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”. …

And while we’re on the subject, tonight’s AMPAS announcement specifically points to the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls which opened in South Africa in 2007. Who has forgotten the sexual abuse scandal that rocked that school set up for disadvantaged girls by the syndicated talk show queen? 

Year after year, Hollywood’s been embarrassed by the lack of television ratings for their Oscar telecast. And so now they’re embarrassing themselves trying to fix an embarrassing problem.

Desperation is never pretty.

Probably a little sucking up to Obama going on here, as well. We should be grateful they didn’t award him the Thalberg.

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.

After adopting London as her new home, Ms. Gwyneth, in classic Madonna I’m Evita-I’m British-I’m a single mom to a couple of African kids- mode, dissed America, set up house in Berkshire Gardens, and practiced her fake English accent while taking children Apple and Moses to buy groceries in trendy food shops.

Over the years the only thing more irritating than Paltrow feigning a British accent in the movie Sliding Doors was seeing her accepted as a gourmet cook. Gwyneth Paltrow even traveled with Mario Batali through Spain and lunched with Ina Garten, the “I’m cooking a fabulous dinner for my good friend Gwyneth” Barefoot Contessa.

After soaking fava beans became too much of a chore, Ms. Paltrow re-focused and said “I could do that. I bet I could do that,” and decided to resuscitate her former career as a Duet singer, but not just a singer, a country singer, which right there was weird enough for a woman who spent so much of her life practicing speaking with a British accent. Nevertheless, two weeks into her revitalized singing career golden child Gwyneth was starring in the movie Country Strong.

Soon after, Paltrow showed up on the 2011 Grammy Awards singing “Forget You” with the Muppets and Cee Lo Green and vamping around in a precociously overconfident number on Glee.  Mrs. Coldplay’s routine was rivaled only by Katie Holmes embarrassing herself while torturing the nation on So You Think You can Dance.

The desire to share her varied gifts must have motivated Paltrow to go beyond her expertise in thespianism, Epicureanism, and crooning, because in addition to mastering all three, Paltrow created Goop.com, a place where a Renaissance woman could branch out, blog, and author an informative newsletter.

At Goop.com, the artiste/chef/chanteuse tells readers: “Make, Go, Get, Do, Be and See.”  The only way to describe the venture is that Goop is authored by an overindulged, self-impressed, spoiled rich kid sharing navel-gazing insights into experiences, locations, products, and ideas few people will ever encounter, let alone be able to afford.  Can anyone say “Clueless?”

Paltrow’s Oprah-style New Age views are a cacophony of beliefs similar to the Cheese Board area of Goop’s “Make” section. While Gwyneth’s channeling of Tammy Wynette, making Duck Ragu, recommending skin products from a French pharmacy, and explaining the Year of the Tiger is irritating, it is still all relatively harmless. However, her views on religion, philosophy and sexuality step out of the Christian Louboutin realm and into the downright unappreciated.

Case in point: Gwyneth recently introduced her seven year-old daughter Apple, whose name was chosen because it was “Biblical,” to the idea of lesbianism. Mom assured the tyke that her classmate, who had two Mommies, was “lucky,” after which she implied on Goop that she didn’t know the answer to the question: “What does it actually say in the Bible that will cause some people to be upset by my line of thinking?”  You mean besides confusing a first grader?

I don’t buy the feigned perplexed confusion, because based on Gwyneth Paltrow’s history the query was more of a challenge than a question.  It’s likely that Paltrow has already resolved the issue and feels totally confident that, even if the Bible and God Himself doesn’t support her “line of thinking,” hers is still the right answer, because in Gwyneth Paltrow’s superior world her answer is correct simply because it’s hers.

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

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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.

OWN would be smarter to go with Charlie Sheen.

—–

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:

In a press conference announcing the release of his long form birth certificate, Obama denounced the “silliness,” the “sideshows and carnival barkers” that forced him to release a completely unremarkable document after years of speculation on the issue had metastasized into a political phenomenon he could no longer ignore.

“We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We’ve got better stuff to do. I’ve got better stuff to do. We’ve got big problems to solve,” the president said.

Minutes later, he boarded a helicopter, bound for Chicago where he will interview with Oprah, the queen of daytime TV talk shows who recently launched her own network.

Full piece here.

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.”

Oprah Winfrey’s daily talk show ratings dropped in 2008 after her highly publicized political rally for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. An October 2008 Gallup poll before the rallies but after Oprah’s public endorsement of Obama found that Oprah’s favorable ratings had fallen from 74 to 66 percent while her unfavorable ratings jumped from 17 to 26 percent. Then came news that Oprah’s TV ratings showed that her daytime audience, which was nearly 9 million at its height in 2004-05, had fallen to 7.3 million.

More here.

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?”

Make no mistake, Libya is a war. It is the same war as the one fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. When you break something, bomb something, or kill someone it is war — and you own it. Libya is the next phase of the same war. This triptych wars first brush stroke came in 2002 at the hands of President Bush because he knew something the left could not grasp: people everywhere want to be free of oppression first and foremost.  That spirit of wanting to be free has now spread like a holy fire throughout the Middle East and into the lap of Hollywood liberals who now sit in silence.

Hollywood’s ruling class of totalitarian liberals cannot choose which war they protest simply because the soft-bigotry-of-low-expectations has put their man in office and the world has now placed him behind the gun.  If Hollywood groups like Artists United to Win Without War want to be taken seriously and respected for their anti-war positions they must be consistent. They cannot say this war in Libya is humanitarian. After all, Kurds were being slaughtered in Iraq and women had been treated like animals for hundreds of years in Afghanistan. Hollywood cannot choose what war kills people and what war saves people. Because all war does that, that is its purpose.

