The general feeling of 'well it could have been worse" comes from the fact that the bar has been getting lower and lower year after year. The last years of the previous regime had plenty of "who's that?", head scratchers, and yawners. Inadvertently, they've been slowly grooming us to have this shoulder-shrugging reaction to this year's crop.
Had these picks come right after the first decade or so of the Honors
(Marian Anderson, Fred Astaire, George Balanchine, Richard Rodgers, Arthur Rubinstein, Aaron Copland, Ella Fitzgerald, Henry Fonda, Martha Graham, Tennessee Williams, Leonard Bernstein, James Cagney, Agnes de Mille, Lynn Fontanne, Leontyne Price, Count Basie, Cary Grant, Helen Hayes, Jerome Robbins, Rudolf Serkin, George Abbott, Lillian Gish, Benny Goodman, Gene Kelly, Eugene Ormandy, Katherine Dunham, Elia Kazan, Frank Sinatra, James Stewart, Virgil Thomson, Lena Horne, Danny Kaye, Gian Carlo Menotti, Arthur Miller, Isaac Stern, Harry Belafonte, and Claudette Colbert)
we'd be having quite a different reaction.
Of course, it's not entirely a fair comparison as that first decade had more than 1/2 a century of American culture to pick from. But, still.
Sister George
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