With her appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards last night, Britney Spears has accomplished what I thought was impossible. She made me feel sorry for her. [Watch video here.]
Ill-prepared and out-of-step, she stumbled her way through a lip-synched performance of her already-average single “Gimme More” looking so dazed and confused that it was almost too painful to watch.
You know the stock dream where you’re naked and everyone’s laughing and pointing at you? Well, Brit lived it out for everyone to see, except she was wearing a spangled bikini that was too small for her.
It starts out bad, with Spears moving so slowly that you can almost hear her counting out choreographer instructions in her head: “One, two, breast jiggle, walk, walk, grab the guy’s crotch. Oh wait! I messed up, y’all!”
And it only gets worse. By the end, she had even stopped lip-synching and turned her back to the camera, like an “American Idol” wannabe who forgot their words. When you’re this unprepared, it’s time to call in sick or as Sarah Silverman suggested in her own awkward performance to claim, “I have diarrhea.”
Not only did Spears torpedo her “comeback” chances, she turned herself into an international laughingstock – something all her previous no-underwear-wearing, umbrella-wielding, car-crashing actions had not yet fully done. Her fans were rooting for her to succeed last night, but that will become increasingly harder to do when she looks like she didn’t even try. Or care.
PHOTO: Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press.