Well well, maybe that American Idol Judge’s Save gimmick wasn’t as hopelessly poo-headed as we all thought.

Just look at Matt Giraud. Everyone figured that, after his save last week, he’d be kicked off American Idol last night. But no. Instead Matt Giraud remains on American Idol, while Lil Rounds and Anoop Desai got booted.

So does this mean that Matt Giraud will win American Idol? No, it means that he’s slightly better at singing than Anoop Desai and Lil Rounds. But we know rape alarms that are better at singing than Lil Rounds and Anoop Desai, so whoopty bloody doo.

It’s been a long time coming – so long, in fact, that we’ve already formed entirely fictitious memories of how perfect life was back in the early stages of the season – but American Idol has finally revealed its top five contestants. And it’s with some degree of authority that we can declare that this year’s American Idol will be won by either Adam Lambert, Dead Wife Bloke, That Other Man, A Woman or Whichever One We’ve Missed Out.

And, whatever you think of American Idol, you’ve got to hand it to the show – that sure is one talented bunch of people who’d largely go unrecognised in the street.

However, although we’re thrilled that it won’t be long before everyone gets to stop pretending that Adam Lambert isn’t very obviously going to win American Idol, we’re a little sad that Lil Rounds and Anoop Desai were kicked off American Idol in a double elimination last night. A little sad, mind you. Maybe sad is the wrong word. We noticed that Lil Rounds and Anoop Desai were kicked off American Idol last night. There, that’s better. Reuters reports:

Rounds, who sang “I’m Every Woman,” and Desai, who performed “Dim All the Lights,” had both faced elimination in recent weeks by repeatedly placing among the bottom vote-getters, and both seemed resigned to their fates. “I’m still really disappointed,” Desai, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, said during the program. “I’m coming home,” added Rounds, addressing her husband and three children.

The elimination won’t have come as a surprise to Lil Rounds, who’s been informed week after week that she’s a terrible singer, but Anoop Desai really put the effort in for this week’s American Idol. By which we mean that he didn’t shave for a couple of days. You know, like George Michael. Or that homeless man who threw a bottle at us when we caught him going through our bins the other day. He deserved more.

But although it’s the end of American Idol for Lil Rounds and Anoop Desai, they can still return home with their heads held high. After all, not all of us can say that our life peaked during a two-month period of time when a smug British man with bad hair and granny teeth consistently mocked our lack of ability and stage presence in front of an audience of millions, can we? No. Not all of us can say that.

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Ah, American Idol Disco Night – a tradition right up there with visiting elderly relatives and hereditary bowel disease.

Honestly, why? Whose idea is it to keep bringing Disco Night back to American Idol? If it isn’t someone who has a financial interest in those cross-channel ferries than run a nightclub service to Calais every month with music by a middle-aged local radio DJ then we’ll be surprised. American Idol Disco Night is terrible.

So what happened on last night’s American Idol? Some people with funny haircuts sang some uninteresting disco songs in a mediocre way. Don’t you watch American Idol?

Because each season of American Idol lasts roughly – and this is just a ballpark here – 400 years, it doesn’t take much for the show to look stale. And, for all sorts of reasons, that’s exactly what happened on last night’s American Idol. Here’s why…

1 – It was Disco Night on American Idol last night. Disco Night, for crying out loud. There are only two places where disco music – or at least the disco music chosen by the American Idol contestants – should be heard. Wedding receptions and hell. Provided that wedding receptions aren’t automatically a direct subcategory of hell, of course. And we need hard proof that they aren’t. In summary, disco music makes us want to kill ourselves.

2 – In terms of the zeitgeist, American Idol has been blown clean out of the water this week by Britain’s Got Talent and, specifically, Susan Boyle. Nobody wants to see pretty young starlets wiggle and writhe through zippy performances any more – they only like hearing depressing songs performed by dumpy little sasquatches who look like they pick their dinner out of their hair every evening. Plus, screw you Danny Gokey. You’ve got a dead wife? So what? Susan Boyle has got fairly big eyebrows. That’s tragedy.

3 - This far into American Idol, we can start to see through each contestant’s palette of tricks and gimmicks. So when Adam Lambert slowed down If I Can’t Have You enough to let him pull an array of faces that made it look like he was being sucked off by something startling like a dinosaur or his grandmother, it wasn’t a surprise. That’s what Adam Lambert does every single week on American Idol. Similarly, when Lil Rounds was rubbish and a bit embarrassing to watch during her performance of I’m Every Woman, that wasn’t a surprise for exactly the same reason.

In fact, the most interesting thing we can honestly say about last night’s American Idol is that Anoop Desai didn’t shave beforehand – something that Paula Abdul singled out as an example of his artistic growth. We haven’t shaved for over a week. We think that makes us Ernest Hemingway. Thanks, Paula!

But still, because Matt Giraud inexplicably got saved from elimination on last week’s American Idol, two performers have to get the shove tonight, and that has to be a good thing. Or is it? We’ve just realised that we’ll get two goodbye performances instead of one this week. And they’ll both be disco songs. Arses.

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Last night American Idol sang songs from the movies – specifically the movies with dreadful power ballads in them.

Honestly American Idol, Songs From The Movies? Be more broad next time, we dare you. Why not have a Songs That Exist night? Or, if you feel that’s too constricting for your audience, why not have an Arbitrarily-Chosen Ambient Sounds night? Would you watch Lil Rounds give a heartbreaking performance of Dot Matrix Printer Paper Jam? Because we bloody would.

Anyway, because last night’s American Idol was about films, the show booked Quentin Tarantino to be the guest mentor. Which was weird.

American Idol is one of the biggest shows in history because it understands. It understands that, with Blindy being eliminated last week, the roster of inexplicably bad American Idol contestants is drying up. And without anyone to laugh at, American Idol becomes the worst thing it could possibly be – sincere.

But as we said, American Idol understands this and took two genius measures last night to stop this from happening. These were:

1 – Only letting Simon Cowell comment on about 50% of the performances, much to his obvious chagrin, and

2 – Bringing in Quentin Tarantino to be the contestants’ mentor as a way of promoting his new film, even though he has no obvious musical ability and his new film has the words ‘bastards’ in the title so nobody on American Idol could specifically refer to it by name.

But still, with Quentin Tarantino as the mentor on Movie Night, maybe he’d help to choose some typically idiosyncratic song choices. Perhaps Stuck In The Middle With You, or Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, or The Love You Save (May Be Your Own) by Joe Tex. But, no, that didn’t happen either. Instead we basically got smacked over the head with a lot of genuinely bad power ballads. Most of which seemed to have been recorded by Bryan Adams, depressingly.

But despite all this obvious nonsense, what were the American Idol performances actually like? Drearily standard, to be honest. Lil Rounds wasn’t as good as people expected her to be, Danny Gokey cried because he’s got a dead wife, Anoop Desai pulled a face that was a little bit ‘stalker’ and a little bit ‘rapist’ during Everything I Do (I Do It For You) and Adam Lambert magically transformed Paula Abdul into the world’s worst Yoda impressionist. Exactly what we’d expect at this point in the competition.

So with that in mind, who’ll be chucked out of American Idol tonight? On the basis of last night’s show, Lil Rounds. But who knows? All we can say about the American Idol results show with any certainty is that it’ll have about 15 pointless performances by people we don’t like in it, it’ll go on for roughly nine days longer than anybody really wants it to and we’ll seriously consider impaling a giant metal spike through our eyes and face about 15 minutes in. So, you know, nothing new.

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