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Silk Sonic, Jon Batiste Win Big; Lil Nas X, Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish Miss Out at #Grammys 2022.
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The artists that win big and miss out at the #Grammys 2022
Unlike the Oscars, which are usually quite predictable, the #Grammys are always full of surprises, and this 2022 edition was no exception.
Jon Batiste has the most wins with five. Who could have predicted that, save for those who saw him coming in with a lead of 11 nominations and assumed the math would work out?
That mathematics, however, did not apply to the highly nominated Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X, who went home empty-handed (but still full-hearted, let’s hope), nor did it generate the results Olivia Rodrigo and the Tony Bennett/Lady Gaga pairing had hoped for.
Here’s a summary of the greatest snubs and surprises of the year:
SURPRISE: Silk Sonic swept the board.
Bruno Mars and Anderson Paak are the duos that make the fast-rising Silk SOnic group.
Paak had the night’s lone perfect record, at least among nominees who had a considerable number of at-bats.
“We are really trying our hardest to remain humble at this point,” said Paak, “but in the industry we call that a clean sweep.”
They won in all four categories in which they were nominated: record of the year, song of the year, best R&B song and best R&B performance. If they’d been up for album of the year (Silk Sonic’s collection won’t be eligible till next year, because it came out after the Oct. 1 cutoff), they probably would have gotten that one, too.
In retrospect, Silk Sonic being Grammy bait shouldn’t have been as big a surprise as it was, given the way Bruno Mars swept with six wins when he was last up to as a solo artist four years ago.
SNUB: Lil Nas X, Billie Eilish
Lil Nas X and Billie Eilish despite having expectations about at least clinching an award went home empty-handed.
“Can’t believe I lost all my Grammys,” wrote Lil Nax on Twitter. “I am now no longer gay!”.
Of course, he still has his two-year-old “Old Town Road” triumphs to keep him warm. However, any notion that Nas would be rewarded for his boldness was soon dismissed.
Even though he was never a front-runner for album or record of the year, how can he lose for a music video when “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” was the water-cooler clip of the year? That’s simple: He loses if the video gets in the way of the Recording Academy’s love affair with Jon Batiste.
Billie Eilish was also shut out at the 2022 Grammys, after dominating the 2020 awards, after winning the record of the year in 2021, and after just receiving an Oscar last week.
Olivia Rodrigo: Blessings and Disappointments
Rodrigo should be ecstatic to receive three Grammys for the first time as a youngster, and she most likely is. She was destined to win best new artist; no one has ever lost their Grammy lottery by guessing wrongly on that one.
While her Grammys debut is remarkable, to say the least, it’s still been damped due to the over-heightened expectations of just how much the commercial and critical phenomenon of her success might translate to a clean sweep of the top four categories, a la Eilish did two years ago.
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Surprising Snubs: BTS and Justin Beiber
If there was a Grammy award for “most spectacular performance on the Grammys,” the K-pop group would be nominated in 2023.
In the absence of anything like that, the seven members are unlikely to care over losing a single nomination as much as its large fan base known as ARMY does. Bowling over a large television audience, as they did on Sunday night, is a reward in and of itself.
However, Bieber and his crew are known to have taken the Grammys seriously in the past, so he may be less enthusiastic about walking home empty-handed.