Monkeys Have Flown Out of Your Butt

The movie world is still abuzz about Matthew McConaughey's Best Supporting Actor win yesterday with the New York Film Critics Circle for "Magic Mike" and "Bernie".  But before you threaten to turn in your Academy membership for fear that an actor of McConaughey's, uh, "ability", could actually join the historical pantheon of great Academy Award-winning actors, let us remind you of something.  Oscar voters are not critics, and critics are not Oscar voters.

 

(mcconaughey in "bernie")

As for the New York Film Critics Circle's record of predicting who will go on to win the Oscar, note that in the past ten years, only twice have the New York Critics and the Oscars picked the same actor for Best Supporting Actor.  The head-scratcher about McConaughey's pick is that we would have guessed it would have been the Oscar voters who would give in to voting for popular, well-liked actors before the New York Critics would.  Which means one thing: serious New York critics actually thought McConaughey did a great job of acting.  But trust us, we saw "Bernie", and McConaughey did not do a good job of acting.  In fact, when we saw "Bernie", we remember that it was McConaughey's awkward performance, in particular, that solely threatened to derail the charm and tone of the otherwise very likable movie.

 

Next up:  tomorrow the National Board of Review will announce it's winners for the year's best in film.



Maybe the World IS Coming to an End

 

 (sally field in "lincoln")

Whoa! A couple of surprises today in the movie awards season.  First, The New York Film Critics Circle upped their awards announcement by a few days, beating The National Board of Review to be the first of the major critics' groups to name their year's best films and actors.






But it wasn't the fact that the New York critics jumped the gun, it was what they did with that fire-arm that shocked Hollywood today.  They took that gun and committed the film industry equivalent of showing up at a 7-11 store, brandishing that gun and then proceeding to shoot up the place and everyone in it.  They named, now brace yourself, Matthew McConaughey as the Best Supporting Actor for "Magic Mike".  I know, I know.  Feel free to reach for the smelling salts.

(matthew mcconaughey in "magic mike")

(tom hiddleston and rachel weisz in "the deep blue sea")

The other winners were Daniel Day-Lewis as Best Actor for "Lincoln", Rachel Weisz as Best Actress for "The Deep Blue Sea" and Sally Field as Best Supporting Actress for "Lincoln".  Other winners include "Zero Dark Thirty" for Best Picture and its director, Kathryn Bigelow, as Best Director.


But make no mistake about it, all anyone's going to be talking about today is the win by McConaughey.  And this instantly starts the mind-numbing speculation that the blonde, normally shirtless actor could actually win an Oscar nomination.  We haven't seen "Magic Mike", but we have seen "Bernie", the other film for which the New York critics bestowed this prize on McConaughey, and trust us, he was awful in it.  In fact, over the years, we've seen several McConaughey movies, and we've never seen him do anything which could be even distantly related to that artistic ability the world knows as "acting", and we seriously doubt if he suddenly acquired that skill in mid-life.


Who knows, maybe McConaughey will ride this buzz all the way to an Oscar nom, and maybe even an Oscar win, but all we can say to the Oscar voters is, "Slow down, take a deep breath and think hard about what you're doing.  You did this once before with the infamous Marisa Tomei Oscar win, and you're still paying for that one.  So proceed with caution!"

Suck It!

