For his work directing Back To The Future and its sequels, as well as Who Framed Roger Rabbit? the 10-year old me considered him the greatest helmsman in the history of Hollywood.

The Academy shared my high esteem after Zemeckis masterminded the epic Forrest Gump, marshalling totems from four decades of Americana into one gigantic Hanksathon that thrilled viewers and critics alike. He was named the Best Director of 1994.

Unfortunately, Zemeckis’ career began to turn for the worse. Maybe it was some kind of alien signal that infiltrated his mind while filming Contact, which was pretty good except for the totally implausible McConaughey character. His next film, What Lies Beneath, was probably the most cliche-ridden film I’ve seen in all my days, and what’s worse, Zemeckis was fronting like he could hang with Hitchcock. Then came the grueling Cast Away, a desperate play for Oscar glory with FedEx ads plastered all over it.

All this was merely prologue to the horrid turn his career would soon take. Zemeckis decided that motion-capture technology was the future, and used it to adapt The Polar Express. The result was a melange of creepy looking figures prancing about on the screen, destroying my childhood memories of the classic Christmas book and replacing them with uncanny valley nightmares.

Despite the tepid critical response, Big Z then doubled down on the technology, using Disney funding to build his own studio. His continued his appalling rampage by cranking out the blasphemous motion-capture edition of Beowulf and then moving on to last winter’s Christmas Carol adaptation with a bizarre Jim Carrey-alike in the role of Scrooge.

Zemeckis then hit rock bottom when he went public with demands that Oscar create its own category for the horrible motion-capture films that he and only he is interested in making.

Mere weeks later, Jim Cameron’s Avatar not only beat him at his own game, it completely wiped his studio off the map. Cameron re-invented the special effects that Zemeckis spent a decade beating into the ground — Cameron insisted in calling his technology “performance capture” to distinguish it from Zemeckis’ abominations — and embarrassed him at the box office.

Now, Disney has shut down Zemeckis’ studio and sent him packing. The arrogant manner in which Zemeckis squandered his talent has long enraged me, but today I smile.

Finally, justice has been served.

The beginning of Zemeckis’ downfall was the aforementioned What Lies Beneath. This movie’s twist was that Harrison Ford was the bad guy, despite the fact that we have been conditioned to trust him over the first two acts of the movie, not to mention two decades of filmgoing.

That’s fine, but Zemeckis pooped all over the audience by giving the twist away in the theatrical trailer. His theory? People WANT to know the ending before they go to see the movie. Fuck you, Zemeckis!

Don’t even get me started on his pretentions to make a Hitchcockian thriller, all the while copping out with a supernatural plot that neatly ties up the loose ends of a preposterous story.

Ebert executed an excellent takedown of this turd of a film:

There’s a bag of tricks that skillful horror directors use, and they’re employed here by Robert Zemeckis (“Back to the Future,” “Forrest Gump”), who has always wanted, he says, to make a suspense film–”perhaps the kind of film Hitchcock would have done in his day,” according to his producer, Jack Rapke. Hitchcock would not, however, have done this film in his day or any other day, because Hitchcock would have insisted on rewrites to remove the supernatural and explain the action in terms of human psychology, however abnormal.

[...]

I’ve tried to play fair and not give away plot elements. That’s more than the ads have done. The trailer of this movie thoroughly demolishes the surprises; if you’ve seen the trailer, you know what the movie is about, and all of the suspense of the first hour is superfluous for you, including major character revelations. Don’t directors get annoyed when they create suspense and the marketing sabotages their efforts?

Actually, Zemeckis boasted about his trailer technique in promotional press for the film!

This arrogant “I understand the moviegoing public better than the critics” attitude led him to fart his career away over the following decade. After his failed attempt to recapture Oscar glory with Cast Away, Zemeckis went down the motion-capture rabbit hole, into a dark place…and dragged movie viewers down with him.

The beauty of Chris Van Allsburg’s “The Polar Express” is its magical realism, epitomized by its famous concept of a bell that can only be heard by those that believe in Santa Claus. The illustrations in this Caldecott-winning book are superb and evocative. In short, it is a genius piece of storytelling, enhanced by tremendous artistic talents.

Zemeckis took this masterpiece and decided to innovate it using the motion-capture techniques shown above. The result was a horrifying, skeevy sideshow of technology gone wrong.

i09 hit the nail on the head when they described this film as “A world of Tom Hanks faces, shudder and mutated children. When those kids smiled they looked the demons from Devil’s Advocate, which probably isn’t what this Christmas film was going for.”

