In a conciliatory gesture aimed at making amends for a controversy that saw its former director stepping down amid rumors he had contributed to an anti-gay-marriage initiative, the Los Angeles Film Festival offered up the impossibly dreamy-eyed same-sex union of Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna for their lineup announcement at a Westwood hotel this morning. Their involvement relates to the 2009 LAFF's spotlight on their Ambulante Film Festival, an itinerant documentary series that brings stories by and about Mexican cultures to areas that might otherwise never have access to them.
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· Why yes, the second character poster released for Inglorious Basterds is of conscripted Hostel director/friend-of-Quentin Eli Roth!
· Wait, what? Fox News has invited Gossip Girl star Chace Crawford to be its guest (alongside Sarah Palin!) at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Whatever it takes to keep Shep Smith in the fold, I guess.
· Fox attempted to give its late-night Talkshow with Spike Feresten a chance at the big leagues, but now it's abandoned the franchise.
· The CW is dropping its Sunday night programming after the failure of a Laurie Metcalf drama (?) that even Laurie Metcalf didn't know was on the air.
· Christopher Nolan has set his Batman Begins star Ken Watanabe to play the bad guy in his new sci-fi thriller Inception. So...it's actually Liam Neeson in a third-act twist, right?
With the exception of a 102-year-old bishop who called the film "highly denigrating, defamatory and offensive" to the Catholic Church, Angels & Demons' Vatican nemeses quietly avoided the movie's world premiere Monday in Rome. The event took place one mile from church headquarters in Vatican City, access to which Catholic officials famously denied the production during shooting in 2008. And if the first review is any indication, even the film critics might mellow out slightly from their own less-than-hospitable Da Vinci Code welcome three years ago.
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The Tony Awards are a very important awards ceremony that all of America should pay attention to, even though the things being rewarded are shows that (by definition) can only be seen in one small area of Manhattan. But still, important! So what did we learn from today's Tony nominations?
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Sad reports this morning note that Dom DeLuise passed away in his sleep Monday evening at a Los Angeles hospital. He was 75. His reason for admittance and official cause of death isn't currently known. And at least one reaction has trickled in so far, with DeLuise's Cannonball Run co-star Burt Reynolds responding to the news within the last hour.
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That late-career American renaissance isn't likely to happen after all for Roman Polanski, the Oscar-winning fugitive filmmaker who refused Monday to return for a potentially name-clearing court hearing in Los Angeles.
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· Mark Burnett will produce several shows based on the Walk of Fame, including a TV special set to coincide with the urine-glazed Hollywood landmark's 50th anniversary in November 2010, just 19 short months away. Could its new TV notoriety result in the Walk of Fame getting its own star on the Walk of Fame, resulting in a kind of mind-collapsing, Charlie Kaufmanesque glimpse into the meta abyss that until now has been relegated to the realm of infinity-mirror coffee tables? Time will tell. [THR]
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· I hope you enjoy this Oprah Winfrey Show roundtable on the state of gay affairs. You only have to endure two minutes of Nate Berkus yammering on about himself to get to the interesting part, when Oprah and Hugh Jackman -- i.e. the most gay-rumored mega-celebrities on the planet, besides a certain sofa-trampolining superstar -- address the lavender whispers. (Side note: Hugh Jackman's tanning regime has him inching perilously close to some kind of latino blackface. Tread carefully, my little bronzed mutant.)
· Good news for fans of Fox's Fringe and its syphilitic antiheroines, of which I am one (a fan, not a syphilitic antiheroine): the network has given the show an early second-season pickup.
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The newly democratized MTV Movie Awards has thrown the nominating process out to you, the Hills - watching people, and in doing so righted many of the wrongs perpetrated upon a worthy and unsung Class of '08. Wondering why High School Musical 3: Senior Year was so egregiously underrepresented in the major Oscar categories? Why Anne Hathaway's performance in Bride Wars wasn't deemed worthy enough to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Kate Winslet's finest illiterate-Nazi-pedophiliac work at the SAG Awards? Why the Golden Globes had no "Best WTF Moment" category? Wonder no more: Their time is now, and their fates lie in your tiny voting fingers, still tender from having punched in Kris Allen's dial-Idol number eleventy bazillion times.
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Megaproducer Jerry Bruckheimer's honorable life's mission to bring us the most spectacular chase sequences, slo-mo explosions, and ham-fisted dialogue $150 million of Disney's money can buy resulted yesterday in dire circumstances: A Times Square location shoot for The Sorcerer's Apprentice -- which stars Nicolas Cage in a modern retelling of the classic conjuring tale that somehow involves speeding Ferraris -- went horribly awry when a stunt driver crashed into a Sbarro's.
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God only knows the crowd you'll run into by waiting to see Sasha Grey's mainstream breakthrough The Girlfriend Experience in theaters. But if you're so inclined, you can now watch this film the way you likely watch the vast majority of her adult canon: Online, for a nominal fee.
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Today brought good news to a handful of pilots picked up by NBC, but there were plenty more that weren't -- including some of the network's most high-profile, impeccably-pedigreed projects in development. Which shows will never be (barring an unforeseen reprieve), and which stars are suddenly available?
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· As we head into a star-studded summer movie season, Vanity Fair scores the cover coup of the century: Jessica Simpson!
· Sigourney Weaver would love to talk about Avatar, if Mary McDonnell would just stop hijacking things with her cooing.
· The ink is barely dry on David Slade's contract to direct the third Twilight installment, and his Twitter has already been deleted on account of some unearthed 2008 gems like these: "Twilight at gun point? Just shoot me."
· Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard have exchanged vows (and double vowels).
· Are you interested in a Terminator 5 that kind of makes all the previous films moot, including the upcoming Terminator: Salvation? Boy, has McG got a premise for you!
For the second consecutive year, a C-grade animated film has taken up residency at the bottom of Hollywood's box-office pool. And look who Battle For Terra took with it: Evan Rachel Wood, Luke Wilson, Justin Long, Brian Cox and others, from whom I think we all expected much more of a fight before they succumbed to Terra's spectacularly bad $1.1 million opening on nearly 1,200 screens. But a glance at the bigger picture reveals plenty of blame to go around -- and it goes back further than you think.
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New York Times readers were treated to a splashy fashion layout this weekend featuring a superstar of the silver screen, legs splayed seductively and dangling a naughty piece of lingerie over a killer pair of f**k-me pumps. Any guesses as to who it was?
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