American Idol Final 7, Results Show

It’s results night on American Idol and even though they could just come out and tell us who’s going home, they have to stretch it out into an hour long show with tons of hype and made-up drama with a couple of guest performers thrown into the mix.

The show opened with the group singing Michael Sembello’s “Maniac” from the 1983 movie, Flashdance. Of all the music from movies, I wouldn’t have thought that particular song would be high on the list to be featured on results night, but what do I know?

After a little cross-promotion of the new movie, 17 Again, starring Zac Efron we got right into revealing the results where we were quickly informed that Allison Iraheta and Adam Lambert were declared safe, but Anoop Desai was the first shuffled into the bottom three.

Following the bad news for Anoop, we were presented with a quick bio of Jennifer Hudson followed by her singing “If This Isn't Love” from her self-titled album. She’s definitely a great vocalist, and while it’s not the kind of music I get excited about, I can see why she’s had so much success.

It seemed a little silly for Ryan Seacrest to try to get the judges to say whether or not Anoop “deserved” to be in the bottom three. Really, at this point they’re all really good and the only one left who has a history of being consistently bad is Anoop, so it only makes sense that he’s there.

After dragging it out a while longer it was revealed that Kris Allen was safe but Lil Rounds was in the bottom three as well. Immediately after that, they revealed the last member of the bottom three is Matt Giraud and Danny Gokey was safe.

As we were watching, my wife observed that they could wipe out this bottom three of Anoop, Matt and Lil and it we could just happily go on with the competition. None of these three really have a chance of winning, ultimately.

The first member of this three declared safe was, surprisingly for me, Anoop Desai. I suppose it’s because he got high marks for his song choice last night, but I thought it was time for him to go.

Miley Cyrus came out next to fill in some of the extra time by singing her song, “The Climb.” I was hoping that this was going to be a cover of No Doubt’s song by the same name, but no dice. That's fine, it probably would have been terrible anyway. I guess I’ve never really heard a song of Miley's—does she normally not enunciate her words? There were some phrases that just sounded like she was slurring. Oh well, I guess her music isn’t really my cup-o-tea either.

After all the delays, they finally revealed that Lil Rounds was safe and Matt Giraud had to “sing for his life” in hopes that he’d receive the judge’s save. From how giddy Kara and Paula were being during his performance it was clear that he had earned the judge’s save and so he’ll be in the competition for another week. The twist with the save is that next week two people are going home no matter what—and it’s Disco Week!

I’m pretty happy with this result. I really like Matt Giraud and I’m hoping he can improve on some of the things that are holding him back. While I do think Matt will have a successful post-Idol music career, I agree with Simon that his chances of winning the competition are pretty slim. Still, I’m happy to have him around for a while longer.