I feel terrible for exploiting the Christian Bale Terminator Salvation rant tape for multiple posts in a matter of hours, but these two items just happened to pop up next to each other in my feed reader, and the convergence was just too much too ignore (and anyway — I’m allowed one “What? It’s meta-criticism of the media coverage!” post every now and then, right?)
You have to wonder how a story like this generates at the Wall Street Journal. Basically, Tom Cruise and Sumner Redstone––the Paramount chief who very noisily severed Cruise’s deal with that studio––had lunch. Cruise wouldn’t comment. Redstone did, rather extensively. So are we to assume that Sumner Redstone got home from lunch and started calling reporters? Because he really thinks it’s in his best interest to go around talking about how he accepted a lunch invitation from the movie star he previously declared to be too insane to work with?
I’m running out the door, but discuss among yourselves.
In a recent post titled “Something Not Worth Seeing,” KY lubricant spokesman Perez Hilton, with his usual wit, class and delicacy, declared that Oliver Stone’s yet-to-shoot George W. Bush was was not his cup of tea. “We’d rather go see the Rachael Ray life story….on Lifetime!” was how the blogger put it, writing in the second person presumably based on the assumption that he speaks for an entire nation. To punctuate his assessment of the unmade Stone film’s quality, Mr. Hilton playfully altered a photograph of the actress cast as Laura Bush by painting a disembodied, semen-spewing penis over her lips.
Not content to leave the matter at that bit of MS Paint protest, when the next casting announcement for Stone’s film hit the wires, Hilton once again saw fit to inform his public that W does not bear the coveted Perez Hilton seal of approval. “We still don’t think we’ll spend money to watch it,” Hilton sniffed at the news that James Cromwell and Ellen Burstyn had been cast as the Bush parents. “We wouldn’t watch even if it were free.”
Why doth Perez protest so much? He can’t be a closet Bush protector––in the second post, he refered to our Commander in Chief as “arguably America’s worst president ever. And dumbest!” So I wonder: does Hilton know something about Stone’s not-yet-existent film that we don’t know? Perhaps in addition to his skills at cock-drawing and self-promotion, Perez Hilton has been gifted with clairvoyance?
Scott Kirsner passes along the news that even though the Academy has an official Oscar YouTube channel, they’ve so far failed to use it to showcase clips from last night’s show. Not only that, but they have YouTube hard at work removing clips from the show uploaded by other users––this clip, and this one, and this one were all removed within three hours of their upload.
And not only THAT, but with the exception of a clip from last year’s Jack Black/Will Ferrell/John C. Reilly medley, most of the recently uploaded clips from actual Oscar telecasts date back to the 75th edition of the show––which, of course, took place in 2003. So if you’re just now getting around to blogging about Adrien Brody kissing Halle Berry, you’re in luck! Or, you would be, if the entire channel didn’t disable embeds.
Chris is coming up with a list of things the Academy can do to improve telecast ratings, so check back later this afternoon for that. But this kind of thing has got to be one explanation for last night’s show doing so poorly. The new generation of celebrity porn addicts don’t even know they’re supposed to obsess about the Oscars, because the Perez Hiltons of the world are instead blogging about Jennifer Aniston’s frozen eggs, because at least they have visual aids for that.
Young girl with problems writes song about said problems; song becomes major international hit, thus putting girl in situations that feed those same problems; girl hits rock bottom one month before major awards show and a big, public deal is made of getting her help for the problems she said she didn’t need help with in the song; shy and contrite but somehow still aggressive, girl performs the now-mythic song on said awards show; almost immediately thereafter, she is told via television monitor that she’s won a major award for the same song; over the course of a few seconds on live television, she falls apart, asks for help and then miraculously and brilliantly regains her composure––thus essentially reenacting the above cycle in a compressed space; girl is welcomed, problems or not, back into the embrace of semi-polite mainstream culture.
I’ve expressed my doubts about the media event that is Amy Winehouse before. I don’t deny that the girl has been photographed in some bad situations, but the whole crack video to rehab to Grammy triumph trajectory just seems a little contrived, a little too perfect a story of celebrity redemption. But whether her much-documented problems have been exaggerated, or even underplayed, there’s no denying the power of the clip above as an exclamation point on the end of this narrative. Just those few moments where she appears to be taking in the news of her Record of the Year win via the satellite monitor, and her face cracks and her hands grip for something that isn’t there––this is Judy Garland stuff. You can’t make that shit up.
A couple of blogs and pseudo news sources have picked up a story from WENN (the World Entertainment News Network, kind of a Reuters for gossip, except, as far as I can tell, WENN does very little original reporting and mostly culls news items from magazine interviews) claiming that Natalie Portman “regres” her “nude scene” (it seems imprecise to call a single pose, shot in slow motion, a “scene”) in Hotel Chevalier.
I say we can safely take this with a grain a salt. The WENN story doesn’t site a source, and just three days ago, Portman was quoted in a Hollywood Reporter story as saying the nudity “felt right.” But more importantly: Natalie’s not stupid–she went to Harvard. She’s gotta know that if she’s really serious about launching an online startup which may or may not involve lifecasting, then she couldn’t have engineered a better early promotion than getting naked on the internet.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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I feel terrible for exploiting the Christian Bale 
