by Jac Kern
01.15.2013
125 days ago
Jac's roundup of pop culture news and Internet findings
Tina Fey and Amy
Poehler hosted the 70th annual Golden Globe Awards Sunday, making
the three-hour event pretty much bearable! Some awards were pretty predictable
(Les Mis) while others were surprising (Girls) but T&A — I’m coining their
celebrity couple name — kept the show fun by teasing Hollywood greats and each other.
The first awards
of the night went to Christoph Waltz, Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture, Drama
for Django Unchained; Maggie Smith,
Best Supporting Actress – TV for Downton Abbey;
and Julianne Moore, Best Actress – Miniseries/TV Movie for Game Change, which also was awarded Best Miniseries/TV Movie. Now,
I think we can all lay to rest the Sarah Palin impersonation. May we never seek
its comedic relief again.
Keeping everyone
on their toes, T&A randomly planted themselves, in disguises, in the
audience as the camera panned to nominees:
Next up, Homeland started to sweep
the evening, nabbing Best TV Series – Drama, Best Actor
(Damian Lewis) and Best Actress (Claire Danes) in the category. Danes thanked her recently born son, with whom she was pregnant while filming some of this season's craziest scenes. Cute, but she really
should have named that kid Saul, right?
As Michael Bloomberg said, white
people love them some Homeland.
Mychael Danna was awarded with Best Original Score
for Life of Pi and Adele, finally out
of maternal hiding, won a much-deserved Globe for Best Original Score for the
eponymous hit from Skyfall.
Taylor Swift was
not impressed.
JLo showed up looking like a slutty Queen
Frostine in a what appeared to be a body paint ensemble
to award Best Actor – Miniseries/TV Movie (Hatfields
& McCoys) to a very boring
Kevin Costner. So what do you do when half the crowd is drunk and the show
starts getting boring? Bring out Bill Clinton!
Willie bit his
lip, thumbs upped a few times and introduced Lincoln (once everyone stopped throwing their panties onstage at
him). Not missing a beat, Poehler came out, awestruck, and proclaimed, “That
was Hillary Clinton’s husband!” Sa-woon.
Then out come Will
Ferrell and Kristin Wiig (looking foine as ever),
giggling like a couple stoned teenagers, pretending to not have seen a single
film in their category (Best Actress – Motion Picture, Comedy/Musical).
JLaw got the prize
for her role in Silver Linings Playbook,
wearing what may become a major spring 2013 fashion trend: boob origami.
Lawrence seems like a real human, and funny to boot. She'll be hosting Saturday Night Live this weekend.
Ed Harris won
Best Support Actor – TV for his role as John McCain in Game Change. Anne Hathaway dreamed a dream about winning Best Supporting
Actress – Motion Picture…and it came true (Sorry, that was pretty bad). Though
I did not care for her 1994 mother of the bride look. Best Screenplay went to Quentin “Don’t ask me about violence” Tarantino
for Django Unchained. In a pretty
surprising turn, Don Cheadle, who is awesome, won Best Actor – TV,
Comedy/Musical for House of Lies,
which is really not that awesome. Louie C.K. was robbed.
Everyone took a
little nap as Best Foreign Language Film was announced (Amour) because ENGLISH. And Brave
won Best Animated Feature Film (Side note: Go watch that shit with your mom and
be prepared for sobbing and family bonding).
The Best Actress –
TV, Comedy/Musical category was full of badass ladies, including the two hosts.
Tina awaited the
results with new BFF Jennifer Lopez
While Amy cozied
up with her new beau. Eat it, Will Arnett!
But — Surprise! — it was Lena
Dunham who napped the award for her role in Girls. T&A promptly
poked fun at Dunham’s speech, gave a losers toast, and called out a very drunk
Glenn Close. Then, things turn a turn for the…weird. Jodie Foster was honored
with the Cecil B. DeMille Award, presented by Robert Downey, Jr. In her speech (the one that they actually could have cut off but didn't), Foster hopped
back and forth between trying to make jokes and some genuine, serious points,
making the whole thing a little hard to follow.
On one hand, I can
understand why some people are confused as to why, if she was going to address
her personal life anyway, she wouldn’t just come out with a declarative
statement about being gay. It’s important for people to see strong, positive
public figures who happen to be homosexual, especially children who feel
different, ostracized or unloved because of who they are. I get that. But Miss
Jodie had some points in that cloudy ramble of a speech. As a celebrity who
works hard to keep her life off-screen private, why should she be pressed to make
some kind of grand statement, especially since she has already come out to
those who know her personally? “Coming outs” can certainly be positive these
days, but they’re also an invitation for attention and publicity, which she
personally does not want. In her own words “I am not Honey Boo Boo Child.”
