Lainey Wilson: CMA Awards Gig And ETOTY Reign
Lainey Wilson is one of the hosts of tonight’s (11/20) CMA Awards, which will air live on ABC starting at 8 PM ET. Lainey is a multiple nominee, and of course, is an Entertainer of The Year nominee this year. She won that award last year.
The country superstar has been busy all week doing interviews, and rehearsing for the show. She talked with us about the privilege of being invited to the CMA awards and, of course, her nomination for Entertainer of the Year.
She said, “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to being invited to the CMA‘s, being nominated for CMAs, much less being in the batch of people nominated for Entertainer of The Year. They’re all my buddies, they’re all people I look up to and people who have kind of helped me along the way.”
She added, “My name being mentioned along theirs is pretty cool. I love this year being the reigning CMA Entertainer of the Year. I feel like I tried to dig my boots in a little bit and prove to some of the folks why the CMA chose me to be Entertainer of The Year.”
As for co-hosting, she offered, “Being able to give [co-hosts] Peyton [Manning] and Luke [Bryan] a hard time and just have fun with it. It’s a fun night to celebrate country music.”
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She even talked a little smack going into tonight’s (11/20) co-hosting gig, saying, “I am nervous that I might whoop Peyton and Luke’s butt. I’m gonna put them to shame. That’s what’s gonna happen, you know. I’m gonna show ’em ‘I’m here.’ They asked me to be a co-host, and I’m gonna show ’em why.”
It will be Lainey‘s first time co-hosting an award show, and it should be a show to remember.
Wilson said in a recent red-carpet TV interview, “I am pumped! I mean, even as a little girl, watching the CMAs, it was like a big family function for us. We looked forward to it… We would watch rodeo, or we would watch the Country Music Awards!”
Luke Bryan, one of her co-hosts for the night, said of her, “I think Lainey’s got the personality to come right into the mix with me and Peyton. And we’ll just have to see what kind of alcoholic beverages Lainey prefers about midway through the show.”
Wilson is also up again for the night’s top honor of Entertainer of the Year and she said she thought it would be “pretty wild” if she won Entertainer of the Year two years in a row. Lainey said she thinks if she did it would “mean a lot for the girls in country music.”
