Sunday night at the live tent revival/shotgun marriage of pop culture and musicianship, aka the 2014 Grammy Awards, was an interesting affair. It showed that the industry can still put on an entertaining show where borders are crossed and records were broken.

Let’s start with the good stuff though. Daft Punk became the first electronic act to pull off Album of the Year while claiming four other awards. Lorde breezed over a perceived Best New Artist snub in favor of the far more prestigious Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis steamrollered Best Rap Song, Best Rap Album, and Best New Artist, proving their independent model to be far superior to the competition.

The performances were, as always, some of the year’s most notable moments of creativity, collaboration and passion executed with a trained headsman’s precision. Beyoncé and Jay-Z showed off the power of their marriage with a steamy opening of “Drunk in Love”, despite Hov dropping questionable Ike Turner references.

Metallica roared through their classic “One” with classical pianist Lang Lang riding sidecar to their six hundred horsepower metal. Kendrick Lamar and Imagine Dragons teamed up for his “m.A.A.d City” and a “Radioactive” remix where Lamar asserted dominion over everything in vocal range with his freestyle, and Daft Punk and Pharrell teamed up with Stevie Wonder for “Get Lucky.” 

Of course, the clear winner was Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s performance of “Same Love”, wherein 33 gay couples were married in one history-making musical number that even Madonna’s appearance couldn’t sully. And everything was topped with a liberal sprinkling of awkward white girl dancing (thank you Lorde and Taylor Swift).

Yet despite the performers’ best efforts to prop the whole thing up, the Academy of Recording Arts made themselves look like out-of-touch jerks and provoked vicious criticism from the public.

During the finale featuring Nine Inch Nails, Queens of the Stone Age, Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham, and Dave Grohl, commercials were slapped over the end of the performance before cutting it off entirely, provoking a vicious response from NIN’s frontman Trent Reznor. It was one of the most anticipated parts of the show, and to treat several legends of rock with that kind of crudeness is disgusting. It also shows that rock no longer enjoys any kind of love, at least not from the Grammys.

The most divisive issue of the night was Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s success in the rap categories, none of which were televised. In particular, fans raged over favorite Kendrick Lamar walking away with nothing despite seven nominations, which was an unforgivable snub considering how far he’s come.  

People have unfairly directed their criticism though. It isn’t Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s fault for winning, especially considering they almost weren’t even put in the rap categories at all. They haven’t done anything except make music, and there’s no way of arguing they didn’t deserve a Grammy, although perhaps not for Best Rap Album.

Yet critics still attack him for appropriating rap, or gay rights as a means of enhancing his image. Macklemore himself has been cautious of his place in hip-hop, ever since his first album, and even publicly stated that Lamar should have won and yet “got robbed” (ironic message since his album is called The Heist).

It sucks that the Academy can’t get it together and stop insulting the people at the top of the uplift, despite all the potential the Grammy Awards have to be a great event.