The reason why this technology goes beyond lame to a place that’s frankly frightening is an effect known as the uncanny valley. Wikipedia explains it thusly:

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis regarding the field of robotics. The theory holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness.

Maybe the crowd-sourced encyclopedia isn’t the best scientific evidence, so here’s a little reinforcement from Scientific American:

The flop of the 2004 animated film The Polar Express is largely blamed on the “creepy” feeling people get when they look at very realistic-looking robots or human animations. These too real facsimiles fall into the so-called uncanny valley, between acceptably fake-looking human representations and real, healthy humans. Psychologists have long wondered whether this aversion has an evolutionary basis, and new research on macaques suggests that it does.

Princeton University researchers presented images of real monkey faces, unrealistic animated faces and realistic animated faces to five monkey subjects and recorded how long they gazed at each. Similar to the human response to objects in the uncanny valley, the monkeys avoided looking at the most realistic animated faces.

Even MONKEYS understand that this technology is monstrously bad!

If you want to make a Pixar-like computer-animated cartoon, then by all means, have at it. If you want to use effects to enhance a live-action film, awesome. But when you lean on an FX crutch that leads you to create imagery like this…

…you are crafting a cinematic nightmare.

Zemeckis’ next project was an adaptation of the classic Norse epic poem Beowulf. This ancient masterpiece is fascinating on literary and anthropological levels and inspired such modern classics as “The Lord of the Rings” – Tolkien was an Oxford don who was considered the foremost Beowulf expert of his time. His essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” called for an understanding of the film not only as a historical document but also as a literary work of genius.

Naturally, Zemeckis couldn’t wait to get his hands on this legend and transform it into a motion-capture atrocity. The Wiki entry contains all sorts of horrifying nuggets on this front:

Zemeckis did not like the poem, but enjoyed reading the screenplay. Because of the expanded budget, Zemeckis told the screenwriters to rewrite their script, because “there is nothing that you could write that would cost me more than a million dollars per minute to film. Go wild!” In particular, the entire fight with the dragon was rewritten from a talky confrontation to a battle spanning the cliffs and the sea.

[...]

Robert Zemeckis insisted that the character Beowulf resemble depictions of Jesus Christ, believing that a correlation could be made between Christ’s face and a universally accepted appeal.

[...]

Southern Methodist University’s Director of Medieval Studies Bonnie Wheeler is “convinced that the new Robert Zemeckis movie treatment sacrifices the power of the original for a plot line that propels Beowulf into seduction by Angelina Jolie—the mother of the monster he has just slain.’ What man doesn’t get involved with Angelina Jolie?’ Wheeler asks. ‘It’s a great cop-out on a great poem.’”

I think I would rather watch a video of the performance above than the final result run through the motion-capture meat grinder.

Since Robert Zemeckis knows better than anyone else what makes great cinema, he immediately began looking for another literary classic to disrespect, tarnish and adorn with effects straight out of Ghost Rider and Spider-Man 3.

Joe Morganstern of the Wall Street Journal hit a critical grand slam with this explanation of why Zemeckis’ “Carol” is such an unmitigated waste of celluloid.

To put it bluntly, if Scroogely, Disney’s 3-D animated version of “A Christmas Carol” is a calamity. The pace is predominantly glacial—that alone would be enough to cook the goose of this premature holiday turkey—and the tone is joyless, despite an extended passage of bizarre laughter, several dazzling flights of digital fancy, a succession of striking images and Jim Carrey’s voicing of Scrooge plus half a dozen other roles. “Why so coldhearted?” Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, asks the old skinflint. The same question could be asked of Robert Zemeckis, who adapted and directed the film, and of the company that financed it. Why was simple pleasure frozen out of the production? Why does the beloved story feel embalmed by technology? And why are its characters as insubstantial as the snowflakes that seem to be falling on the audience?

A catch-all answer—and by now an all-too-familiar one—lies in the unnature of that technology. Like “The Polar Express” and “Beowulf,” which were also directed by Mr. Zemeckis, “A Christmas Carol” employs a motion-capture process that translates the movements of live actors into fantasy images. For its advocates, the process is cost-efficient and good enough. For its detractors, including me, motion capture has become synonymous with a special sort of semi-lifelessness—body language that is vaguely impoverished, faces with limited mobility and dead eyes.

