I love award show season. It gives me a great opportunity to be a brat and criticize (or swoon over) all of the celebrities participating in the red carpet spectacle that occurs nearly every other week in January and February. The Grammys are always particularly interesting thanks to freak shows like Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga. Well, this year there was no egg carried by androgynous characters in unitards, and there was no Little Red Riding Hood with the Pope as her date (probably because he was busy preparing to retire), but it was still a pretty solid year from a design perspective. I think it was also a pretty good year for boobs on the red carpet, but that's a different post.
Anyway, it's not the ensembles worn on the red carpet that stole headlines. Instead, it's the dress Carrie Underwood wore during her performance, which intentionally doubled as a projector screen. Check out the footage after the jump:
Here's what NewsOK had to say about it:
Not only did she win her sixth career golden gramophone Sunday night on the 55th Annual Grammy Awards, Checotah native Carrie Underwood also wowed viewers with her grand silver gown that also served as high-tech projection screen for colorful patterns of fleur-de-lis, swirls and roses.
Backstage at the Grammys, Underwood fielded questions from reporters about the dress, along with her Grammys experiences and “American Idol” background.
“They can do a lot of amazing things with projectors these days. And we had a dress specially made so it would be a dress but still have a projection screen; like, I said I should take that home and we can watch movies on it at home. ‘You wanna watch movies on my dress?’” Underwood joked with reporters backstage.
To make the system work, she had to stand in a certain place as she sang a slowed-down rendition of her hit “Blown Away,” for which she won the best solo country performance Grammy, and her latest smash “Two Black Cadillacs.”
“It took a lot of precision. I gotta a lot of great people,” she said.
Carrie Underwood is pretty much impossible to find fault in. She's from a tiny country town and went to a tiny country college and auditioned for American Idol while wearing maroon colored lip-liner, but she has blossomed into one of the most classy, gorgeous, and talented recording artists of the last decade. Her songs are catchy but never annoying. She manages to be simultaneously girl-hot AND guy-hot. She comes off as the sweetest, most down to earth person ever in interviews. She's married to some handsome, low-key athlete. And she openly supports gay marriage, which is very cool and pretty bold considering the demographic she primarily markets to. And she hasn't made any real faux pas so far, which leads me to believe that Carrie has pretty good handlers helping her manage her career.
That's why this whole performance threw me a little off guard. I mean, did it really take "a lot of precision" to orchestrate the cheesy slideshow on her dress? It reminds me of something you'd see in Branson...in 1982...at a matinee show...off the strip. I'm pretty sure this was what Colourmusic did at Cain's the first time I saw them, but that production involved those overhead projectors your public school teachers used and the band members wearing white sweat pants and hoodies. Meanwhile, I'm guessing Carrie's "specially made" dress alone ran in the neighborhood of $15,000. I can't even ballpark the cost of the equipment and tech people the performance probably involved. That's a pretty penny to spend on one of the silliest and anti-climatic special effects I can remember seeing recently.
True to Carrie Underwood form, she didn't say anything even kind of sarcastic about the spectacle when they interviewed her. Maybe she didn't want to hurt the feelings of whoever thought of that idea. Maybe she amuses easily and thought it would be cool. Maybe she thought her singing would overshadow the odd display--which it almost did. I don't know, it's kind of hard to comment on because it was such a strange and cheesy thing that happened, but she's so pretty and talented and lovable that no one wants to say anything bad about her.
I guess that's all I really have to say on the subject. I'll save the "Taylor Swift is an annoying weirdo" diatribe for the next time she comes to Oklahoma. Wouldn't it be cool if she fell in love then wrote an angry song about one of the Kings of Leon, or one of the Hanson brothers? Whiney, opportunistic, obnoxious, and really really predictable sure, but you know that sucker would have a killer hook.
Follow Chelsea on Twitter at @xCawoodstock
