American Idol Oscar Talk?

In my alternate life I am a really big-time movie reviewer, think Ebert without an alarming predilection towards a coronary. Anyway, in this lofty position I get to screen movies before the general public and I recently caught Dreamgirls. I won’t really get into the movie other than to say it’s really, really good, and this is coming from a guy who would rather not see movies that fall anywhere near the “musical” category.

What I do want to mention is that there is now officially a buzz around former Idol contestant Jennifer Hudson, she plays one the main characters in Dreamgirls. This is buzz (and it’s now industry buzz, not just “me” buzz) in the sense that she’s locked and loaded for at least an Oscar nomination and most likely will enter the award show season as the prohibitive favorite. Normally I would make some snarky comment here but she’s deserving in this case. So deserving in fact that after I was reminded she’d been on American Idol I did one of those cartoon like shaking of head, eye bulging moves. She was so effective that I completely blanked on her Idol performance, those two performances had about as much in common as the Dalai Lama and an actual llama (the llama in this case being American Idol).

And I now return you to snarkiness as I point out that the fact that Justin “don’t call me pepperoncini” Guarini didn’t get the first Idol Oscar nomination is shocking, absolutely shocking.

Curses. After that I feel so guilty that I’m compelled to put in a link to Justin’s official site.