In the global marketing push for his new film, the director has dismissed such problems as essentially solved. But they haven’t been solved at all; they’ve only been mitigated, and partially masked by the novelty value of 3-D. Motion capture remains an impediment to capturing emotion.

FilmDrunk ran this hilarious transcript of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew blasting Zemeckis’ filmic atrocities:

Kevin Murphy: I’ll just start the bidding with the entire Robert Zemeckis Christmas movie library. [A Christmas Carol and The Polar Express.] He’s really tried, with his dead, doll-like eye animation that he does, to destroy Christmas for children all over the world.

Mike Nelson: Smack dab in the middle of the uncanny valley, aren’t they? You just don’t know whether to scream or be delighted.

KM: Just to warm myself up for seeing [A Christmas Carol], just to amp up my hate a little bit, I watched the Christmastown/Nuremberg-rally scene in Polar Express. The end, when the elves are marching in formation, and Hitler—oh, I’m sorry, Santa—comes out…

Bill Corbett: [Laughs.] Hitler Claus!

KM: It’s severely backlit behind him, and everyone is just sort of…

BC: [evil voice] “Ho Ho Heil!”

KM: [Laughs.] Yeah. I can’t get on board with Roger Ebert about A Christmas Carol. I think he’s one hundred thousand percent wrong.

BC: Did Roger Ebert like it? Wow. What’s going on with that man?

KM: I don’t know. Maybe he likes misery and horror for children.

The fact that Robert Zemeckis, the guy who directed fucking Back to the Future, flushed his career down the motion capture toilet is offensive enough. That he felt he deserved laurels for this “achievement” is truly staggering.

This article from La Tercera, also discovered by FilmDrunk and translated from Spanish, reveals some quotes from Zemeckis that betray amazing arrogance. He compares his achievements in motion-capture to the animation innovations of Walt Disney himself and suggests he should not only win an Oscar, but a SPECIAL Oscar acknowledging his unique talents.

“I would say it would be appropriate to create a new category, as when Walt Disney made the first animated film. He was given a special award because no one had done that before,” said the pioneer in applying new technologies to cinema.

Zemeckis’ henchman Jack Rapke is also quoted in the article saying that Carrey deserves an Oscar for his performance. Why don’t you jokers (a) stop toppling masterpieces of Western culture and (b) stop awarding yourselves Oscars for at best mediocre, and at worst blasphemous, cinematic diarrhea.

Luckily for me, the market intervened. Disney watched in horror as James Cameron greatly surpassed Zemeckis’ “achievements” in motion capture technology.

Avatar has its critics, but one thing that’s universally acknowledged is that it is a technical masterpiece that manages to bridge the uncanny valley. The Na’vi were believable figures on the screen, rather than horrifying dead-eyed monsters. Not only that, but Avatar’s massive box office gross completely wiped the floor with Zemeckis’ “Carol.”

So let us stand and applaud as Disney drops the guillotine on Zemeckis’ reign of terror.

Walt Disney Studios pulled the plug on Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture company on Friday, the latest in a string of cost-cutting moves. ImageMovers Digital, which is based near San Francisco and employs 450 people, will slowly wind down production over the next few months.

In some ways, the ghost of Christmas past paid Mr. Zemeckis a visit. His hugely expensive “A Christmas Carol” was a big disappointment for Disney, especially considering how much promotional muscle the studio put behind it. And despite his pioneering work in motion-capture technology, Mr. Zemeckis has been leapfrogged in the genre by James Cameron and “Avatar.”

[...]

Mr. Zemeckis said in a statement, “I’m incredibly proud of the talented team that we assembled.” He added, “Their pride and dedication to making quality movies is evident in everything we have produced.”

If by that you mean, your studio was obsessed with plastering crappy special effects over everything, besmirching great works of art in the process, then I completely agree.

Were I to obtain a DeLorean with the ability to go back in time, I would have to consider heading to the mid-90s in order to slap some sense into Robert Zemeckis.

He used to be such an awesome director. Now he’s an delusional joke dwelling deep within the uncanny valley. I’m just thankful that his corporate parents realized what many of us have known for years – it’s high time to pull the plug on his operations.

I guess the fallout from the economic apocalypse isn’t ALL bad.

