"When Tracy won Best Actor for his turn in Captains Courageous in 1938, he was unable to attend the ceremony. MGM said he was recovering from a hernia, which was the 1940s way of saying 'hospitalized for exhaustion,' if you’re picking up what I’m putting down. The studio arranged for Tracy’s wife to accept the award in his stead, as a gesture towards the supposed strength of their marriage. With all the audience fully aware of how Tracy had neglected and mistreated her, Mrs. Tracy walked the stage. But the Academy had a sense of humor: the award was inscribed not to Spencer, but to Dick Tracy. ROUGH. MGM would periodically force Tracy to 'dry out' after massive benders — not out of kindness, but so that they could force him to do his next film. During this period, he was living at the Beverly Wilshire and constantly on the prowl — one MGM exec purportedly claimed that 'No one gets more sex than Spencer Tracy.....except Joan Crawford.'" [The Hairpin]
"When I was in junior high, I was sewing my own clothes. [...] I had these looks. Sometimes they were very tragic. I wore a pair of green, silk, MC Hammer–style pants with the low crotch, Birkenstocks, and my hair in a turban. What that look was, I don’t know, but it was kind of amazing." [BlackBook]
The Jack Russell Terrier Club of America loves your Uggie obsession, but a word of warning to those swept up in the hunt for lookalike pets: "Today, Jack Russell terriers are hot! Tomorrow, those of us who are truly devoted to the breed will be paying the price for this surge in popularity with greatly increased use of our rescue system.” [ANI via The Dog Files]
Gaga waxes poetic on pearls and baseball in the March issue of V Magazine: "I lay down on the airplane back from Japan, tossing around some dashi, fondling my pearls. I watched the movie Moneyball for the first time. I began to laugh and smile as [Brad] Pitt talked romantically about the game. I suddenly imagined that my pearls were teeny-tiny baseballs. When a player hits a home run, the baseball is flung into an abyss of enigma and screams so great. It travels so far that only rarely is one caught in the bleachers. Where do these balls go? Where do all these wins get encased? Are they in a heavenly baseball land floating around for players who pass to acknowledge? Or do they disappear?" [V Magazine via Deadspin]
This would never happen in America: "The two main candidates in this spring’s presidential election took a break from their mudslinging to crow. 'This is a tremendous success for the French cinema,' exclaimed President Nicolas Sarkozy on RTL radio Monday morning. 'I adored The Artist of course.' François Hollande, the Socialist challenger, said on his Web site, 'Bravo to the entire cast of the film, and bravo to French cinema.'" [NYT]
This is lovely: Ridley Scott is executive producing the "self-portrait" doc Japan in a Day, in the crowd-sourced collected footage vein of Kevin MacDonald's Life in a Day, to draw attention to and benefit the survivors of Japan's devastating 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster. Fuji will donate 200 cameras to the project, which will cull from submissions uploaded to Youtube on March 11 with all profits reportedly going back to the victims. Now that's how you show support, Hollywood. [Deadline]
"She knows that I know that she knows that I know the whole scene is deliberate, right down to the supporting players -- assistants, various friends, family -- arranged here and there around the pool, ready to do a star's bidding... That Lopez has dared to try and pull off such a time-honored Hollywood gambit as Rising-Star-Interviewed-By-The-Pool is in keeping with her overall strategy of playing Big. Big is Jennifer Lopez's forte." The jury may be out on Lopez's maybe-wardrobe malfunction onstage at the Oscars, but you can treat yourself with Stephen Rebello's full 1998 Movieline must-read, stat.
This just in: The makers of the forthcoming CW spin-off series The Carrie Diaries (a prequel to Candace Bushnell's franchise-launching Sex and the City novel) have found their new Carrie Bradshaw in Soul Surfer/Race to Witch Mountain/Bridge to Terabithia star AnnaSophia Robb. The series "chronicles Carrie’s coming of age in the 1980s when she asks her first questions about love, sex, friendship and family while exploring the worlds of high school and Manhattan." So it's basically Gossip Girl with a Carrie Bradshaw who looks nothing like the future Carrie Bradshaw. Oh, fine. Why not? [Deadline]
Backstage at the Film Independent Spirit Awards, Christopher Plummer (who vies for the Oscar tomorrow) celebrated his Best Supporting Actor win for Beginners and gleefully stoked the fires of a pup vs. pup beef between his own co-star in the film, Cosmo, and The Artist's award season favorite Uggie. "We had a little private talk," he explained of scene-stealer Cosmo. "Now that you mention it, I think our Cosmo was much more human than Uggie. Uggie was just a trickster. Our dog had soul." Fighting words!
I have neither this decal nor a car to which I could apply it, but the genius of this backlash to the Artist backlash makes me desire both. [The Hot Blog]
"I’ll keep this short and sweet because it's been a rough 12 days for me, with what would have been my mother’s 67th birthday one day and the awful news about Whitney the next. I can’t even think about it... we’ll talk about that some other time, but for now I just want to be sure you’re planning on going to the movie theaters to see Good Deeds this weekend." [TylerPerry.com]
First day advance ticket sales (i.e. sales on the first day tickets are made available) for The Twilight Saga: Eclipse had held the number one spot in Fandango history until this week, when the YA adaptation The Hunger Games took the crown. You hear that? It's the sound of Lionsgate execs exhaling a month ahead of their franchise-starter's March 23 debut. The Hunger Games could still drop off considerably after its first week of release, but this is a great early sign for Katniss & Co. [Deadline]
Woody Allen, whose Midnight in Paris is competing at this Sunday's Academy Awards, will be bringing his Oscar-nominated 1994 comedy Bullets Over Broadway to the Great White Way in 2013, reports the New York Times. The adaptation has long been rumored to be in the works; Allen himself is writing the book, with songs culled from existing 1920s-era music. Cue obligatory Dianne Wiest quotes! [NYT]
It's only taken a few years, but the success of director Daniel Espinosa's Safe House means that Harvey Weinstein is finally ready to let the filmmaker's Swedish-language hit Easy Money -- née Snabba Cash -- off his shelf on July 27. The distributor cited the eventual Stateside publication of the film's source novel (as opposed to Safe House's $83 million-and-counting domestic haul) as his motivation: “We love the movie, but we needed the book to be out here,” he told the LAT. Right. As always with Harvey, all release dates are subject to change and/or revocation at any time, so remember to mark your calendars in pencil. [LAT]
"Unless they’re assured that nothing entertaining is going to happen on the Red Carpet, the Academy is not admitting Sacha Baron Cohen to the show." Previous succinct gems. [Deadline]
