‘American Idol’ top 9 results: Jessica Sanchez performs; did Lazaro Arbos survive?

Thursday night’s “American Idol” was at times boring, at times fun, and for a good seven or eight minutes, a lengthy commercial for Jessica Sanchez. After seeing that she got both an introduction piece and a performance of her new single “Tonight,” you cannot argue about whether or not the show is supporting her following her second-place finish last year.

We hope that after watching Sanchez work the stage with Ne-Yo tonight, we hope that some of the current contestants take this as a sign that it really wouldn’t hurt them (seriously) to perform an uptempo song for a change.

In moving forward to the actual results, we have to say first and foremost that we warned you about this. We like Lazaro Arbos a lot as a guy, but if we’re being totally fair to him, his performance last night was the worst. He’s said online that he didn’t get to perform the song that he wanted, and maybe that was the reason why he struggled, but unfortunately this is the way that the competition works sometimes.

Thankfully, the show got rid of that annoying “X Factor” rip-off in ranking the contestants, and instead just told us who among the contestants was safe to go on for another week. We saw Devin Velez and Paul Jolley coming to an extent given last week … and we also predicted Amber Holcomb. As we said in our preview article Wednesday, she seems to be in danger thanks mostly to the fact that she is surrounded by other strong women, and her style is not as discernible.

But did Amber really go home? No. Instead, the man otherwise known as Nicki Minaj’s whipping boy in Paul Jolley was forced to sing for his life. You knew that he wasn’t going to get the save, and the voters this season are almost living in a bizarro world where they actually protect the female singers, and the good-looking male country singer gets sent home.

What do you think about the results this week? If you want to also check out the studio performance of Jessica’s single, you can do so over at the link here.

Photo: Fox