David Burnce is our movie-industry expert of choice, who earlier opined on the 2010 Oscar nominees. Here’s his epic overview of the big event.

Some years, you can go into the Oscar race feeling pretty confident that your predictions are largely safe bets, save for a few toss-of-the-coin categories like last year’s Penn vs. Rourke Best Actor race.

This is not one of those years.

And don’t listen to anyone who claims otherwise (sorry Ebert).

Instead, we’re facing a year with a small batch of heavy favorites and a whole lot of races, down through the below-the-line categories, that could go a few different ways. So I’m not feeling as confident in my predictions this year as I often have in the past, but I am really looking forward to Sunday night and seeing how this topsy-turvy Oscar season comes to an end. I’m happy to sacrifice bragging rights for some genuine suspense…and I’m not really inclined to brag anyway. So here’s where my head is at as the big day rapidly approaches.

WARNING: My fondness for talking (and writing) about movies can lead to a lot of rambling, sometimes more than the category in question really justifies. My Best Picture commentary really goes off on some tangents, but I couldn’t keep it all in! Anyway, I tried to keep it shorter as I worked my way down the list, but proceed at your own risk.

ANOTHER WARNING: This is just some advice. If you’re planning to Tivo the show, be sure to set whatever is on after the Oscars to record as well, because you can bet that the show will run over the three-hour time that your DVR has allotted for it.

BEST PICTURE/DIRECTOR

To those who’ve been paying attention since last November-ish (i.e. mega movie awards nerds like me), this year’s Best Picture race has been the most schizophrenic in recent history. Heading into December, I would have said that Up in the Air was going to be the movie to beat. A serious film that still has lots of laughs, plus effervescent performances and a sharp script that nailed the zeitgeist. But as the critics awards actually started to roll out, The Hurt Locker turned out to be the dominant film. Then came mid-December and the release of Avatar, which left everyone slack-jawed, Academy members far and wide included (or so it was reported). When the Golden Globes anointed Avatar, it officially became the movie to beat. Until the guilds came around, that is, and suddenly The Hurt Locker was back on top with wins from the producers, directors, writers, and editors.

And still there are many who think that with the new voting system, this isn’t just an Avatar-Hurt Locker race. To go along with the switch from five to ten Best Picture nominees, the Academy is also switching to the preferential ballot system for its top category. This is the system by which they’ve always determined the nominees, but the actual winners were voted by straight up popularity: the movie with the most votes wins. Not anymore. If you want to understand this game-changing element, read this article wherein the preferential system is clearly and thoroughly explained through a fantasy scenario that has Inglourious Basterds winning Best Picture.

Let’s start with Director though, because that race seems to have become more certain. At this point, I’d be surprised if Kathryn Bigelow doesn’t take it. Even her fellow nominees James Cameron and Quentin Tarantino have said they’re voting for her. She would be the first woman to ever win Best Director. She’s only the fourth to be nominated, and the only one who has come this close, thanks to wins from nearly every major critics group, plus the Director’s Guild and the British Academy. I would be really happy if she wins -  The Hurt Locker is a superbly directed movie.

But will it win Best Picture? This could definitely be one of those years when the two top prizes are split. The irony there, if we stick with the Hurt Locker vs. Avatar scenario, is that it would probably make more sense for the split to go the other way. I think more people look at The Hurt Locker as a better film overall than Avatar, but even those who take shots at Avatar’s story have to admit that Cameron is a true visionary and a brilliant craftsman. Whether you’re bothered by his dialogue or not, there’s no arguing that the man can direct the shit out of a movie. Nonetheless, the opportunity to help Bigelow make history seems to be the overriding feeling, and it’s not like The Hurt Locker is undeserving of a directing Oscar.

So what about Avatar? Despite the staggering box office, I know many people were underwhelmed and disappointed in the story and can’t believe that the Academy would give the film its top honor. But think about this: most movie fans of my age group, if not beyond it as well, look at 1977 and still can’t believe that Annie Hall beat Star Wars for Best Picture. Star Wars, after all, defined a generation. Its box office success was unprecedented, its affect on culture was unparalleled, and its impact on visual effects was revolutionary. Star Wars changed movies forever. Yet it was a simple story, one whose detractors – and yes, it had plenty of them – dismissed as childish as they sneered at the dialogue and wrote it off as silly, faux-spiritual hokum. Those “serious” filmgoers and Academy Award watchers probably didn’t think Star Wars deserved it either. But I’ll bet that a lot of the people who decry Avatar as a Best Picture winner do think that Star Wars should have won. Now I’m definitely not saying that Avatar is as good as Star Wars or that it will spawn the same degree of undying fervor, but its impact is similar…maybe not as much on the culture, but for better or worse it is seen as changing movies forever. Like it or not, Avatar is the movie of the year. Not necessarily the best movie of the year, but the one that more than any other defines 2009. Is it crazy to argue that the Best Picture Oscar should recognize exactly that?

