With the 2012 Grammy Awards upon us and everyone already thrilled for the big Beach Boys / Foster The People / Maroon 5 reunion (finally!), let’s take a second to remind ourselves of something we all already know and complain about every year: The Grammys are, without a doubt, the weirdest and most arbitrary awards show in the entire entertainment world.
To re-prove this time-tested theory, we’ve scoured Grammy’s checkered past and compiled some of its most bizarre winners in a desperate search of some meaning for this odd gramophonic statue. From the awesomely-random to the just flat-out terrible, here’s a list of 13 People You Can’t Believe Won A Grammy:
1. Zach Braff
Without rehashing the internet’s eminent disdain for Garden State, let’s just take a moment to acknowledge that an actual physical golden gramophone was given to Zach Braff for being the “compilation producer” of the third-date-mix that was the Garden State Soundtrack. Nothing against the actual music, but if burning Nick Drake onto cds to impress people is award-worthy, most of us earned that Lifetime Achievement Award by sophomore year of college.
2. Mikhail Gorbachev
The former Head of the Soviet Union won a “Best Spoken Word Album for Children” Grammy for his contribution to a 2004 recording of Peter And The Wolf, though it might’ve been a make-up win after his failure to be recognized for having inspired a decade of award-worthy hilarity from Yakov Smirnoff.
