Thursday, May 17, 2007

OUR NEXT TOP NATIONAL NIGHTMARE IS OVER: Adam said I'd have some more to say, and I do. I'm going to spoil, so for the tiny demographic who tapes ANTM but doesn't watch it right away, stop reading and do your homework. Anyway, I said early in this season -- excuse me, cycle -- that I wasn't going to watch ANTM in protest of the pulchritude-free direction Tyra chose to take it. I didn't exactly keep that promise -- I missed a couple of episodes and watched only parts of others, but I generally knew who was sticking around. Then, in an Idol thread a few weeks back, I mentioned that all of the cameos were really putting the lie to this season's contestants. It's one thing to be outdone by Carridee's "my sham life as a spokesmodel" segments, since Carridee is actually both pretty and hot. It's another thing entirely when your current contestants make also-rans like Melrose and April, who were competent but medicore in their own seasons, look like Alessandra Ambrosio and Adriana Lima. And it's yet another other thing when Nicole Freaking Richie is the most luminous beauty at a party attended by all your wannabes.

So it is not really surprising that, even in a season in which only one anorexecution could be called "mildly controversial" (that of Dionne over Natasha), this conclusion was both obvious and fitting. Obvious, because neither Renee nor Natasha was capable of winning. Renee not only was hard and old -- let's just say that there's only one reason why a person's husband might move to Twenty-Nine Palms to make more money, and that reason rhymes with Feeling Death Ham Threat A Clean -- but looked it. As for Natasha, perhaps no reality show contestant has prompted as much spirited disagreement in the Spacehold. Spacewoman thought she was cute and funny. I thought she had the neck and jaw of a football player, skin so shiny it looked oiled and polished, a decidedly non-model paunch, wax lips, and a face like it was made up by the same people who brought us Vincent D'Onofrio in Men in Black. I do think I understand why a certain demographic thinks Natasha is pretty -- she is more or less what bad plastic surgeons are aiming for when they build that cheeks-and-lips mask that looks so stupid to those of us who are not plastic surgery fetishists. Given those two finalists, the victory of preternaturally skinny Jaslene, who might be pretty had she not had the ass of a hamadryas baboon grafted onto her chin, was inevitable.

But it was fitting for an entirely different reason. Jaslene's arc was that she was the girl who got booted in the last cuts before they came up with last season's 12 contestants, and that's about right. It may be a stretch to say that all 12 of last cycle's models were better than Jaslene, but it's only a stretch by two or three contestants. So next cycle, Tyra, a little more care in the auditions?

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