Still, I really don’t know which way this is gonna go. For every article I find that says the preferential ballot system will favor Avatar, there’s another claiming it will favor The Hurt Locker while yet another claims that Inglourious Bastards will actually be the beneficiary. And the stream of idiotic arguments for or against a given movie’s chances are laughable, as everyone spins whatever numbers or stats they want in order to bolster their film’s chances. Some say The Hurt Locker won’t win because it grossed so little money theatrically. Seriously? It’s not going to win because it only made $12 million? Who cares? Okay, fine – maybe producers and studio executives think that way. But does anybody really think that a composer, makeup artist or cinematographer is going to not vote for a movie because of how little money it made? That’s what they’ll ask themselves when they fill out their ballot? It’s absurd. The Hurt Locker will apparently be the lowest grossing Best Picture winner if it wins. So? No fantasy film had ever won Best Picture until The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. And come to think of it, I don’t think any science-fiction film has ever won it either, so there’s Avatar’s chance to make history. There’s a first time for everything. (Hear that, gay cowboys? Your day will come!)

Or then there’s Harvey Weinstein, who is convinced that Inglourious Basterds has Best Picture in the bag, citing the film’s win of Best Ensemble at the Screen Actors Guild awards as one of his chief reasons (actors being the largest branch of the Academy). Harvey, there are 1,205 actors in the Academy. There are nearly 120,000 in SAG, and they all get to vote. Do the math. Not to mention that every year, people try to draw a connection between the SAG Ensemble prize and Best Picture despite the fact that they have only matched up six times out of 14.

There are also the run of recent stories about various acts of dirty campaigning (The Hurt Locker incident being the most prominent), or accusations against the nominees ranging from anti-Semitism (shots ludicrously thrown at Basterds, An Education and A Serious Man) to story inaccuracies (real soldiers suddenly attacking The Hurt Locker months after its release). I hear that helium balloon vendors are incensed over Up’s reckless suggestion that their product could allow a house to be safely navigated through the air. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior mars every Oscar season, even if the sordid depth of the shenanigans are not highly publicized. Really, when you hear how much manipulation and politicking goes on behind the scenes by studios and producers to win Oscars, it paints the whole thing in such a tawdry, disheartening light. There are so many reasons that the Oscars often have little to do with recognizing and celebrating the best in film, and yet despite being fully aware of that, I eat it up like candy. I can’t help it. Years later, fans like me – and some of you – are still muttering about the snubbed performer or the movie that should have won this or that award. But I suppose it’s all part of the fun.

God, have I stalled long enough? Okay, here goes. I’m practically throwing a dart here, but I’m going with The Hurt Locker. It seems like a less polarizing film than Avatar, and so I’m thinking that with the preferential ballot system, people who choose another film as their favorite still might have Hurt Locker high on their list, which could help it in subsequent rounds of voting. I can honestly say that I’ve never had such a hard time trying to predict a winner in any category about which I’m reasonably well informed, ever. I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen.

Personal Choices: Picture – Precious; Director – James Cameron.

“Burnce is on my side and that’s all that matters”

BEST ACTOR
Morgan Freeman should have been a force to be reckoned with as Nelson Mandela, but unfortunately the film didn’t meet expectations and the role gave him little to work with. George Clooney, though he dominated the field of critics awards, doesn’t really have a chance either. Colin Firth picked up the BAFTA award, but he had a home field advantage and while he and his work in A Single Man are widely admired, this just isn’t his year. I’d say Jeremy Renner has a shot for an Adrien Brody-style upset, but Brody wasn’t going up against a heavy favorite who had never won before. Renner is.

