Imagine our surprise, when finally awakening from a holiday bender, naked, crusted with confetti, and spooning with an old man wearing a tattered 2009 sash while a newborn baby wails in a nearby bassinet, that the New Year is actually upon us, bringing with it that annual call for the reformation of our self-destructive ways. That's right: It's New Year's Resolutions time. Sure, we could scribble these pledges on some paper and tuck it away in a desk drawer, ensuring our moral failures will only be known to us. Just like we do every January. But in the spirit of fresh starts and the breaking of unhealthy patterns, this time we're going to document them, here in public, where literally dozens and dozens of web-crawling enforcers can savagely bludgeon us with the comment-section cudgel to make sure we don't backslide into the bad habits that marred the previous year. So, after the jump, our resolutions for 2010, in hopes we'll be able to better serve your Hollywood-related needs going forward in 2010:
Whenever someone rounds up the number of Warren Beatty's reported sexual conquests from 12,775 to an even 13,000, we're not going to begrudge them those extra 225 encounters. Beatty probably picked up the difference in the hazy, out-of-control year following Shampoo, anyway.
When Avatar assumes its inevitable position as the second-highest-grossing film of all time, we resolve to paint every inch of our body blue, grow a braid that dangles all the way down to the base of our now-azure buttocks, and then attempt to tie the split-ends at the tip of that braid to the mane of the first six-legged horse we see.*
(*Under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms, a standard four-legged horse will seem to transform into the more Pandora-friendly six-legged configuration.)
We resolve to take a drink each time Ricky Gervais somehow comes off as charming while cutting the legs out from under a visibly drunk Golden Globes attendee by shrugging, giggling like a naughty imp, then claiming he "doesn't know how these fancy Hollywood parties work."
The next time we see The Hurt Locker (coughcough sendaBluRayscreener coughcough), we resolve to soil our underthings during just one of the movie's three tensest moments (The First Bomb Defusing, The Third Bomb Defusing, The Failed Defusing Of An Entire Shelf Of Ticking Count Chocula Boxes), besting our embarrassing three-for-three performance of last summer.
We resolve to take another drink when cameras cut to a reaction shot of a just-insulted Golden Globes attendee dismissively waving a hand toward the stage, mouthing, "Oh, go on, you cheeky devil!"
To help multiplex owners in their quest to keep their theaters a relevant option in a world full of increasingly appealing entertainment-delivery choices, we will wear 3D glasses everywhere we go this year, answering any questions about our eyewear with, "Why, we're off to the cinema to immerse ourselves in three living, breathing dimensions of Hollywood magic! Won't you smash your iPhone to bits and join us?"
We'll only call the Hollywood Foreign Press Association a "tasteless swarm of starf*cking, buffet-decimating Euro-locusts" once during the entire Golden Globes telecast.
If someone should mention the Resurgent Sandra Bullock's Best Actress chances for mega-super-hit The Blind Side, we resolve not to petulantly unfurl the All About Steve one-sheet we've been carrying around just in case this particular subject came up.
The next time a major publication does a story about The Weinstein Company's financial woes, we resolve to immediately organize a telethon on behalf of Harvey Weinstein. Someone's got to keep bankrolling Quentin Tarantino.
We resolve to produce a movie that's nothing but 105 minutes of people smoking, talking about how sexy smoking makes them seem, and quote "facts" about the health benefits of smoking as composed by doctors under the employ of Big Tobacco in the 1950s. This movie will be called F*ck You, People Smoke in the Movies.
When our invitation to the Governor's Ball is "lost" for a sixth consecutive year, we will not park outside Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Tom Sherak's house, hurl flaming bags of cat excrement over his wall, and shout obscenities that poorly communicate the profound hurt of exclusion. Nor will we hire a skywriter to display the words DON'T FORGET ME SHERAK above his home in angry puffs of white exhaust. Nor will we kidnap one of Wolfgang Puck's cater waiters, steal his tuxedo, and then infiltrate the Ball carrying a tray of crab cakes topped with dollops of garlic-chipotle remoulade just so we can tell Sherak in person what we think about his rejection, our whiskey-tinged breath hot on his earlobe.
