So many deserving, yet-to-be acknowledged men and women who actually work in and contribute to the film business, and here goes the Academy making a choice that’s quite obviously geared toward television ratings as opposed to merit:

Hollywood Wiretap:

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has selected actor James Earl Jones and makeup artist Dick Smith as recipients of this year’s Honorary Awards. And, in something of a head-scratcher, Oprah Winfrey will be honored with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

The Academy’s board of governors voted on the awards on Tuesday night. They will be conferred at the 3rd Annual Governors Awards on Nov. 12 at the Grand Ballroom at the Hollywood & Highland Center.

Winfrey, best known for her TV contributions, received an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress for her film debut in 1985’s “The Color Purple.” The Hersholt prize goes to someone “whose humanitarian efforts have brought credit to the industry.”

Deadline Hollywood Daily:

Suffice it to say that of all the lousy decisions made by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and its Board of Governors, choosing Oprah Winfrey to receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award has to rank among the worst. This Oscar statuette is supposed to be given “to an individual in the motion picture industry whose humanitarian efforts have brought credit to the industry”. …

(more…)

College drop-out know-it-all, do-it-all Gwyneth Paltrow is the epitome of a spoiled Hollywood brat who was raised in privilege, never told no, and made to believe her every thought was brilliant. The Paltrows must have been the type of liberal parents who handed out trophies to the losing soccer team, because daughter Gwyneth is a hopeless victim of undeserved “Good job-ism” gone wild.

An average kid with moderate talent, since her late teens, between acting, mothering, cooking, and singing, Gwyneth Paltrow has subjected America to incessant rounds of painful “No wait…let me start again,” off-tempo renditions of Für Elise followed by impromptu tap-dancing exhibitions by a grown woman who might as well be dressed in a tight pink tutu.

Gwynie (I like to call her Gwynie) is an attractive woman with a superior gift of imitating British accents.  Ms. Paltrow started her career in Hollywood when her mother, actress Blythe Danner, and her father, the late director Bruce Paltrow, together with family friend Steven Spielberg brokered a deal and got her a starring gig in the movies at 19 years of age.

An unabashed recipient of Hollywood nepotism, after winning an Academy Award for Shakespeare in Love Gwyneth was crowned the “Muse” of Miramax studios by film producer Harvey Weinstein.  Since that day, Gwyneth has been nothing short of unbearable.

Raised in Massachusetts, Gwynie moved back to Los Angeles where her career and love life with Brad Pitt took off. Paltrow traveled the world, and now speaks British-style English, French, Spanish, and a little Italian. Gwen even married a temperamental British rock star – Chris Martin of Coldplay – who she’d never have met without the benefit of a VIP backstage pass.

(more…)

Oprah Winfrey’s new cable network OWN is already in trouble. Does the talk titan really think bringing  on board a woman too obnoxious and full of hateful crazytalk for the “The View” is going to help.

Meet the woman who moves into Oprah’s studio this fall:

—–

You have to love freedom of speech, if for no other reason than how it allows us to see who these people really are.

Heckvua choice there, Oprah!

OWN is foolish to gamble millions on a woman who is obviously too full of herself and her own insane ideas — fire can’t melt steel – to sustain any kind of following on daytime talk again. Rosie shorted out sometime during this 1999 Tom Selleck interview and has only gotten worse in the decade since. She’s toxic to anyone not living within 4 square miles of downtown Manhattan and Los Angeles.  Unfortunately, the people who make most of our pop culture decisions never leave that bubble and are unable to grasp that Rosie is a slow motion train wreck already in progress and a long way from stopping.

(more…)

—–

Yeah, okay NBC, except that in the movie the Michael Douglas character didn’t get all sanctimonious about serious issues and then trot off to do an appearance on Oprah.

Anyway, let’s add complete lack of imagination to Obama’s growing pile of failures. After all, who plagiarizes the worst part of a movie?

Jonathan Strong at the Daily Caller:

(more…)

Tina Fey claims her mean-spirited Palin impersonation backfired on her “30 Rock” ratings. The low-rated show remains on the air, though. Because, you know, Hollywood is so money driven. Looks like Oprah’s now worried about the same.

If this report is true, it makes sense. The Queen of All Media has OWN, a full-blown network to get off the ground and, frankly, how much help would Oprah be this time around? Obama needed her in his 2008 primary race against Hillary Clinton, but unless the Secretary of State challenges the President, Oprah can sit this one out. Anyone she could convince to vote for Obama is likely to anyway, so there’s really no compelling reason to risk further polarizing her audience.

Oprah was a factor against Hillary, though. Believe that.

PopEater:

Now as the 2012 election process has officially begun, sources tell me this time around Oprah’s support will be much more private.

“For 2012, much has changed for Oprah. She now has own cable channel called OWN that has been struggling to find an audience — she isn’t going to do anything to alienate them,” a TV insider tells me. “Unlike in 2008, when a drop in ratings didn’t matter as much for the queen of TV, Oprah is now fighting every day to get people to tune into OWN.”