This is a category where sentiment will rule the day. The industry hath deemed it time for Jeff Bridges to win an Oscar, and win an Oscar he shall. Does he deserve it? Sure. Bridges has longed topped my list of actors long overdue for an Oscar (a spot he shares with Ed Harris and Sigourney Weaver, so get crackin’ Academy…), and he does great work in Crazy Heart. Is it the best of his career? I wouldn’t say so. Is it even the best of the year? Debatable. But it’s good, and he’s universally respected and appreciated in the business. His time has come.

Interestingly, Bridges is about to re-team with the Coen Brothers, who directed him in The Big Lebowski (a film that, in hindsight, should totally have earned him a nod), for a remake of True Grit. John Wayne won a Best Actor Oscar for the original in 1969, and with the Coens at the helm, Bridges may well be back in the race next year.

As for my own pick, if I strip away all the external factors and just judge the performance alone (which is always how it should be and always how we want it to be but rarely how it is…even for purists like me), the nominee whose work left the strongest impression is Firth. But I’ll be thrilled to see Bridges finally win.

Personal Choice: Colin Firth

BEST ACTRESS
Way back in the fall, long before the race had fully taken shape, it already seemed like we were headed for a two-woman showdown: Meryl Streep and Carey Mulligan. At the time my feeling was that a Streep-Mulligan race was no race at all; the Academy was not going to overlook Meryl Streep again in favor of some fresh-faced ingénue with her whole career ahead of her. I actually thought that if anyone could beat Streep, it was Gabourey Sidibe. True, like Mulligan, she’s a fresh, new face at the start of her career, but she had a role and a movie that stirred people deep inside – much more so, I guessed, then Mulligan, whose performance was admired and engaging but not nearly as moving.

But then something happened. The film community collectively put their heads up their asses and somehow moved Sandra Bullock to the front of the queue for her entertaining-but-hardly-award-caliber work in The Blind Side. I talked about this when I commented on the nominees, so I won’t dwell again on how she even wound up in the race. But I will dwell on how she has turned into the frontrunner, because it continues to baffle me.

Bullock is extremely likable, and word on the street is that everyone who has worked with her, cast and crew, adores her. I like her too, but she has hardly given us a career full of great films and performances, so any argument that it’s “her time” is complete bullshit. It’s Jeff Bridges time. He’s someone who has been around for years, done consistently excellent work, been nominated multiple times but never won and this year found himself a role that perfectly suited his stage in life and his career. If this were the aforementioned Sigourney Weaver, or Julianne Moore or Laura Linney, then there might be some credence to the argument that “she’s due.” But we’re talking about Sandra Bullock, whose filmography has a smattering of good movies and a lot that are mediocre to bad. I could see likability factoring into things if the performance really dazzled, but I just can’t see how enough people could be more impressed by her performance than any of her fellow nominees.

I readily admit that numerous factors other than quality of performance enter into Oscar voting and that all kinds of political factors are taken into account, from how much a nominee works the campaign circuit to how good their speeches are throughout the season. Bullock has worked the circuit, and her speeches have been funny, humble and all around terrific. But despite all signs pointing her way for the win (including The Blind Side’s shocking Best Picture nomination, which suggests reasonably broad support), I just can’t go there. My mind can’t wrap around it and my fingers can’t type it. While it may cost me in the pool, I’m holding onto the idea that enough Academy members pulled their heads out of their asses in time to actually watch these performances side by side and recognize that while Bullock does a good job, she doesn’t hold a candle to her competition.

Meryl Streep, on the other hand, is still defying expectations and proving why she is widely regarded as the greatest actress alive. There’s nothing this woman can’t do. She is a force of nature. Julia Child is such a recognizable and distinct personality that any actress would be daunted trying to portray her. Streep not only does it, but deepens our understanding and appreciation of someone we knew only as a TV personality. It may not be the biggest stretch of her career, but this was hardly an easy or throwaway performance. The film marks her 16th nomination, and her 12th since the last time she won. She’s due…and there’s nobody else but Meryl Streep who could already have two Oscars and still be called overdue.

I also want to throw this out there: Streep and Bullock tied at the Critics Choice Awards; they both won Golden Globes (Bullock for Drama, Streep for Musical/Comedy); and although Bullock took the SAG, that group tends to spread the wealth around rather than awarding people multiple times, and Streep won last year for Doubt. I’m just saying. So despite the prevalent opinion – and probably the accurate one – I’m predicting Meryl for the win.

That said, if Gabourey Sidibe pulls an upset, I’ll be on my feet cheering.

