How Spring Sing’s mystery celebrity judges are selected

About a dozen celebrity judges grace the Spring Sing stage each year to flash a smile in the spotlight and determine the best performers. Paula Abdul, Kathy Bates, Dennis Quaid and Beth Behrs are just some of the celebrities who have officiated in the past few years.

Who are the celebrity judges for Spring Sing 2016? That information is confidential except for Ian Bohen from “Teen Wolf,” who accidentally spilled the beans on Twitter before deleting his tweet the next day. The only two stars officially announced for this year’s show are Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, who will receive the George and Ira Gershwin Award for Lifetime Musical Achievement on behalf of their band, the Who.

After seeing the celebrity judges appear briefly on stage before disappearing to their seats, students are left to wonder what the role of the judges is: How are they selected, and why are they kept secret until the day of the event? The Student Alumni Association (SAA) judges and awards directors can provide the answers.

Alex Taylor, a second-year financial actuarial mathematics student and one of the judges and awards directors, said SAA likes to keep the judges’ names a secret so they can add judges and accommodate last-minute cancellations. The celebrities who actually come to the event to judge are never set in stone until the last minute, he said.

Grace Hunter, a second-year political science student and also one of the judges and awards directors, added that the directors don’t want to promise people judges only for them to not show up.

However, according to fourth-year Design | Media Arts student Kara Logan, this year’s George and Ira Gershwin Award director, dropouts are much less common for the award, even though previous winners like Alanis Morissette, Stevie Wonder, Julie Andrews and Frank Sinatra are huge celebrities.

Once the recipients of the award are locked, they always come to the show to receive their award, an indication of how much they value being honored by UCLA, Logan said.

Selecting the George and Ira Gershwin Award winner is a long and tedious process, Logan said. The search begins in winter quarter, when the directors create a list of possible recipients with illustrious music careers of over 20 years. The Who was contacted through the charity they created, Teen Cancer America, which has a wing at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, Logan said. The fact the band is currently touring the country made it logistically convenient, Logan added.

This year, nine awards will be given out to the participants of Spring Sing, and the celebrity judges will score each act of the night. Taylor and Hunter said the celebrities’ appearances at Spring Sing and the fact that they come for free justify the hard work that goes behind booking them.

Each year, the judges are given score sheets with different criteria for judging each type of performance, Taylor said. The judging criteria include vocal quality, meaning how accurately the performers hit the keys and notes; performance, which evaluates the entertainment quality of the act; and musicality, which has to do with the song choice and execution.

Maggie Pa, a third-year sociology student, said the celebrity judges add to the glamour of the event. For Yoonbin Cho, a third-year comparative literature student and previous Spring Sing attendee, the celebrity judges are an important part of the event.

“The celebrity judges may not be the biggest reason students go to the Spring Sing, but they definitely inspire the performers just to be able to perform in front of them and get their appreciation,” Pa said.