Honestly, I'm not ever really impressed by the BET Awards, but I can at least enjoy a nice portion of it and feel like that I actually got a little something from it. However, this year just did not impress me at all. Before I go any further, I will say this; I know that they almost changed the entire show in order to celebrate Michael Jackson and I understand that, but even then, I felt that it still could have been better. I do give them a little slack though because if it wasn't for that, it might not even be worth this blog.

I have to say that I thought Jamie Foxx did an excellent job at hosting the show. I thought he did all that he could, but he still couldn't save it. Unfortunately, I think that too much of the show was taken up with trying to pay homage to Michael. I think it would have been a lot better to just have a 30 minute to hour segment in honor of him and then the rest of the show could have gone on the way that it was supposed to. Instead of that, they tried to change the award show into a tribute show, throwing in awards and performances inbetween. I think that is where they went wrong and it took away from the show.

There may have only been about three good performances during the show, the first being Jamie Foxx's performance with T-Pain (who really needs to stop wearing that chain) and Travis Barker (this is not including his Michael Jackson moves at the beginning which was hilarious, especially the moonwalk). The second was the O'Jays tribute which I thought was very good. Those are always pretty special. They really knew how to get down back in the day. I wish our generation made songs like that. Wishful thinking I guess. Finally, the duet Jamie Foxx and Ne-Yo did was excellent. That was probably the best thing they could have done for MJ and I thought it really came out nice. The rest of the performances I wasn't really impressed with and the Young Money perfomrance was absolutely horrible. I mean I know Drake tore his ACL, but he got up to the stage, they couldn't at least put him in the middle so everybody could see him! Then to make it worse, nobody else on the stage did anything to save the performance. It just killed everything.

I was talking about this with some of my co-workers and we all agreed that they should have had a small portion of the show go towards Michael's remembrance and then dedicated a completely different show strictly to Jackson. I know, easier said than done, but I have a feeling that most people would still show up for that kind of produciton. It doesn't have to be as drawn out as the award show, but if they set it up the same way with performances and speeches focused solely on Michael without distraction of awards and everything else, it would make for a great show.

Trying to fit in everything that wasn't originally planned reuined even the smallest things, namely showing all of the nominees in certain categories (until the end, which just made it look worse). The transformation from an award show to a award show/tribute took away from both the awards and the tribute. I thought that the show was affected more than the tribute, which was still actually pretty good, but I still say that there should have been a small tribute during the show and then another show strictly dedicated to Michael later on. Regrdless, there were a couple of nice moments. Here they are...(sorry for some of the bootleg videos by the way, but Viacom got all the good ones on lock lol)

But, no matter how bad I thought the show was, the worst came before the show even started and something that BET had no control over it. That sorry excuse for a father Joe Jackson got on TV and had absolutely no remorse that his son just passed. Instead, he was more concerned about promoting his new business ventures. It was a true disgrace. I hadn't even seen the interview until this morning, but I already thought that throughout the show he didn't seem to upset about the hit his family just took. When I saw this interview, I knew for a fact that he didn't care. Just check it out for yourself.