How the Grammys, set for Feb. 10, will be affected by the writers strike is the subject of an NYT Jeff Leeds story:

The Grammy Awards on Feb. 10 were supposed to be a balm to the ailing music industry, a 50th-anniversary celebration of artistry and longevity at a time of mass layoffs and sharply declining sales. Instead the music world began bracing for the latest havoc from the continuing strike by Hollywood writers, as a stalemate with the Writers Guild of America threatened to force record labels and organizers of the Grammy Awards to proceed with a show with severely diminished star wattage.

This is of course another dispatch from the “it couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people” desk. Interesting tidbit farther down in the story: “Grammy organizers said the show would proceed even if striking writers picket the ceremony, held at the Staples Center arena here.” If that happened, we will be able to see which pop, rap and rock stars find it expedient to cross a picket line. You can be sure that Kanye West will walk past strikers, starving children, and the bleeding to get to the ceremony; but the story also specifically and pointedly mentions Alicia Keys, who has performed for the striking writers, and the Foo Fighters, both of whom are also on the show’s current schedule.

The Foo Fighters are playing because, in a classic piece of Grammys randomness, it was suddenly decided that Dave Grohl had made one of the best records of the year, a distinction his former band never received.

Entertainment industry awards show range from the defensible (for better or worse a scrupulously overseen accounting of Hollywood’s feelings about itself) to the indefensible (just about all the others). The Grammys are a special case, existing in its own category of badness, for many but particularly these three reasons:

• Decades of awards that consistently fall upon on a spectrum ranging from the haphazard or the absurdist to the silly and the just plain wrong. To ask how the Foo Fighters become an album-of-the-year band is to ask why Evanescence (or Maroon 5, or Paula Cole, or Hootie & the Blowfish) was a best new artist, or why U2, after a 20-something-year career, is suddenly routinely winning album, song and record of the year awards.

And whatever happened to Christopher Cross, anyway?

• Michael Greene, the renegade NARAS CEO, and MusiCares, the worst charity in the history of the world. The Academy let Greene run wild for so long that the LA Times’ Chuck Philips and Michael A. Hiltzik eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the corruption. Among other things, MusiCares was found to have devoted about one percent of the money it raised to, uh, caring.

• Speaking of corruption, the Grammys, as you know, reflects the members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences’ views of the best recordings of the year. Since those members, as we have seen, are boneheads, but also, and more importantly, because the group makes a ton of money of its awards show on TV each year and has to beef up ratings, its leadership devised a crafty scheme some years back. (This aspect of the Academy’s voting procedures is almost never mentioned in coverage of the awards.) It allows a secret committee secretly to revise the nominations in the top four categories. (Album, song and record of the year, and best new artist.) This allows the leadership to proceed with a show that might not only contain fewer embarrassments but also, not coincidentally, feature a nominations lineup of artists with a bigger fan base than, say, latter-day Steely Dan, not to mention a younger one.