(more…)

Hollywood loves war, it is their glory. War lines the pockets of Hollywood liberals while giving them a forum to moralize their position at the cost of box office totals. And war is what most Hollywood lefties turn to when they dream of marching the streets with blood made of sugar-water and red-dye number three on their phony hands.

In 2002 a group of Hollywood stars met to discuss ways to protest the war in Iraq. The meeting took place in a private swanky home, only an hour or so after President Bush took to the airwaves to announce the commencement of the military conflict.

The group — called themselves Artists United to Win Without War — with merry huckster members Susan Sarandon, Ethan Hawke and Jessica Lange speaking out from the east coast. The Grand Poobah of this rank and file of brilliant geopolitical-analysts was none other than Rob Reiner. The rest of the troops were made up by Sally Field, Blythe Danner, Christine Lahti and husband Thomas Schlamme (director of The West Wing), MASH star Mike Farrell, Dharma & Greg’s Mimi Kennedy, Bradley Whitford and then wife Jane Kaczmarek, writer/director Audrey Wells, producer Robert Greenwald, actress Fionnula Flanagan, TV stars Lindsay Wagner, Daniel Benzali, Sharon Lawrence, David Clennon and rising star Troy Garity, the son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. (This group has grown to over 140 members.) It was announced at the event that the Barbra Streisand Foundation was donating $5,000 to keep the group going. I assume the donation was for the Russian beluga and Crystal served to these wealthy Democrats by the Venezuelan help on loan from Hugo Chavez.

It is in the very heart of Hollywood, as misguided and self-serving as it is, to march in the streets, to make movies about their positions, and to yell like banshees: “War is not the answer!” The problem with Hollywood celebrities shouting anti-war babble is their inability to ask the question, “Without war, where would Hollywood be?”

(more…)

If there is a line to get into hell the man standing at the front is author and habitual literary-prevaricator James Frey. Frey, one of those writers who in their misguided youth got hooked on drugs, stole things, got in fights, went to jail and then wrote an autobiography about it.  His was titled, “A Million Little Pieces.” Problem is, most of his story was made up and Oprah’s book club busted him for it.

Meet James Frey

What’s a shameless author to do to get back into the good graces of the New York literary world while hoping to conjure up a Hollywood movie deal? Offer a sacrifice to their godless imagination in the form of a new novel entitled, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, staring Jesus, an alcoholic bachelor who sleeps with prostitutes and marries gay couples. The other gimmick placed atop Mr. Frey’s inane offering is a limited U.S. print run of 10,000 slip-cased leatherette copies, as well as 1,000 collector’s editions signed and numbered by the author.

Mr. Frey said in a 2008 interview the book is his “idea of what the Messiah would be like if he were walking the streets of New York today.” His Jesus — or Ben Jones – is apparently a drunk who impregnates a prostitute, smokes pot and fools around with men. “It doesn’t matter how or who you love. I don’t believe the messiah would condemn gay men and women,” Frey said. Judas, meanwhile, would be the “same as he was two thousand years ago”, a “selfish man who thinks of himself before the good of humanity, who values money more than love.”

(more…)

——

Tonight: (more…)

—–

What he had said was too volatile and I felt that his statement, which I won’t repeat, seems wrong to me because Muhammad Ali is a Muslim. Is he responsible? Is that what you’re saying, Bill, that it was him or Kareem Abdul Jabar? You mean they did that?

Whoopi Goldberg is all too happy to give fugitive director Roman Polanski the benefit of the doubt, to put an asterisk next to his raping and sodomizing of a 13 year-old girl, because in Whoopi’s world world if you can spring her from Barbara Walters’ hen-house and get her back on to a real film set, your rape and sodomy don’t quite qualify as rape and sodomy. But Bill O’Reilly is a racist devil for not hyphenating the word “Muslim” with “extremist.”

When O’Reilly said what he said the whole world knew what he meant, including Whoopi and Joy as they cluck-cluck-clucked their way off the stage. The idea was to try and tar O’Reilly as a racist and of course to feel sanctimonious about themselves…

And who knows, maybe there was an egg somewhere off-stage getting cold. (more…)

Headphone connects to the neck bone
Neck bone connects to the arm bone
Arm bone connects to the hand bone
Hand bone connects to the Internet
Connected to the Google, connected to the Government

So begins /\/\/\Y/\ by rapper/pop star/activist M.I.A., cutting to the heart of the cultural sea change wrought by the Internet.  If there are only six degrees of separation between us and the feds, who monitor as much of our communication as they can, what’s the point of trying to keep anything private?  It’s an introduction that piques our interest and prepares us for an uncensored albeit uneven look into the mind of an indie critical darling who, with fame, is losing the political edge that made her famous.