For the final
awards of the night, Ben Affleck won Best Director for Argo; Girls won Best TV
Series – Comedy/Musical; Hugh Jackman nabbed Best Actor for Les Miserables, the same film awarded for Best
Comedy/Musical; Jessica Chastain, who’s appeared in 10 films since 2011, won
Best Actress for Zero Dark Thirty;
Daniel “Human Chameleon” Day-Lewis shocked no one when he won Best Actor for Lincoln; and Best Film in the Drama
category went to Argo.
Whew. That was a
lot to take in, wasn’t it, Mel?
0 Comments · Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Right off the bat in Lincoln,
director Steven Spielberg gives us one of his signature moments, a
framing device in the story that is supposed to be based on historic
facts that smacks of pure invention and threatens to derail our
investment in, not just the individual moment, but the film as a whole.
by Jac Kern
09.19.2012
Jac's roundup of pop culture news and Internet findings
Google unveiled
its latest Easter egg of a search tool last week, inducing “bacon number” madness. Now when
you’re playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, instead of cross-referencing IMDB,
Googlers can simply type in the actor’s name and “bacon number” for an
automatic calculation.
After hours of
furious research, it was found nearly every human remotely involved in show
business over the years (including ‘90s Nickelodeon star Kel Mitchell and silent
actor Charlie Chaplin) are within just 2 degrees of Mr. Bacon. The only stars I
could find with a higher number are Paula Abdul and Humphrey Bogart (who both
have a whopping BN of 3). Here’s to Google: the company responsible for
incredible technological advances that continues to make us waste time on the
Internet and screw off at work.
Netflix Picks of the Week: Looking for something new on
Netflix now that you’re all caught up on Breaking Bad and Celebrity Rehab? Check out Bobcat Goldthwait’s over-the-top pop culture massacre God Bless America and Winnebago Man, the humorously touching
documentary about the angry star of an early viral Internet video.
Saturday Night Live returned for its
38th season Saturday. Jay Pharoah debuted as Barack Obama, with
Fred Armisen handing over the presidential torch. We also saw Taran Killam will
serve as Paul Ryan and Jason Sudekis will continue to play Mitt Romney
(squashing the rumors that he’d leave SNL
along with Kristen Wiig and Andy Samberg). The trio is expected to appear
on SNL Primetime Edition, the special
election season show to air this Thursday and Sept. 27 on NBC. Seth McFarlane hosted
Saturday’s premiere, and to sum up his performance in one word: VOICES. HuffPo
breaks down the episode.
And as one
television show kicks off, another comes to a close. Sunday brought the
one-hour series finale of Showtime’s pot dramedy, Weeds. Without spoiling too
much, the finale gave us a peek seven years into the future. The good news about 2019:
the Botwin crew (plus Doug and Andy) is alive and mostly well. If the show's predictions pan out, fan-made renderings of an even-thinner, transparent future iPhone
were totally spot-on; the next diet craze will feature Regina George’s all-carb regime; and, most importantly, marijuana will not only become legalized, but sold
like cigarettes in stores and in edible forms at coffee shops. The bad news:
Shane grows a bad ‘80s cop mustache.
Everyone has an
opinion on TLC’s hillbilly hullabaloo, Here
Comes Honey Boo Boo, especially regarding the series’ matriarch, mama June
and her scary Jabba neck. But have you seen The Real Housewives of Miami? I
give you Mama Elsa: the stuff of surgical nightmares.
In music news, Ben
Folds Five is back and showing some love to Jim Henson in this new video.
Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is due in theaters this November, and the trailer has just been released. Apparently 90 percent of Hollywood is in the film, including what I’m guessing is an Tupac-inspired Abraham Lincoln hologram (seriously, though, Daniel Day Lewis is scary good). I was
totally captivated, swept away to the 19th century, up until Adam
from Girls arrived on the scene. From
1:37 on, it was all union suits and depraved sex acts to me.
Alison Pill apparently
didn’t learn one lesson explored in the show on which she stars, because
homegirl accidentally tweeted a topless pic last week. The photo tweeted was meant for
boyfriend, actor Jay Baruchel, which reveals that Alison Pill has no idea what Twitter
is or how it works. It was removed immediately and, in the best reaction possible, Pill
owned up to the flub and apologized for being just as technologically inept as The Newsroom's MacKenzie.
1 Comment · Thursday, September 25, 2008
Tearing down the Valley Homes would seem like a good way to kick-start struggling Lincoln Heights. Walking among the mostly boarded-up government stock housing built in the 1940s to house workers at the General Electric plant during World War II, it's clear that this place isn't exactly prime Hamilton County real estate.