Archive for January, 2008

Belated addition to the Heath Ledger cacophony of mourning

Published by Rob on January 27, 2008 in Celebs, Films and Oscar Fever. 0 Comments

So normally at this point in the end of January I’d have written, like, six posts about the Oscar nominations, kvetching about everything from the complete and utter shafting of my favorite 2007 movie (Zodiac) to the deafening homoerotic undercurrent of almost all of the Supporting Actor nominees (look closely, it’s there).

But Tuesday’s untimely passing of Heath Ledger harshed even my Oscar buzz, and I mean that in the most sensitive way possible. And I don’t think there’s really any way to properly reflect on it apart from saying that, even if it didn’t mark the most groundbreaking example to date of a mainstream actor plunging headlong into the role of a gay romantic lead, Heath’s Brokeback performance would be one for the ages. And that more than anything else, it really felt like the beginning of something, not only for gay audiences, but for Heath, who had lifted his game to an unexpected level.

It has been bothering me for weeks that Cate Blanchett, amazing though she is, has been receiving the lion’s share of the attention for Todd Haynes’ fucking awesome quasi-Bob Dylan fantasia I’m Not There. Ledger (as a reluctant movie star who’s playing a version of Folk Singer Dylan in a biopic-within-the-movie) brings much of the ground-level humanity that this conceptual art project of a movie couldn’t quite do without. His breakup embrace with Charlotte Gainsbourg, scored to “Idiot Wind,” is the most beautiful moment in a movie where just about every shot deserves its own undergrand semiotics seminar.

All the more reason to include the movie on your pre-Oscar Catch-Up List, I guess.

The 2007 Oscar Nominations [Movie City News]

How to destroy your modeling career in 9 months

Published by Rob on January 16, 2008 in Career Suicide, Celebs and Famous PEN15s. 2 Comments

When it comes to hating Matthew McConaughey, we’ve never been prone to mincing words.

So it was with customary horror that we accepted today’s news that M Squared is becoming a daddy. And, you know, acknowledging it. And ruining the future of a perfectly nice-looking 24-year-old model in the process.

There are a number of things we find offensive about McConaughey: His propensity for dropping the “g” in every gerund he uses (see his official babydaddy statement, in which he refers to the fetus “growin’ in [Alves’] womb”); the fact that he hasn’t even attempted to appear in a good movie in at least six years; and the extreme pleasure he appears to take in his own physique, to the point where its overexposure causes us to question everything we thought we understood and admired about the male form.

For these reasons and many more (dude, at 38, it’s time to lose the Blue Lagoon hairdo) we fear for this child every bit as much as we fear for whatever flotsam emerges from a Spears family birth canal.

Matthew McConaughey and Camila Alves expecting first child [Celebrity Baby Blog]

Overdosing on Bush

Published by Rob on January 13, 2008 in Films, Oscar Fever and TV. 0 Comments

No, the title of this post does not refer to the charges in Michelle Rodriguez’s latest arrest.

It’s my reaction to foolishly watching the first 10 minutes of NBC’s misbegotten Golden Globes-but-not-really telecast, in which Access Hollywood-amatons Billy Bush and Nancy Odell announced the winners in each category. If the network had trimmed the fat and just had Bush and Odell run through the nominees and winners, it might have been a moderately tolerable 20-minute news break.

But no, somebody thought it would be a better idea to pad the telecast to a solid hour, so as to allow Bush and Odell to air their own editorial opinions on each winner. Imagine my surprise when, after announcing that Cate Blanchett had won the Best Supporting Actress award for I’m Not There, Bush announced that he was surprised Amy Ryan hadn’t won, because Blanchett “was just doing an impression of a man.”

Yeah, thanks Roger Ebert. And kindly fuck off.

The hour also included multiple airings of a home video of zaftig, 19-year-old Hairspray nominee Nikki Blonsky and her obese New Jersey family learning of her Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy nomination, in which Blonsky screams, convulses like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, and knocks over a coffee table. I’m not sure what happened next, because by the end of the video I was in the bathroom vomiting up everything I’d eaten in the last six hours. It was like 1 Girl, 1 Couch.

Eventually I realized that I could switch to E!, which was airing the somewhat-less-unbearable live press conference, which I guess was feeding into NBC’s bloated circle jerk.

Hopefully this car wreck will serve as a Worst Case Scenario quasi-olive branch that’ll put an end to the Writers’ Strike. Because, come late February, if I have to watch Mary Hart announce the winner of the Best Picture Oscar, I’m going to impale myself on one of the Cable ACE Awards available for $5 on eBay.

Global cooling

Published by Rob on January 3, 2008 in Celebs, Oscar Fever and TV. 1 Comment

I’ll be honest. The news that the striking Writers’ Guild is officially going to picket the Golden Globes, thereby scaring away all the nominees and presenters, is really bumming me out.

Obviously it makes sense within the context of the strike (although WGA members are allowed to work on Letterman and the SAG Awards? Huh?), but it still seems like yet another example of this strike’s tendency toward Audience Punishment. I say this as someone who would race to his computer for a “2 Girls, 1 Cup” marathon before watching 5 seconds of NBC’s American Gladiators revival. (Speaking of which, I love that they’re marketing that show as a 300 ripoff, rather than the sorry excavation of early ’90s dross that it is.)

The Globes are stupid and trashy and, by all accounts, easily purchased. But we need them, especially in January, when a nation of loudmouthed heterosexuals are frothing over the NFL postseason. Isn’t this year’s entire awards season kind of like a Julie Christie postseason? Casey Affleck, Amy Ryan, Ellen Page and others all had really awesome and justly celebrated career breakthroughs this year, and I want to see how they look on the red carpet, dammit. Javier Bardem got a lot of attention for that terrible haircut he had in No Country for Old Men, and he deserves the opportunity to remind people that he looks really, really good in a tux.

So, even in the spirit of complete solidarity with the writers, I have to say that this sucks.

UPDATE, 1/7/08: NBC and the HFPA have somehow MacGuyvered a way to broadcast the awards show without actually broadcasting the awards show. Is it worth me staying home and getting ‘faced on champagne? Probably. But I’ll probably be flipping back and forth to the Desperate Housewives rerun on ABC.

Golden Globes, WGA at odds again [Variety]