All-Star weekend wasn't really about basketball

Denzel Washington and Jack Nicholson were in Los Angeles' Staples Center Sunday night. Oh, and some guys played basketball there too.

Will Smith, Ashton Kutcher and Jay-Z got more airtime sitting courtside than Paul Pierce and Dirk Nowitzki did on the court at the NBA All-Star game, as TNT apparently decided that average Americans wanted to see the celebrities watching the game, not the NBA stars playing in it.

Indeed, the All-Star festivities verified two things that we already knew about the NBA. First, the West, which prevailed 136-132, is better than the East. Second, the NBA's primary concern is in the business of entertainment, not basketball.

After the Super Bowl debacle, the NBA wanted to make sure performances stayed PG at the All-Star game -- so they invited Christina "my middle name is most definitely not wholesome" Aguilera to sing the Star-Spangled Banner. Seriously, if there is anyone this side of the adult entertainment industry who could top Janet Jackson's little accident, it's Christina. To her credit, she stayed clean, but butchered the anthem.

And if Jackson wasn't allowed to show her breasts on Super Bowl Sunday, why can Outkast sing "Drip drip drop there goes an orgasm, now you coming out the side of your face" on All-Star Sunday?

That didn't stop the rap duo from being the real MVP of the weekend, even if Shaquille O'Neal was the one hoisting the trophy at the end of the night. Outkast was simply omnipresent on Sunday. The backbeat to their hit Hey Ya played in the background during player introductions (Kevin Garnett attempted a fairly unsuccessful dance, although nothing on par with Mark Madsen or Bill Belichick). They chilled with Paris Hilton in $7,000 seats. They performed live.

They weren't the only ones, of course: Beyonce performed too, making her entrance from the ceiling on a giant ball and prompting the always entertaining commentator Charles Barkley to say: "I think gay people have a right to get married, that's their own business, but when you see Beyonce, why would you want to be gay?"

If Barkley was the most entertaining media member, Craig Sager was the most annoying -- again. A year after ruining Peja Stojakovic's moment in the sun as three-point contest winner by reminding him that his Sacramento Kings could have beaten the Los Angeles Lakers in the previous year's playoffs if he had shot as well, Sager was at it again this weekend.

This time, he tried to persuade Toronto Raptor Vince Carter to ask coach Rick Carlisle for more playing time (Carter almost bit). Sager also played a part in one of the most ridiculous (and most amusing) ploys in recent history when he gave an outlet for Ron Artest to campaign for a shoe contract.

Sager did a courtside interview in which he showed Artest wearing two vastly different looking sneakers, one Nike and one Adidas. Artest complained that he didn't have a shoe contract but thought now that he is an All-Star it is time he deserves one, so he put out an open call to companies.

Of course, Artest might need to be more than a year removed from those nine flagrant fouls and that domestic dispute which resulted in ordered counseling sessions before he gets that luscious shoe contract.

Actually, never mind. This is America: the more violent and scandalous, the better it sells. Bring on the shoe commercial.

Shaq already has his own shoe, and his 24 point, 11 rebound, nine dunk performance showed why. He led a dominant West squad, but the East led at halftime and managed to hang tough on the basis of a speed-up game, with Jason Kidd and Allen Iverson throwing up alley-oops to Vince Carter, Kenyon Martin, and Tracy McGrady.

So the basketball, when it was actually being played between all those commercials, crowd scanning, and celebrity interviews, was pretty entertaining. The rest of the time? Let's just say Starr Jones getting proposed to by her boyfriend at the game was the last thing we wanted to see when we tuned in to watch Yao Ming shoot a turnaround jumper.