7:18 p.m.
Steven Tyler pays lip service to the great piano player Pinetop Perkins, who's in the audience looking leathery and wearing a cowboy hat, no doubt thinking, Boy, I was living in a garage in Mississippi while you were doinking Bebe Buell upstairs at the Mudd Club. Where the hell were you then? Then Los Lonely Boys win an award, and Perkins rolls over in his future grave.

7:25 p.m.
Another lip service, this one for jazz great Art Blakey. But at least they follow him with Alicia Keys, a person so far out of my league that I don't even deserve to be in the same room as her discarded wisdom teeth. She sings to great effect. Then Jamie Foxx shows up to lay down the yellow brick for his Oscar. He does a remarkably hip "Georgia on My Mind" duet with the new woman of my dreams. I briefly want to consider this annoying, but then again, try to imagine Adrien Brody or Roberto Benigni pulling it off.

7:40 p.m.
Jerry Lee Lewis gets a Grammy lifetime achievement award. Jerry Lee is sitting in the audience, looking like he could still bite the head off a rat. "Rock 'n' roll has its fathers, and here are its sons," says Queen Latifah. That means U2. Bono says that his father was a postman with a beautiful tenor voice, and he would like to think he passed that voice on to Bono. Jerry Lee Lewis thinks, I busted my ass for this?

7:46 p.m.
There's lot of lifetime achievement tonight, probably too much, as Led Zeppelin gets a lifetime achievement award. In a case of reverse irony, Green Day wins best rock album immediately after. They're a band far better than Zeppelin, though the sex to their music goes at a much less seductive pace. Those Green Day guys worked damn hard; they deserve it. In the audience, Cyndi Lauper appears pleased.

7:55 p.m.
Queen Latifah informs us that tomorrow morning, "everyone will be talking about the next 15 minutes." Everyone who didn't watch "Desperate Housewives" or the Pro Bowl, that is. It looks like the unstoppable conversation express is being led by the world performance debut of the world's most passionate husband and wife, Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony!

He stands at a purple-lit window that fronts a set on loan from Home Depot. The set parts to reveal J.Lo, wearing a lime-green curtain held together by long strips of silver and gold glitter. She's in what appears to be the honeymoon suite at the world's cheesiest boutique hotel. There's a reason these two haven't sung together in public before. It's because Marc Anthony is humiliatingly better than Jennifer Lopez. At least with Ben Affleck, it was an even match of talentlessness; the equivalent to J.Lo performing with Marc Anthony would be Affleck hitching his wagon to Frances McDormand. I think J.Lo's handlers assume that we'll take the spiciness of their love for granted because they're Latin, but those of us who have truly felt passion cannot be deceived! They walk around the hotel room in what is supposed to be a dance of seduction, but they don't even really acknowledge each other's presence. Mike Wallace and Morley Safer have more sexual chemistry onstage than J.Lo and Marc Anthony.

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