Mark’s Picks for the ACM Awards Tonight

Keith Urban hosts tonight's Academy of Country Music awards show. Keith will also do a song on the show with Pink, who is one my favorites. They will sing "One Too Many."

Social distancing means that we will get performances from several different locations, and I read on ACM's website that all five of the Entertainer of The Year nominees are going to sing a medley to open the show.

Luke Bryan, Eric Church, Luke Combs, Miranda Lambert, and Carrie Underwood are the ETOY nominees. I really feel like any one of these folks deserves to win. But, I believe that this year's trophy will go to a gal. There's just been too much talk coming out of Nashville about equal airplay for women and so forth. And if I have to pick one winner, I think it will be Miranda Lambert.

The awards generally discount newer artists in the big categories, no matter how big of a year that they had. It's hard to see anybody who had a bigger year than Luke Combs, in my opinion. The obvious exception to the rule is Chris Stapelton. He wins all the time with very little airplay on country radio.

Because of the perceived slights to the newer artist, we can't just ignore the year that he's had. Luke Combs is my pick for Male Vocalist.

Female Vocalist is a three gal race for me. Miranda Lambert, Carrie Underwood, and Maren Morris. Since I gave ETOY to Miranda, I'll take Carrie Underwood for the win.

For Duo, I'll take Maddie & Tae only because I think that both the ACM's and CMA's are going to have to promote some of the younger acts.

The ACM's actually had their first award show before the CMA's did. The Academy of Country Music started to promote artists who were more popular on the west coast than they were in Nashville. Artists like Glen Campbell, Roger Miller, and Buck Owens.

As to why we still have two separate award shows for country music, I can only guess that some folks have some power that they don't want to give up, like they would have to if the two organizations would merge.

I always enjoy the country award shows because it's the business that I'm in. But also because they generally far less political than others tend to be. That being said, if one of tonight's performers takes a knee, I'm changing channels and never playing anything from that artist again.