Good news, Washington: our vicarious American Idol dreams live on! Despite a performance of “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” that prompted criticism even from Paula Abdul, D.C. resident Antonella Barba has made it through the show’s first round of voting.
Nice as this is to hear, it’s not unexpected. DialIdol.com, a site that provides autodialing software and analyzes the incidence of busy signals to gauge voting volume, predicted that Barba would finish safely in the top 3.
What accounts for Antonella’s success? She’s certainly an attractive woman, but there’s reason to think that’s not all that’s at work: Vote For The Worst, a self-explanatory site that’s been gleefully attempting to short-circuit American Idol for the past few years, selected Antonella as their pick for this week.
But there may be more to it than that. On the basis of some comments floating around the D.C. blogosphere, we thought that our local girl might be the contestant that America loves to hate. But, based upon DCist’s cutting edge American Idol Misogynometer technology (which consists of searching technorati for contestants’ names plus the word “bitch”), it appears that she’s just in the middle of the pack:
And of course, there is one more thing: the pictures. Alas, the Internet is a cruel place, and MySpace users propelled to fame often reap a bitter harvest. The pics should probably be considered NSFW, although they are SF-Network-TV. There’s no point in trying to hide something on the Internet, so we may as well invite those of you who can’t resist the electronic voyeurism impulse to click here.
Will this endanger Antonella’s chances? So far she seems okay — most of the pictures floating around merely depict her as a woman who likes to party. It seems safe to say that the show’s producers are aware of the pics, but it seems unlikely that they’re enough to justify canning a popular contestant.
But we’re still not sure that even a combination of spoilerism, civic pride and prurient interest will be able to push her all the way through to the finals. Here’s hoping!
Screencap by Flickr user faithx5, used under a Creative Commons License
