In a skin-crawlingly mean-spirited rant delivered on his radio show yesterday, Howard Stern, egged on by sidekick Robin Quivers, laid into Oscar-nominated Precious star Gabourey Sidibe. Calling her "the most enormous fat black chick I've ever seen," Stern predicted that "she's never going to have another shot. What movie is she going to be in? Blind Side 2? She can take out the whole front line...Listen honey, now you got a little money in the bank, go get yourself thin. You're going to die in like, three years."
Audio, and delicious comeuppance, after the jump.
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· If Caprica didn't burnish Patton Oswalt's cult sci-fi bona fides enough, he's now penning a Firefly comic book. Click to expand the cover art, nerrrrds.
· Nooo! Newly minted Oscar winner has dropped out of David Cronenberg's The Talking Cure, where we was to play Sigmund Freud. Now, Viggo Mortensen will be filling in opposite Michael Fassbender and Keira Knightley.
· One of the Rhode Island cops on this season of The Amazing Race has been put on desk duty "in the wake of an internal investigation into a major cop-operated cocaine ring." That's never good.
· Columbia is trying to bring Sacha Baron Cohen or Jemaine Clement on board the entirely unnecessary Men in Black 3.
· Does Sherri Shepherd know why the Oscarcast cut to her when Precious screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher won? "Sure, 'cause I'm another black person, but I didn't care," she told Vulture. "I wanted them to cut to me for everything."
Robert "Joe" Haldeman, the Emmy-winning CBS producer who sought $2 million from David Letterman in exchange for suppressing details of his romantic staff liaisons, is expected to pleaded guilty today to attempted extortion. As part of a plea agreement, Halderman will serve six months in prison, four and a half years' probation and perform 1,000 hours of community service. Suggestions for that are welcome in the comments, though keep in mind he probably won't be teaching any underprivileged aspiring screenwriters. Anything else though... sky's the limit. [NYT]
You know an Academy Awards show is boring when the best fodder for late night programs is a non-celebrity stage-crashing. Last night, both David Letterman and Jon Stewart paid tribute to the Oscar's breakout star, Elinor Burkett, with one using an orange wig and the other, wildlife. Those clips, as well as the other highlights you missed last night while weeping over Ticketmaster's denial of a Conan O'Brien comedy tour, after the jump.
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Get ready for White vs. Baumbach III: Word got out Monday night that famously irascible NY Press critic Armond White was barred from seeing a press screening of the forthcoming Ben Stiller/Noah Baumbach collaboration Greenberg, and that Baumbach himself joined Scott Rudin in issuing the lockdown."I was told this rescinded invite was ordered by director Noah Baumbach, producer Scott Rudin and their publicist," White wrote in an e-mail to his peers, citing distributor Focus Features' initial call on Monday. "They objected to my previous reviews of The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding. I objected that they were infringing upon my First Amendment rights as a journalist."
While neither Baumbach nor Rudin are commenting, their representative Leslee Dart begged to differ this morning -- sort of -- when she spoke with Movieline.
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When I first heard that Lindsay Lohan had filed suit against E*TRADE for featuring a "milkaholic" baby named Lindsay in one of its commercials -- and that Lohan's rep shrugged off the fact that the name "Lohan" was never uttered in the ad by saying, "Do you know the name Oprah? Do you know the name Madonna? Same thing" -- I thought to myself, "Here we go again. People are linking to one of HuffPo's 'Borowitz Reports' and not realizing that those are satire." But no! This is a real thing! The question is, does Lohan have a case?
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Disney raised more than a few eyebrows recently when its upcoming animated film Rapunzel was renamed the comparatively gender-neutral Tangled. "We did not want to be put in a box," said Pixar and Disney Animation Studios president Ed Catmull, still bruised from the underperforming The Princess and the Frog. "Some people might assume it's a fairy tale for girls when it's not." That's the same rationale that got Disney's in-development project The Snow Queen canned (on account of the difficulty of renaming it Snow: Monster Truck Explosion, we presume). [LAT]
Last week, Sarah Palin took advantage of her appearance on the second night of the new Tonight Show with Jay Leno to test out that stand-up routine that she had (certainly not) been tinkering with for the past few years. A few nights later, Chelsea Handler told Jay Leno on-air that he had been "way too nice" to the former governor of Alaska, Megan Mullally dissed the routine to Movieline and Palin celebrated her controversial debut by wreaking havoc on an Oscar gifting suite. But it was another claim -- by studio audience members who had witnessed Palin's segments first-hand -- that got more media coverage and an official response from NBC.