We're going to stop dropping Na'vi expressions into casual conversation by April, we promise. (Note: This does not include using "I see you" whenever we need to articulate a deeper connection with the Quiznos artillery specialist preparing our Toasty Torpedo for delicious launch.)
Our cocktail party disputes about relative desirability of Taylor Lautner and Robert Pattinson will this year be settled by civilized debate, not teary, alcohol-fueled, best-of-three-falls Indian leg-wrestling matches.
Should we run into Jude Law, who's doubtlessly being barraged with fresh offers now that his once-dimmed star is again rising after his turn in Sherlock Holmes, we resolve to wordlessly press a note reading "Remember 2004" into his palm, exchange knowing nods, and then disappear into the night.
We resolve to not throw a fit in the event that the wildly overpraised Up in the Air wins Best Picture over more deserving films, like The Hurt Locker or Inglourious Basterds. Or the The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Or In The Loop.
We resolve to let go of our fantasies that little-seen British movies featuring some of the best, most operatically profane dialogue we've ever heard might creep into the Best Picture race. In the Loop, people. Just f*cking see it, you motherc*nting c*ck**b*l*rs.
We resolve not to interrupt the Oscar viewing party by yelping, "I'm king of the sentient forest!" should Jim Cameron win Best Director and/or Best Picture.
We resolve not to retreat to our hibernation pod the moment the final credits on the Oscars roll, only to emerge when awakened by the first brain-rattling explosions of blockbuster season, choosing instead to succor the ugly stepchildren Hollywood cruelly shoves out on the street between March and early May. They deserve love, too.
We could probably be kinder to Peter Berg in the coming year. Dude's just trying to make a living with his space-battleships, yo. You try making a movie out of a game about stabbing red pegs into tiny toy boats.
Let's all resolve to lobby our Congressional representatives to designate a "Give Katherine Heigl A Hug Day," because wouldn't that be nice? She seems like she could use a hug once in a while, especially during the press tours for her movies.
We resolve to lose fifteen pounds by summer by undertaking the "Watch Ten Minutes Of Food, Inc Every Time We Consider Hitting The Drive-Thru Diet." (Our "Super Size Me Diet" of 2004 did nothing but give us an insatiable craving for Quarter Pounders. Hopefully considering how deeply the Subsidized Corn Industrial Complex has penetrated its poison husks into our daily lives will help us stick to the program.)
For each hour we spend watching TLC shows about the heartbreaking, nightmare-fueling head deformities of gentle Pakistani teens, we'll spend an hour adding critically acclaimed Britcoms to our Netflix Watch Instantly Queue, which we'll totally get around to seeing right after we peek at just a couple minutes of the Animal Planet show about the little people who train pit bulls.
Now that Fox and Time Warner Cable have narrowly averted mutually assured destruction by settling their petty dispute, we'll take down IWillFirebombMyLocalTWOfficeIfIMissEvenOneSecondOfAmericanIdolYouGreedyMonsters.com, and think twice about hastily registering any such needlessly hostile URLs in the future.
Renting a Bangalore phone-bank to jam the lines on behalf of our favorite Idol contestant is probably not the sporting thing to do, so we resolve not to do that again this year, unless completely necessary.
We'll also do our best not to take Simon Cowell, in his potential last season steering the good ship Idol, for granted; we often weren't appreciative enough of the inimitable brand of nonsense-tinged boosterism Paula Abdul brought into our lives every year around this time, and now we've got all the Ellen DeGeneres we can handle. Lesson learned.
We're finally going to get started on the proposal for The Year Of Fingerbanging Grimly, our meditation on how each week of the Don Draper Fingerbang Threat Level mirrored the society-shaking events of a tumultuous 2009.
We resolve to resolve, resolutely, with regards to Hollywood things.
We resolve not to rush headlong into post ideas we foolishly think we can easily stretch to an even one-hundred bullet points just because we're coming off a brief end-of-year vacation, then peter out somewhere in the 30 range, especially when the concept was wearing pretty thin right around the late single-digits.
We've already broken at least five of these. Happy 2010, everybody.