Tom Shales

Has Mary J Blige stopped thanking people yet?  The rambling diva was one of the reasons CBS's telecast of the 49th Annual Grammy Awards ran into local-news time Sunday. Blige won more than once but it was the first time, when she began rattling off a list of friends that started with "Jesus Christ," that she took dishonors for tortuous fatuousness. Blige later told the huge audience in the huge Staples Center that it's when you're in the valleys that "you know who you are" but it's also on the peaks when "you learn who you are." People in Hollywood often have hard times remembering who they are. But Blige assured the crowd: "I am growing into a better human bein'," and good for her.

The show was gorgeous in HDTV but got off to a terrible rip-offy start: the much ballyhooed reunion of The Police consisted of one brief song ("Roxanne," about a hooker) and poof, they were gone. Anyone tuning in late missed it. Meanwhile in the I-Want-One Department: Justin Timberlake sang part of one song self-shot and self-illuminated with some kind of high-tech, hand-held Hyper-Handycam. He sure wasn't getting a picture like that with a telephone.
An audio bleep of Chris Rock near the very end of the show was a clue it had all been on nervous tape-delay.It was wonderful to see and hear Smokey Robinson sing "The Tracks of My Tears" again, but those HD close-ups suggested he could well have revised the lyrics from "Take a good look at my face" to "take a good look at my facelift." Well, whatever it takes.

Viewers should be told that a McDonald's commercial in which children pursue red balloons was a shameless rip-off of an award-winning French film called -- surprise -- "The Red Balloon." It's a classic of its kind and it looked crummy for some ad agency to rip it off like that. The original director was Albert Lamorisse, or so my aging memory seems to think.

Too bad the telecast did not include the nutty nut commercial featuring Robert Goulet that premiered during the Super Bowl.  It's hilarious absurdity, the premise of the ad being that if you don't eat a certain kind of nut, Robert Goulet of all people will sneak into your office and mess it up. Hilarious -- but as Howard Stern noted on his radio show the next day, nobody could quite remember the name of the nut. The one in the can, that is. For the record, it's Emerald.

As for the Grammys, as you have doubtless read elsewhere, the ratings weren't bad -- like they were last year -- and the show helped give CBS the night opposite a powerful ABC line-up.

Still, more people watch amateurs screeching on Fox's "American Idol" than tuned in for the Grammy show's spotty line up of so-called professionals  -- most of the pro's as freaky as those aspiring idols are, just better coiffed and with bigger back-up bands.  And in Timberlake's case, cooler toys.