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The titular mother of Mother -- the new film from South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, director of the 2006 creature thriller The Host -- is a ginseng seller and under-the-table acupuncturist, whose only child is a man in his early 20s, gifted with great looks but cursed with an under-developed mind. Her doting over the boy, who tends to get into trouble hanging out with his no-good friend, verges on the obsessional -- they share a home, every meal, and a bed at night. Then comes her worst nightmare: before her eyes, her son is snatched away by cops, as he was the last person seen with a local promiscuous teen found dead that morning. Thus commences to churn a hurricane of a performance from Korean national treasure Kim Hye-ja, perfectly cast as a frantic parent running on nothing but adrenaline and desperation in a race to find the real murderer. It's a crackerjack of a thriller. Movieline sat down recently with Joon-ho for a lively discussion about moms and monsters; it turns out the two are not always mutually exclusive.
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What better way to start a bright, sunny spring morning than by hearing the minute-by-minute details of Harry Smith's colonscopy? The Early Show anchor will one-up his intrepid colleague Katie Couric by undergoing the procedure live on Wednesday's episode; Couric reported on her own colonoscopy during an Evening News segment back in 2000. You know, kind of like the Census? But with colonoscopies. Use the bathroom before you come to work tomorrow, Early Show staff. [AP]
· Nick Nolte is in final negotiations to join the Michael Mann-directed HBO series Luck, about the world of horse racing. The series, created by horse-owner David Milch, previously cast Dustin Hoffman in the lead role an intuitive veteran gambler. Kevin Dunn also joins the cast as a prodigious misanthrope who is the ringmaster of a syndicate of misfits. If negotiations go through, Nolte will play the trainer of a top racehorse. John Ortiz and Dennis Farina round out the cast. Nolte's last major TV part was over three decades ago, in an ABC miniseries called Rich Man, Poor Man. [THR]
Tom Cavanagh finds another role as an Ed, Jean Smart lands a tropical vocation, and more TV Bites after the jump.
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I don't know quite what to make of this shot of James Cameron meeting Kathryn Bigelow at the 2010 Oscars -- whether it was before or after Bigelow's Hurt Locker defeated Avatar for Best Director and Best Picture, or whether this was just an unfortunate angle on the ex-spouses' convivial Oscar-night embrace. At least two things are certain: If anyone is going to establish "strangratulation" as a new awards-season tradition, it'll be Cameron. And Harvey Weinstein is going to frame this. If he hasn't already. [Guardian via IW]
· Sopranos creator David Chase is back at work on his feature-film debut, an untitled and essentially undefined coming-of-age drama about a young rock group in the '60s. Boomer nostalgia! Can you dig it? You'd better: Paramount has dibs, though the studio will reportedly release Chase's film for some revived version of its Paramount Vantage label -- the Oscar-friendly boutique that courted such awards-season favor with the likes of Babel, Into the Wild and, with its now-defunct partner Miramax, There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. It's an interesting move for a studio that went 0-fer on Sunday outside the Make-Up category; it'll probably be at least a couple years before we see if it pays off, so don't go radically tweaking your preliminary 2011 Oscar ballot just yet. [Deadline]
Liv Tyler and Patrick Wilson step on to a Ledge, MGM inches closer to a deal, and more Hollywood Ink after the jump.
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For the first, mostly irrelevant analog minute of the new Tron: Legacy trailer, a familiar-looking man with a voice for luxury car commercials delivers big news to a younger man in his 20s: he was paged the night before by the boy's long-missing father. This is shocking for a number of reasons, not the least of which being the fact that someone in 2010 can still get paged. A motorcycle voyage to Flynn's Arcade, a mysterious portal to the unknown ... do you see where all this is leading? Precisely! Academy Award® winner Jeff Bridges is still being held against his will by an evil, blacklight-abusing microprocessing regime, and only his son can get save him, after 93 minutes of Light Cycle races, Ultimate Identity Disk tournaments, and Michael Sheen showing off his wicked Air Guitar Hero moves in an outfit even gayer than the one he wore in New Moon!
Verdict: My memory stick just involuntarily uploaded.
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· In our zeal to cover the Oscars, we neglected to address Zach Galifianakis's admirable turn as SNL host. The most gripping (and funniest) moment occurred offstage after Vampire Weekend's second performance, when the Hangover star shaved his signature beard. Something is less compelling about a clean-shaven man playing the piano and making wry That's So Raven jokes, but I suspect his foray into peach fuzz is only temporary. [USA Today]
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