Two different events happened simultaneously last night in the Crypto.com Arena in Las Angeles, a venue fittingly named after a postmodern financial shell game. For most participants and viewers, it was one of the more effective Grammy Awards ceremonies in living memory, with a surfeit of touching performances and a relative lack of abrasive celebrity ego. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift seemed to think she was at a shareholders' meeting to announce her second-quarter profit projections, or, as she called it, her new album. And while there, she might as well collect her annual bonus payment, or, as the Grammys call it, the prize for Album of the Year. (She won it for a record-setting fourth time, passing Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon, and Stevie Wonder to become the artist with the most wins in that category.)
This year's Grammys seemed to verify the lastingness of the awards broadcast's positive turn since 2021, when it passed from hidebound four-decade executive producer Ken Ehrlich to the fresher hands of Ben Winston. Aside from the extended memorial segment in the middle-which itself included some great music-the night seemed to zip along, and mostly struck a decent balance between the contemporary and the historical. The recording academy's ongoing efforts to widen the demographics of its membership base seems to be yielding results, with the major awards spread among a fairly predictable range of big names (within limits I'll address shortly), but at least not being swept by one safe bet or falling to irrelevant hangers-on of decades past, as has happened so often before.
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