The Sri Lankan refugee, real name Maya Arulpragasm, has named her last two albums after her parents: Arular after her father, a Tamil political activist, and Kala after her mother, who raised her in Wimbledon after Sri Lanka erupted into civil war.  Those albums created an exhilarating synthesis of exotic world rhythms, Western hip-hop attitude, subversive political references, and an ADD-addled, pastiche production style that does for music what Dogme 95 only wishes it could accomplish in film.

Starting out, M.I.A. proclaimed that she wanted to make her music about something more than the superficial fluff that normally populates the airwaves:  “Every bit of music out there that’s making it into the mainstream is really about nothing,” she’s quoted as saying.  “I wanted to see if I could write songs about something important and make it sound like nothing. And it kind of worked.”  With controversial name-drops of the PLO and rants against corporations, her lyrics swapped the sweet nothings of tween-targeting songwriters for the shrill nothing of her art school peers.  Regardless, her style injected fresh life into the hip-hop world, which Jay-Z famously declared had entered its “hair metal phase.” (more…)

—–

Sorry, I’ve been away. Was in Los Angeles doing some media hits for the book, but now I am saddled with jury duty, which is what I’m doing today, and tomorrow. I hope I am able to do the show tomorrow.

 Tonight Billy is hosting. Hang in there!

(more…)

—–

The Radio Equalizer:

[F]resh from declaring “communism” as the answer to dealing with corporate misconduct in America, O’Donnell actually appears to agree that Jews should depart Israel for Germany and Poland, especially since (GET THIS) THE OVENS ARE GONE!

Yup, the next Oprah: (more…)

[Rosie] O’Donnell said she wanted to “build on what Oprah began and excelled at for 25 years, in my own style and with new adaptations and ideas.”

(more…)

[Rosie] O’Donnell said she wanted to “build on what Oprah began and excelled at for 25 years, in my own style and with new adaptations and ideas.”

(more…)

[Rosie] O’Donnell said she wanted to “build on what Oprah began and excelled at for 25 years, in my own style and with new adaptations and ideas.”

(more…)

[Rosie] O’Donnell said she wanted to “build on what Oprah began and excelled at for 25 years, in my own style and with new adaptations and ideas.”

(more…)

I must have missed the groundswell of support and the public clamor for the return of Rosie O’Donnell to the daytime airwaves.  It seemed that her time in the cultural spotlight had passed following her notorious 2008 variety show failure (It was hailed by one merciful critic as “dead on arrival”) and her exile to a daily Sirius XM radio show that caters to creepy shut-ins and those unlucky listeners who can’t figure out how to tune-in to Howard Stern.  But like some sort of loudmouthed, frumpy, left-wing vampire who just won’t stay in the ground, she is threatening to rise again with a terrifying plan to replace Oprah once the Queen of Daytime TV retires in 2011.  Someone in Hollywood, please – break out the garlic.

Of course, I’m hardly Rosie’s daily television show target demographic.  I work for a living instead of sitting at home staring slack-jawed at the succession of Sham-Wow commercials and ads for shyster lawyers promising big payouts for the imaginary injuries of their deadbeat clients that fill the time between inane segments of mindless yak.  And while the social parasite demographic seems to grow larger after every freebie, hand-out and pay-off the Administration and its Congressional flunkies issue in favor of their employment-averse constituents, Rosie O’Donnell still seems like a bad economic bet.

This is no longer the same country as it was back in 1999 when Rosie was honchoing her first daytime gabfest and hassling Tom Selleck over his support for the Second Amendment of the Constitution.  It’s not even the same country as it was in May 2007, when the former “Queen of Nice’s” anti-conservative bile culminated in her slandering American fighting men and women as terrorists on The View: (more…)

(more…)

The announcement that Oprah’s ending her show after 25 years came as no surprise.  In fact, I have been expecting this sort of announcement since Oprah took the stage with Barack Obama to announce her support for his presidential run.   During her first of many stump speeches in Manchester, I heard the crowd chant Oprah! Oprah, and listened to her give a well-crafted speech.  I also noticed a transformation in her voice and delivery.  She sounded more like a pastor giving a fiery sermon, closer to Reverend Wright, than a professional talk show host.  She seemed to revel in the moment and the difference in reception that comes with political power.  I couldn’t help but think of Oprah’s career and what was left for her to do that she hasn’t already done.

She became the country’s first Black Billionaire, she has maintained the crown of Queen Of Daytime for the last 23 years,  she’s built schools in Africa and convinced Americans to read whatever book she suggests, no matter how ridiculous.  She even started her own magazine appropriately called “O” during a time when the printed magazine market was being pummeled by digital delivery via the Internet, and it has somehow succeeded.  (more…)

Breaking at The Hollywood Reporter:

The queen of daytime will interview the president of the country during an ABC holiday special that brings together Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama.

The network has announced “Christmas at the White House: An Oprah Primetime Special.”

“Christmas at the White House” will air Sunday, Dec. 13, at 10 p.m. (more…)