Jorge Nunez Advances, Tatiana Blows Her Second Chance
Just a couple days ago we made the bold prediction that American Idol finalist Jorge Nunez was sure to be eliminated, and that Puerto Rico's best chance at the finals was the unlikely possibility that Tatiana Nicole Del Toro would be brought back in the judge's wild card round… boy did we miss the mark on that one. Jorge wasn't ranked 4th out of all the guys, but 3rd overall. And Tatiana finally got a fair shot, she just didn't live up to it.
Thanks to the predictive modeling of DialIdol.com, we pegged the talented Jorge Nunez as a sure bet to get his walking papers. Placing him at 4th on the male side would have meant that, out of 12 contestants, he was ranked somewhere around 6-8 overall. The model has worked well in past seasons, but it was way off the mark this time.
A big part of the reason for the new "best-3" round of finals was to diminish the capacity of sites like Dial Idol and Vote The Worst to hold their normally powerful sways.
Vote The Worst only needed to keep a terrible candidate from falling into last place, a feat that proved easier than you might suspect. Dial Idol, on the other hand, didn’t control who advanced, but accurately predicted it. No such luck on the new system, unless you're Jorge Nunez, who unlike many contestants who obviously already knew their fates, he was as shocked as I was.
And I watched it live. I knew when I saw the results that I'd have some explaining to do. So here I am, and this is my explanation. My apologies to my readers. If you've followed any of my predictive work in other publications, you already know I'm less accurate than multiple-choice guessing, but for those of you who don't know me so well, please accept my humble apology.
The other guess I got wrong was that Tatiana would not be brought back in the wild card round. In all fairness, I didn't know there was a sing-off. Fox hadn't been particularly forthcoming on the process for the wild card, and I believed they were just going to pick their three without an additional opportunity to perform.
Tatiana did get her shot, and like center/centrist judge Paula said, this girl can really sing.
We've seen so little of Tatiana (except in lingerie) that this really was her big (first) break. She once again tackled a larger-than-life song, and although the judges pegged Anoop as a better performer, there's little chance she's not going to hit the bricks, show some hustle, and get that record deal she's been waiting for since pretty much forever.
Why Taitana Didn't Advance
The crying didn't help, as it never does, but the only deal-breaker I can figure (and again, you know how bad I am at guestimating,) had to be the fact that she did the same song… again… for the third time. Despite the beauty and power of the performance, it showed a lack of range that the judges feared would hamper upcoming rounds, and maybe rightly so.
Our only complaint so far had been that the two Puerto Rican finalists didn't get a fair shake. Well, now they have. Jorge Nunez is in the top-12 and Tatiana had two good shots at it. No games, no tricks, and nobody from the production staff feeding her bad advice. They might have fed her some good advice, but the same can be said of just about all of the eliminated candidates.