Without war Hollywood has no stories to tell, no actors to play pretend hero, and no special effects to blow up balsa-wood worlds. Without war Hollywood liberals have nothing left to fight, and when liberals have nothing left to fight, they have a hard time finding something to live for. Peace is the mirror that walks in front of them that they dread so much. They need war to say, “We are better than that which we do not understand.”

Today, the only group of anti-war Hollywood liberals meeting to discuss the war in Libya are those looking for an angle on how to produce pro-war movies in the name of Commander and Chief Barack Obama. When war breaks out and Democrats are in the White House, Hollywood liberals become warmongers by remaining silent to a cause they acted so passionate about when Bush was in office.

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.”

A writer should only write about what he knows; yet Mr. Frey clearly sees himself as the Messiah in the spinning of his yarn. Though upon a closer examination of the author’s choices in life, and the release of this gimmicky offensive novel, exposes Mr. Frey as being more in the vain of Judas, a “selfish man who thinks of himself before the good of humanity, who values money more than love.”

Only those shrouded in the pop-culture-ruling-class applaud artist as groundbreaking when they pee on Jesus, paint him with elephant dung or depict him in a novel as a typical liberal living in the West Village.  However, those who have more respect for people’s faith simply find this sort of art cowardly and uninspired, created by artists who see the media spotlight as their ticket to a worldly heaven.

At some point in a writer’s life one must decide whether he’s hanging on the cross for his work, or pounding in the nails. With Mr. Frey’s latest book, he’s clearly chosen a nail gun and aimed it at Christians. It’s not even a brave literary choice. If Mr. Frey really wanted to be edgy and expose a burden in today’s society, he would have written a novel about Muhammad the cab driver in a post 9/11 New York seeking peace by contemplating a conversion to Christianity.

——

Tonight:

Making her debut (and singing), Katherine McPhee!

Plus, Andrew WK

and Joe Derosa!

—–

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.

Whoopi can run around all she wants pretending to have some kind of moral authority, but she’ll always be “Rape-Rape” to me.

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.”

I was worried by the end of Kala that M.I.A. had lost sight of her mission statement.  Despite its catchiness, the smash hit single “Paper Planes” was a jarring departure from the the rest of the album’s style, and album closer “Come Around” with Timbaland was a generic clunker about hooking up in clubs—a tawdry and boring loop-fest far below someone of M.I.A.’s talent.  Now, with an album comprised of her unedited interior monologue, there are even more songs about nothing.  The longest cut on the album, “Teqkilla,” is six minutes dedicated to what kinds of liquor exist in the world and how “freaky-eeky-icky-wicky-wheeeee” she becomes when drinking them.

What seems to have happened is M.I.A. was pressured by her label to write vapid chart-toppers, like the first official single “XXXO.”  The track, a first-person tale of submission to a controlling lover, is a catchy but puffball Ke$ha sound-alike on autopilot.  I suspect that since the punk-flavored “Born Free” leaked online and was given an R-rated shaky-cam video before “XXXO” came anywhere near pitchfork.com, M.I.A. is as embarrassed by the song as her fans will be, and she’s compensating for this pop-star turn with heavier, more “hardcore” music. 

For the most part, it works; “Steppin Up,” the album’s first proper song, uses sampled power tools and lo-fi, choppy metal guitars to great effect.  “Meds and Feds” is a thunderous, overdriven march that might make Sleigh Bells want to contact their lawyers.  “Born Free” is a rollicking anthem that gets your toes tapping with a grungy bassline and chaotic live drums.  But before those two tracks, the album breaks into saccharine sweetness with “It Takes A Muscle,” a bubblegum reggae love song inevitably bound for the radio, and “It Iz What It Iz,” an admirable but uninteresting ode to the singer’s newborn son.  The revolutionary thriller “Born Free” loses some of its bite placed after songs that sentimentally embrace domestic, bourgeoisie concepts like romance and motherhood.

And though these stylistic jumps don’t make for great listening, they highlight the theme of the album.  In response to a world that doesn’t care what she has to say, she alternates between screaming all the louder as M.I.A. and just letting it go, focusing on her personal life as Maya. 

And, as M.I.A., she’s losing sight of her origins. In the stream-of-consciousness “Born Free,” she admits, “I was close to the ants, staying undercover/ with a nose to the ground I found my sound.”  But now, as an iTunes-topping superstar, she’s 25 years and millions of dollars removed from the political violence she once escaped.  She’s had an audience with Oprah, the world’s biggest Celebrity who Cares™, and seen nothing come from her pleas to raise awareness of the Tamil people’s plight.  Instead of facing off with the armies of Sri Lanka, she’s taking on corrupt journalists by tweeting their private phone numbers.  Her frustration couldn’t be symbolized more clearly than the rendering of her moniker in bars of gold; now, she feels, she is little more than a commodity, a brand to be packaged and sold, an image out of her control.

This tension is what makes the album as fascinating as it is.  M.I.A. is at a crossroads in her career, one step closer to world domination but ever more powerless to stop the injustice she sees in her home country.  She’s strapping herself into the jetski on the beach next to the shark-infested water, but she’s still looking over her shoulder for a way out.  If you can overlook the banality of “XXXO” and its ilk, and if you can accept the know-it-all college hippie talking points for what they are, /\/\/\Y/\ is an album with many masterfully crafted moments from a supremely talented artist, so you’ll want to pick it up in case they’re the last ones she’s able to make.

NOTE TO PARENTS:  The album has a Parental Advisory due to explicit language.