Though the blogs and news media would have you believe the final battle for Idol’s crown is “too close to call” it’s fairly evident from a quick survey of social media sites that Adam Lambert will be in the finale.  This means that the fate of Danny Gokey or Kris Allen will be decided on the results show, Wednesday May 13, 2009.

But is this really any surprise?  With the Paula Abdul predicting Adam’s victory from the very first performance show, Randy Jackson statement that nobody could touch him, and Simon Cowell’s anointing of the mascara clad screamer on Tuesday’s performance show, it’s clear that the he is, and has been for some time, the judges’ favorite.

Whatever the results, it has been a bumper year for American Idol. Not only have the televisions ratings been consistently among the highest, they’re received record numbers of phone calls for several of their shows this season. Even new social networking web 2.0 applications such as Twitter have felt the fire from Idol’s heat with “Adam Lambert” and “American Idol” knocking even “Oprah” and “Swine Flu” from the top twitter trends.

But the season hasn’t been all milk and honey. In fact, it has been one of the rockiest seasons to date. The instability started with the format change. The episodes were shortened, sped up, and (did I forget to mention) they added a fourth judge. Kara DioGuardi (who just happens to have a home mere miles from my house in Maine) took her place between Randy and Paula on the judges table, for better or worse. The producer, singer, talent scout extraordinaire was brought on to breathe new life into the show (and possibly replace one of the judges as there were rumors floating around that either Paula or Simon were calling it quits after this season.) But from the start it appeared that not only did the fans not care for Kara, some of the judges had not-so-nice opinions about her as well.

Indeed Paula said that Idol was designed for three judges and three judges only, that the four judge format “just doesn’t work.” Meanwhile, Simon was experiencing some regret about bringing Kara on as well, with rumors floating about that she and he never even spoke to each other off camera. This was all due to Kara’s gung ho, go get ‘em attitude that she expressed quite clearly in the audition section of the show. While the other judges had been comfortably dealing with rejecting idol hopefuls and dashing dreams, Kara focused much more on their clinical talent, not really understanding that Idol was a “singing” talent show that wasn’t.

That doesn't even start to scratch the surface of a season which included bleeped curse words, horrible lip syncing, bizarre "mentors,"and on stage mishaps including injusries and destruction of part of the set.

And then there’s the infamous Judge’s Save. The judges were given the power to save one Idol hopeful from elimination this season (for one week at least) to prevent what happened to Chris Daughtry and Michael Johns from happening again. The judges chose to save Matt Giraud (Matt G) from elimination but his stay was only prolonged for another two weeks. In order to accomplish this, Idol had to send two hopefuls home the very next week and thus came to an end Anoop Desai’s and Lil Rounds’ bid to be the next American Idol. Was it worth the save?

What does all this mean? And who will win the coveted crown of pop stardom? Even though the judges seem to have already given the honor to Adam Lambert, even they seem unsure if he has what it takes to win. Simon was quoted in TV guide as saying that America will vote for Gokey in the end yet, on the Today Show, he said that Adam would win.

In the end, if Adam wins, Idol wins but America may just be the biggest loser.