Personal Choice: Streep or Sidibe

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Sorry guys. You did good work, but this category is owned by Inglourious Basterds’ Christoph Waltz, who will become the third performer in a row – after Heath Ledger and Javier Bardem – to win Supporting Actor by giving us an antagonist for the ages.

Personal Choice: Christoph Waltz

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Anybody who thought that Mo’Nique’s behavior during the awards season was controversial – oh my God, she didn’t run around kissing Academy members’ asses! – has been silenced by her moving, grateful acceptance speeches at the Critics Choice Awards, Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild awards (where her graciousness extended to acknowledging some of the actors from Precious who were not included in the film’s nominated ensemble cast). With all respect to her fellow nominees, especially the ladies of Up in the Air, Mo’Nique cannot be stopped. Nor should she be.

Personal Choice: Mo’Nique

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
While Oscar voters sometimes want to keep the Best Picture space relatively serious, the writing awards are where they are more likely to vote for something fun. Movies like Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, Fargo and Ghost have all triumphed here rather than in Best Picture, so I think Inglourious Basterds stands its best chance at a major non-acting award here. Some will point to The Hurt Locker’s Writer’s Guild Award win as a sign in its favor, but keep in mind that Basterds was ineligible for a WGA nomination, clearing the way for The Hurt Locker. Not that Locker isn’t a good script and couldn’t pull through, but I think all the support for Inglourious Basterds – Christoph Waltz aside – will be channeled here to Quentin Tarantino, giving him his second screenwriting Oscar.

Personal Choice: Inglourious Basterds

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Up in the Air has earned gushing love for its writing and Jason Reitman has cemented his status as one of our finest young filmmakers. This category is full of great work, but Up in the Air is too smart, too “of the moment” and too appreciated to go home empty handed. I would be shocked if anything else wins. It’s kinda lame though that this dude Sheldon Turner gets to pretty much ride Reitman’s coattails to an Academy Award win, but what can you do?

Personal Choice: Up in the Air (with In the Loop nipping at its tail). Seriously, have you not seen In the Loop yet? WTF are you waiting for?

BEST ANIMATED FILM
It was such a good year for animated features that even this category could have had close to 10 worthy nominees. Fantastic Mr. Fox could pull an upset, but it’s hard to imagine that Up isn’t going to bring another Oscar to the halls of Pixar.

Personal Choice: Up…but I’d have no complaints about Mr. Fox

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
The black and white imagery of The White Ribbon took the prize from the American Society of Cinematographers and won some notable critics awards as well, but I don’t think enough Academy members have seen it. And nice as it is to see Harry Potter here, Colin Creevey stands a better chance of killing Voldemort than this movie does of winning. Basterds will have a lot of support, but I think it will fall by the wayside. It could go either way with Hurt Locker and Avatar, and while I don’t necessarily think most voters understand the technical challenges involved in shooting Avatar, I think they understand enough – and admire the film’s prettiness enough – that I’m giving it the edge.

Personal Choice: Avatar

BEST FILM EDITING
I think Academy members tend to vote for editing they can notice or at least intuit, so I’m ruling out Precious and Basterds, finely edited though they may be. Even more so than its cinematography, The Hurt Locker’s editing creates its powerful tension and helps the movie hold the viewer in a vice-grip. In Avatar’s favor, it is the rare action movie that is edited so cleanly that even during the rapid cuts of big battle sequences you never lose your bearing or feel like you’re watching a blur. And District 9 actually bridges that gap as an action movie that is also dramatically intense.

I have a number of friends who are editors, and I have to think they’re laughing their asses off at my ignorant commentary. Hey, I admit I don’t really understand what makes editing great and that I too tend to be wowed by editing that I notice…even though any editor will tell you that the best editing is invisible. So knowing full well that I don’t really know what I’m talking about, my gut tells me this one goes to The Hurt Locker.

Personal Choice: The Hurt Locker

BEST ART DIRECTION
This category often favors period pieces and historical recreations, which bodes decently for Sherlock Holmes and even better for The Young Victoria. But if there’s anything that can trump something from a history book, it’s something imagined and fantastical. So while Victoria could be crowned, I think the floating mountains, celestial skyscape and lush, eye-popping botany of Avatar’s Pandora will take the gold.

Personal Choice: Avatar

BEST COSTUME DESIGN
Period frocks do even better with Oscar than period sets. Both Coco Before Chanel and Bright Star fit that bill (and I wouldn’t count out the latter), but The Young Victoria is the higher profile of the period films, and also required a greater number of costumes to dress all those royals at court. I expect it will rule the day.

