A good while back, I was envisioning a Grammy-night dogfight between what, at that point, were my two favorite albums of 2011: Lady Gaga's Born This Way and Paul Simon's So Beautiful or So What. (Both ended up on my Pazz & Jop ballot.)I mentioned this to Maura and she said, "No. Adele." Up went my vision in smoke. Still, I figured the Englishwoman would at least be looking back in passing at the Egg Lady and Mr. Grammy together. Of course they'd both be nominated, I figured. Gaga is Gaga, and Simon's album wasn't simply his strongest work since Graceland—after many, many plays (none for work, incidentally—I didn't write about it), I think So Beautiful might be his best album, period.

Obviously, my predictions didn't mean anything. Gaga has nothing to worry about, but not only wasn't Simon nominated for Album of the Year, he wasn't nominated for anything at all. This for a guy who managed a 2001 Album nod for the outright dud You're the One—never mind that he's one of only three people to win three times for AOTY: in 1971 for Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, in 1976 for Still Crazy After All These Years, and in 1987 for Graceland. Simon may stew over "coming in second" to Bob Dylan all these years, but this year was his chance to at least try to pull ahead of fellow three-Album winners Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder (whom Simon thanked in 1976 for not "mak[ing] an album this year") in the Grammy sweeps.

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For the last twenty years, the award for Album of the Year, the biggest Grammy honor of them all, has tended to go to two types of people: young women and old men. Female solo artists under 30 (Lauryn Hill, Taylor Swift) and male veterans over 40 (Tony Bennett, U2) have dominated the category for two decades with only a few exceptions: the youngish male rappers in Outkast, the wide range of musicians on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, and the thirtysomethings in the Dixie Chicks and the Arcade Fire. This year, that pattern's unlikely to be broken, with only one of the five nominees falling outside either of those two categories.

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The 54th Grammy Awards mark the combination of the Best Hard Rock Performance and Best Metal Performance awards into the single category Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance, which is why Mastodon and Sum 41 are up for the same award. Historically, the metal category has been one of the most confounding, with oddities like Judas Priest winning for a new live version of a song originally released 23 years earlier, Motörhead winning for a cover of a then-22-year-old Metallica song, and Metallica actually being honored for a track from St. Anger.

In addition to the pros and cons of each nomination, we've helpfully included whether each group is listed on Metal-Archives.com, a database that serves as the genre's gatekeeper by barring its doors to those bands deemed not brutal enough to ride to Valhalla.

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The Grammys have a determinedly behind-the-times history, and Song of the Year is one of the ceremony's most reliably old-fashioned categories. It's given to the songwriter—even though what constitutes a "song" today is a lot different than when the Grammys began in 1959, back when sheet music was still a major music-biz income source. Usually the nominations overlap heavily with Record of the Year (which is given to artist and producer), with a couple of differences, sometimes confusing ones. (Take 2010—since when was Beyoncé's "Halo" more of a "record" and "Single Ladies" more of a "song"?) This year, the category seems like as much of a straight shot as the other Big 3 (Album and Record). But as with everything the Grammys do, from picking the nominees to putting on a show, there's always the possibility of surprise—last year looked like it belonged to Eminem, and he got shut out. It's highly doubtful that'll happen to Adele, whose "Rolling In The Deep" is nominated here, but with Grammy, you truly never know.

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In this week's Voice I wrote about Skrillex, the emo-dude-gone-dubstep-auteur who's spawned a bunch of funny-Photoshop blogs and garnered five Grammy nominations. One of the categories he's nominated in is one of the Big Four—Best New Artist, which seems to have shaken off its "one-way ticket to obscurity" stigma (recent winners include Maroon 5 and probably Woman Of This Year Adele). But does he have any chance at all of winning this genre-spanning category on Sunday night, and introducing those American viewers who aren't familiar with the EDM circuit to his aesthetic? In the first of a series of oddsmaking posts on SOTC over the next few days, we handicap his odds against The Band Perry, Bon Iver, J. Cole, and Nicki Minaj.

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53. Phil Collins, "Another Day in Paradise" [1991]

52. The 5th Dimension, "Up, Up and Away" [1968]

51. Olivia Newton-John, "I Honestly Love You" [1975]

50. Celine Dion, "My Heart Will Go On" [1999]

49. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, "A Taste of Honey" [1966]

48. Bobby McFerrin, "Don't Worry, Be Happy" [1989]

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The Album of the Year nominees, as presented by Katy Perry.

Last night's Grammy nominations show was full of pomp, eyeliner, and people on Twitter becoming very confused. Here's the complete list of nominees; below, 20 questions that we're still wrestling with some 14 hours after the broadcast signed off.

