A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

I DON'T WANT TO MISS A THING DESPITE MY FEVER AND THE FACT THAT I AIN'T GOT YOU: Justin Guarini! Lloyd from Entourage! Big-time handlebar mustaches! And nine performances, none of them awful, but none tremendous:

• Judges' Picks: YDA and Syesha -- perfectly lovely. Look, I think "If I Ain't Got You" is a song so classic and perfect that we'll be it hearing sixty, seventy years from now when our grandkids are getting married, so I'm glad Syesha handled it so well. David Cook, however, was better: your face, your face, your face, your faaaaaaace! was a nice way for him to do something different (if predictable) with it.
• Singers' Picks: There are few songs with the word "boo" in them as a noun that are singers' songs, and that Chris Brown uptempo number isn't one of them. YDA shouldn't sing any song that requires movement, and whoever I read this week that suggested he sing some Coldplay ("The Scientist"?) was more right than this song certainly was. Syesha's "Fever" looked a little better than it sounded, and I'm not sure that it told us anything new about her. And David Cook ... yeah, nothing new. But nice. No one seems to want to win this competition. Say what you will about Jordin Sparks now, but her peak performances ("I Who Have Nothing", "Broken Wing", "You'll Never Walk Alone") were a lot better than anything we've seen since Hollywood from this final three. Okay, except for Cook's "Music of the Night".
  
• Producers' Picks: Yes, we all have scandalous tattoos of Dan Fogerburb Fogelberg; that doesn't mean we didn't need to hear that crappy song again. Ever. I could survive the rest of this competition without another superfluous Syesha singing run, and probably will. And David Cook, David Cook, loved it ... until the unnecessary shift to a Rock-and/or-Roll ending. Worked much better just the way it was, because it wasn't making me think about how he didn't sound like Steven Tyler.

Let me make a modest prediction: none of the final three this season will be terribly successful as recording artists. However, we haven't heard the last from Josiah Leming yet.

Fienberg: "Look, I've criticized David for doing the same thing week-after-week, but as his songs tonight have proven, what David does he does very well and he's incapable of doing anything else. Why would he change? What would be the American Idol advantage to David showing range he doesn't have? It's up to the producers of his album to decide if he can really sell a CD with 12 socially aware power ballads. Archuleta's job is to win a reality show and he isn't going to do it by singing Chris Brown."

Zulkey: "I am not feeling this final three at all. Maybe I've been watching Idol too long or it's been on too long or I'm too jaded, but really I just think these particular kids seem too hard and polished. They don't seem like they LOVE to sing, like Carly did, or that they get a boner just by being on stage, like Danny Noriega did. I'll continue to root for David Archuleta because I don't want his dad to hurt him next week if he doesn't win."

Sepinwall: "I vastly prefer David C's schtick to David A's, but the longer the season goes on, the more he starts to seem like yet another 'Idol' one-trick pony."