DWTS Week Eight: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Tonight, there were only five stars left on “Dancing with the Stars” to battle it out for spots in the semi-finals next week.  These stars are Nancy Grace with pro partner Tristan MacManus, Rob Kardashian with pro partner Cheryl Burke, Ricki Lake with pro partner Derek Hough, Hope Solo with pro partner Maksim Chmerikovskiy, and last but not least, J.R. Martinez with pro partner Karina Smirnoff.  The dance levels varied widely, and so did the performances, but everyone did as well as they possibly could.

That said, it’s time for some serious critiquing. 

Best of the night: J.R. Martinez/Karina Smirnoff.  I’ve said this before, but Martinez is so good that he often looks like a male pro until he makes a mistake, or has his body in a position a male pro would not take.  Martinez is the class of this field, and he had an outstanding night tonight.

Prediction for tomorrow: Safe.  (Easily.)

Second best of the night: Rob Kardashian/Cheryl Burke.  Kardashian moves stiffly and doesn’t pick his feet up off the floor very often, but he’s shown the most improvement.  Both dances tonight were good.

Prediction for tomorrow: Probably safe.  (Should be, but may not be depending on the strength of his fan base.)  If he hits the B2, he’ll go home.

Third best of the night (tie): Ricki Lake/Derek Hough.  As always, Hough’s choreography was outstanding, but Lake is hurt and it’s very easy to tell.  She was good, but not outstanding; Kardashian was actually a little better, and he has far less talent than does Lake.

Prediction for tomorrow: Bottom 2, will be retained for semi-finals.  (Once again, if Kardashian hits the B2, he’s gone.)

Third best of night (tie): Hope Solo/Maksim Chmerikovskiy.  They danced better than I’ve ever seen them in both dances.  They received the “kiss and make up” edit, and the “most improved dancer” type of remarks; they’re not going anywhere.

Prediction for tomorrow: Safe.

Fifth and last:  Nancy Grace/Tristan MacManus.  I really like MacManus, as I’ve said before; he is a consummate professional, and he has done the best job he — or anyone else — could’ve done with Grace.  Ms. Grace is stiff and does not move well, and by this point she is badly outclassed by the competition.  This is not merely due to her age (she over 50) or how short she is, or that she’s a fuller-figured woman.  (I am a big, beautiful woman myself, so I don’t really care about that.)

Nope, it’s none of that.

Purely and simply, it’s a combination of two things:

1) I don’t like her attitude toward her pro — she seems to be blaming MacManus for why she hasn’t improved, not realizing that at some point natural talent (or the lack of it) has to apply.  Maybe Grace would do better at some of these dances if she had more time to study it — that’s almost surely the case — but her complaining about her busy schedule and then saying that MacManus “doesn’t have a full-time job” was just wrong.  (Doesn’t Grace realize that teaching her anything has to be the toughest full-time job MacManus has ever had?)

2) Her tango was, at best, tepid.  She was given better scores than she deserved, and better comments, too, in her first dance, probably because the judges had seen Grace do the jive last week and knew she was terrible.  Her second dance, the “instant jive” (all of the couples had to do this), was awful despite the best efforts of MacManus to showcase her in a positive light; it was so bad that head judge Len Goodman actually told Grace that her time at DWTS was just about up.  (I kept expecting him to add the words that usually follow those, “Don’t let the door hit you in the rear on the way out.”  But he didn’t; he left those words unsaid.)

Prediction: B2.  Will go home.  MacManus will breathe a sigh of relief, and so will those of us who watch DWTS.

But my predictions are just that . . . I’m not omniscient, omnipotent, or omnipresent, either, so it’s possible that someone else will go home instead.

What do you think, America?

DWTS Non-Shocker: David Arquette Goes Home

Is it just me, or did the fact that David Arquette went home tonight on “Dancing with the Stars” rather than Nancy Grace seem like a total anticlimax?

Last night, I predicted that if Arquette hit the bottom two (called the B2, for short), he’d go home because I believed his fan base was most likely lower than either Grace or Hope Solo.   Arquette danced better, in my opinion, than either Grace or Solo, but in a reality show competition, how many people are willing to vote for you is the major thing that either keeps you in or sends you home (that’s what I mean by a fan base).

Consider that Solo is one of the best-known female athletes in the world as she’s the goalie for the United States of America’s national soccer team.  So you’d figure she probably has a much bigger fan base than Arquette and Grace, as she did not hit the B2 tonight.

As for Grace, while she’s really not a good dancer, she has two things on her side: her partner, Tristan MacManus, who many DWTS fans have taken to as he’s a delightfully low-key presence, and her own show on HLN (formerly CNN Headline news), where she’s actually called in to her show and asked her viewers to text her number to keep her in.

This week, we were told who was definitely in the B2 — sometimes, they only say “one of these two really is in the B2, while the other may or may not be” — and it was definitely Arquette and Grace.  This means that Grace’s huge fan base probably won’t be enough to save her next week, considering by any objective measure, Solo’s should be far higher — and the other three dancers (including Rob Kardashian, of all people) are all much better than Grace, so are likely to outscore her by plenty.

What I know from watching DWTS for years is this: when a good dancer who’s improving is booted “too soon” by the viewers (this was Arquette’s role tonight), the judges get tough the next week on the undeserving person (or people) who stayed instead of him.  Grace’s time should’ve been up several weeks ago but she’s outlasted several better dancers, now including Arquette; watch for the judges to be in an uproar next week and give Grace the extremely low scores she’s likely to deserve no matter how much the judges approve of her pro.