1. "Super Bass": Robbed or totally robbed?

2. Now that Rihanna is officially an Album Artist thanks to her Album of the Year nod for Loud, are critics going to rush to reevaluate Talk That Talk before they file their Best Of '11 lists?

3. A song from freakin' Family Guy gets a nod in the Best Song Written For Visual Media category but the Lonely Island's "Jack Sparrow" doesn't? Come on.

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D.L. Anderson

Aw, why so glum?

Tonight's Grammy nomination concert, airing at 10 p.m. on CBS, will not only jam-pack a bunch of performances by the likes of Lady Gaga and Jason Aldean into its 60 minutes, it'll also let us know which artists will be prostrating themselves in front of the globe and thanking their families and God during next February's awards ceremony. Sure, Adele not getting as many nominations as humanly possible for her much-beloved, best-selling 21 is probably the most shocking development that can transpire this evening, but there are other questions afoot, too. Will the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences allow Taylor Swift to look surprised again and nominate Speak Now for multiple awards? Will Kanye West get honored for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy a year after it was greeted by nearly across-the-board critical love? Will the ambition all over Lady Gaga's Born This Way pay off in nominations? And is Bon Iver, currently racking up the "Best Album Of 2011" laurels from the likes of Paste, slated to rep for "indie" next February a la the Arcade Fire this year? Nick Murray and I answer these questions, and offer our picks for the Big Four categories' nomination slates, below.

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Jason Aldean uses the royal "we" so often that you're half-tempted to ask for whom else he's speaking. Yet Nashville's newest king comes by the grammatical flourish honestly: Barring a last-minute surge by Lady Antebellum or the kids in the Band Perry, Aldean's My Kinda Party is almost certain to end up as the best-selling country album of 2011, thanks in large part to the crossover successes of "Dirt Road Anthem" and "Don't You Wanna Stay," his killer duet with Kelly Clarkson. Earlier this month Party beat out records by Taylor Swift and Brad Paisley for Album of the Year honors at the CMA Awards, and tonight Aldean is scheduled to appear alongside Lady Gaga and Rihanna on CBS's live Grammy-nominations special. I recently sat down with him prior to a show at L.A.'s Gibson Amphitheatre, where he performed "Don't You Wanna Stay" with an enormous video version of Clarkson that reminded me of Apple's famous "1984" commercial.

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The lady sitting atop both of Billboard's major lists this week has made enough news in 2011 that I'm tempted to rename this column "This Week in Adele." The British thrush is certainly making enough sad news these days, canceling her tour and preparing to undergo much-needed throat surgery. But in happier news, her inventory of rarified chart achievements just keeps getting longer—so much that stat geeks like yours truly have begun to imagine the truly exceptional, hall-of-fame-level feats she could yet pull off.

First, this week's stats. Adele holds at No. 1 on the Hot 100 for a fifth week with her wistful ballad "Someone Like You." Added to the seven weeks "Rolling in the Deep" commanded the list in the spring, Adele's 12 chart-topping weeks in 2011 represent the longest cumulative run at No. 1 since the Black Eyed Peas held the penthouse for fully half of 2009's weeks. Among women or solo acts, it's the longest run in a year since Mariah Carey's 15 weeks ruling the Hot 100 in 2005 with two singles ("We Belong Together" and "Don't Forget About Us").

The bigger news is on the album chart. By sliding back into the top spot on the Billboard 200 for a 13th week (out of 35 weeks on the chart, all but one of them spent in the Top Three), Adele's 21 becomes the first album to surpass a dozen weeks on top in more than a dozen years. Back in 1998, the Titanic soundtrack ruled for 16 weeks; among albums released since then, 21 just overtook Santana's Supernatural, a 12-week leader in 1999-2000.

Switching from chart position to Soundscan, 21 has now crossed four million in sales (another 106,000 sold just this week). Adele is the first artist to sell that much of a single disc in a single year since, again, Carey in 2005, with The Emancipation of Mimi.

So, this much is certain: With only about a month left in Billboard's "chart year," which ends on November 30, and two-plus months left in the calendar year as tallied by Soundscan, Adele is going to have the top-selling album of 2011, by any measure. It's not even gonna be close: the year's second-best seller thus far, Lady Gaga's largely petered-out Born This Way, is at 1.9 million, less than half of Adele's still-piling sales.

It's also the safest of bets to assume that 21 is going to clean up at the Grammys next February. In particular, the prestigious, show-closing Album of the Year trophy is all but in the bag.

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