Among the categories the academy eliminated are best contemporary jazz album, best traditional blues album, best metal performance and best rock instrumental performance, as well as four classical music categories.
Most particularly, the academy eliminated the red-carpet arrivals area on the street outside the auditorium: a 100-yard runway down the center of Hollywood Boulevard, overlooked by hundreds of screaming fans on bleachers, a kind of celebrity fantasyland where couture met hauteur in a dance of clicking cameras and skimpy gowns.
Jochen Becker, a producer and the president of Zoho, an indie label specializing in jazz and blues that has won two Grammys, each of them in categories that the academy is eliminating, complained that the group had "fixed a problem that none of us here in this room really saw," adding, "We have gone the wrong way on this".
But budget cuts caused the academy to eliminate its marine science major and he left immediately; he spent the rest of his freshman year at Kalamazoo College in Michigan and then transferred to the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.
In a statement issued today, Vijayan vowed that the academies will eliminate the plagiarized material and issue a revised report.
Last April the academy slashed the categories from 109 to 78, eliminating separate trophies for male and female performers and getting rid of individual awards for genres like Latin jazz, Hawaiian music, zydeco, traditional blues and American Indian music.
The academy's plan is "aimed at spurring innovation and eliminating redundant research programs," Larson wrote.
Last April the academy slashed the categories from 109 to 78, consolidating many categories, eliminating separate awards for male and female performers and eliminating individual awards for small genres like Latin jazz, Hawaiian music, zydeco and American Indian music.
Roberto Lovato, a co-founder of Presente.org, said his organization has gathered more than 18,000 signatures on a petition, to be presented later this week, asking the recording academy to reinstate the eliminated categories.
Contending that the Grammys had become bloated and too easy to win in some categories, the trustees, led by the recording academy's president, Neil R. Portnow, eliminated separate awards for male and female singers and did away with individual awards for genres like Latin jazz, Hawaiian music, zydeco and American Indian music.
