time, it seems clear that previous screen time wasn’t a huge factor for this round. However, screen time probably wasn’t a big factor because of the composition of the contestants in this group.
On the boys side, Adam Lambert had, essentially, no competition. His closest competitor in hindsight was Matt Giraud and Kris Allen, the former of which sounded awful singing a Coldplay song, and the latter of which was barely seen at all in the audition rounds. In fact, much of Kris Allen’s screen time came during the group round, of which he was a part of “White Chocolate” with India Morrison. When he had been on air, the story wasn’t even about him! Adam’s clearly superior talent level was the most important factor this round, not screen time.
On the girls side, notice how NONE of the girls cracked the top 5 in screen time (Kris Allen was the only male that didn’t make the top half of screen time). This was a very under-exposed group of singers. In a weird way, because none of the girls had much screen time, they were all playing on level ground. The only person who really got shafted was Jeanine, who had never been shown singing (and probably for good reason).
So all in all, screen time wasn’t a huge factor for Group 2. Personally, I like it this way. When you don’t have expectations for a performance, you get really pleasant surprises from talents like Allison Iraheta and Kris Allen. I found their performances just as, if not more, entertaining as Adam Lambert’s, whose talent is great, but kind of expected based on his previous exposure.
I loved this article from Entertainment Weekly, which enumerates exactly how I feel about a) the wildcard structure and b) how Kristen McNamara and Ju’Not Joyner got shafted when they weren’t picked for the wild-card round.