It's a big day for birthdays in Hollywood, and two of our favorites are blowing out the candles today.
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Kathy Griffin, the funniest bitch on the planet, and the best friend the gay community ever had, is having the biggest day; she hits 50 today. The girl from Chicago who's not afraid of a little plastic surgery, or Elisabeth Hasselbeck, looks better than ever, and after watching her new Bravo stand-up show last night, "Kathy Griffin... On Crutches", we have to say, she's funnier than ever as well.
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We just happened to be sitting in the audience at The Gay and Lesbian Center in West Hollywood just over ten years ago when Griffin first tried out her now famous comedy routine of "celebrity mockery". No one that night knew what to expect; it's hard to remember that just a few years back, Griffin was only known for a featured role on the sitcom "Suddenly Susan", and a few other scattered t.v. appearances, but the Miss Kathy we know and love today hadn't emerged yet. We only went because the tickets were cheap and we thought she had been funny on "Susan", but we couldn't talk any of our friends into going with us that night; everyone said "Kathy, who?". Well, we lucked out. It was that night that the Kathy Griffin we know today was born. She started out making fun of Liza Minelli, everyone gasped, and just a few minutes into the show, the entire audience was holding their sides, howling in laughter; some people were literally crying and having a hard time catching their breaths from laughing so hard. She really put it all out there that night. We had never seen anything like it, and soon after, the whole world got to see what we saw that night.
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Today is the 48th birthday of the one of the sexiest t.v. hosts of all time, "Survivor's" Jeff Probst. This guy doesn't dance, sing or tell jokes, but he's got more charisma in that smile and those famous dimples than most other entertainers have in a lifetime. We love this guy.
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Oh, by the way, today is also the 41st birthday of actor and surfer dude, Matthew McConaughey. Hey, the guy might not be much of an actor or performer, actually the guy has no real discernible talent of any kind, but it's okay, he's always had other... assets. And hey, you gotta give the guy credit, he still looks pretty damn good at 41; this is definitely not your grandfather's 41.
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Hollywood Watch - "The Lincoln Lawyer"

Ryan Phillippe is currently in L.A., filming "The Lincoln Lawyer" with Matthew McConaughey, and from the looks of these on-set photos which emerged today, Ryan is keeping his upper body in tip-top shape. Too bad it looks like, from the next photo, that he'll be wearing a suit for most the film. Couldn't he be a lawyer whose shirt falls off a lot, like the way they do in soap operas?
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.Anyway, the film which also co-stars Marisa Tomei and John Leguizama, is supposedly about a lawyer who conducts his business from the back of a Lincoln Town Car while representing a client in Beverly Hills. Sounds riveting. And we hear that the film has experienced a few delays because the producers have to keep stopping every so often to take all the big words out of the script so as not to confuse Matthew McConaughey. Okay, we're just kidding on that last one. Sort of..
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,,And finally, in case you're wondering if Phillippe looks as good out of his tank top as he does in it, you can judge for yourself with these photos that were taken of him at a beach in May 2010.

Everyone Died Except the Ones Who Deserved It: The Writers

Last night was the much-anticipated series finale of ABC's mega-popular fantasy drama, "Lost". And listen, we're just not going to get into it. Full disclosure: when the show started way back in 2004, we watched the first two episodes, and never watched it again. We saw right away that the writers were going to take us on crazy plotlines on whims of the moment that were going to make absolutely no sense and which, not only would we not understand, but which the writers wouldn't either. And after reading all the reviews from the show and its ending last night, evidently we were right. Hey, if you liked the show, more power to you, we're not trying to burst your balloon, but we're guessing the finale of "Lost" was something akin to the finale of "The Sopranos" in which it was obvious there were two things going on.
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On shows like "Lost" and "The Sopranos", first, the writers don't know how to end the story. They've painted themselves into so many corners with so many nonsensical plotlines, there is no way they can get out and make any rational sense. So they just end it, leaving it vague and open-ended, and if you speak up and say that it didn't make any sense, they try to pretend that the ending is open to artistic interpretation and that maybe you "just don't get it". Horse hockey. It's a story; it should have a beginning, a middle and an end. You're not writing Nobel Prize-winning literature here, it's just a t.v. show; learn how to tell a story or go do something else. But the more important thing going on with these types of finales is that, in Hollywood, there is always the option of a movie version of the t.v. show, or a prequel series, or spin-offs, so the writers can't end the show and the characters in an absolute way. They have to leave the show and characters open-ended in some way so as to provide for these other options.
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The blogs are full of comments today from "Lost"'s many viewers, some loved the show ending, some hated it. The funniest comment we read was from a guy who wrote, "So, did the professor finally fix the hole in the boat? Ooops, wrong show!" That's funny.
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Well, whatever you thought of the show, it's over. And now, there'll be no more sexy, scantily clad men running around on a beach who are overwhelmed by confusing thoughts swirling around in their heads... oh wait a minute, we still have Matthew McConaughey. Thank god.