Personal Choice: Bright Star

BEST ORIGINAL SONG
It’s not the strongest category this year, but then again, how often is this really a strong category? You usually find one or two good songs each year, and a few others – often cheesy ballads – that fill space. Perhaps that’s why this year, Oscar producers decided not to include performances of the nominated songs during the show.

The Princess and the Frog has two nominees and there was a time when a song from a Disney animated musical would have this sewn up, but while the movie is a welcome return to form for Disney animation, the songs by Randy Newman don’t live up to the Alan Menken/Howard Ashman tunes that scored wins for The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.

No one has heard of the movie Paris 36, let alone it’s nominated song, so we can safely discount that one. And the number from Nine? Ehh.

This year, justice will be served as the one great song in the category takes the prize: The Weary Kind, from Crazy Heart, by T-Bone Burnett and Ryan Bingham. Since you won’t hear the song on the show, check out the video or just let the mp3 play in the background. I love the underlying percussion that enters in the second verse. It’s unobtrusive, yet gives the song an added depth.

If you’re interested in hearing the competition, here are links to Quicktime mp3’s via incontention.com:

Almost There (Princess and the Frog)
Down in New Orleans (Princess and the Frog)
Loin de Paname (Paris 36)
Take It All (Nine)

Personal Choice: The Weary Kind

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
I suppose it’s possible that James Horner could get caught up in an Avatar sweep, but I think Michael Giacchino’s whimsical score for Up will float to the top.

Personal Choice: Up

BEST MAKEUP
There are three nominees. One is Il Divo. Ever heard of it? Neither has anyone in the Academy. One is The Young Victoria. I still can’t figure out how this got nominated. Even the artist admits there isn’t much in the way of makeup. Seriously. In a Variety article about the set design, costumes and makeup for the film, this is all hair and makeup artist Jenny Shircore could say:

But it’s especially in her dewy, makeup-free skin that Victoria’s youth shines through — although this is as much of an illusion as anything, Shircore reveals. “Emily did wear quite a lot of makeup, but that’s the skill of doing it, really, to make her look lovely.” The trick, she says, is “not to powder it into oblivion so that you get a dry, matte look. You’ve got to allow a little bit of sheen to come through.”

That leaves Star Trek, which features some fine makeup work, sure. Oscar worthy? In this weak field, I guess so.

Personal Choice: Can I still say The Road? No? Okay, then Star Trek.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Star Trek and District 9 both feature excellent work, but when James Cameron movies are nominated for Best Visual Effects, they win Best Visual Effects. And how can this one not? It changed the rules. One of the night’s surest bets.

Personal Choice: Avatar

BEST SOUND MIXING/SOUND EDITING
As usual, I have no idea how to make a well-thought out prediction in these categories because not only do I not understand either of them, but that obviously means I don’t understand how they differ from each other. So as always, my guess is pretty blind. I’m picking Avatar for both, but who knows? The Hurt Locker could easily get one of them.

Personal Choice: None. As in, I don’t have a personal choice. Not “none” as in none of them deserve win. That would just make me a dick.

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Now we’re getting into the categories where I haven’t seen any or all of the nominees and can only go by what I hear, so I’m looking to professional journalists who’ve all been covering the Oscars for years to guide my choices.

The two highest profile films are A Prophet and The White Ribbon. From what I’ve heard, the former is the preferred choice, but few think it will win and neither do I. It’s a violent movie, and the thing to remember about this category is that only Academy members who have attended screenings of all five nominees can vote. That means the deciding members are likely older and retired, and they don’t like violence. My concern around The White Ribbon is that it almost seems too obvious. Being one of the most recognized and critically acclaimed of the bunch would appear to give it an edge, but this category seldom follows traditional logic. So while Ribbon may well be the victor, I’m going with what many in the field are predicting: El Secreto de Sos Ojos, or The Secret in Their Eyes.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
The most well-known of the nominees are Food, Inc. and The Cove. The latter has collected the majority of pre-Oscar prizes and seems to be the favorite, so I’ll follow the pack.

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT
These documentary categories are often so hard to pick because each one tells a story more devastating and heartbreaking than the last. It almost comes down to which one moves people the most. It looks like the majority of pundits are predicting The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant. I’ll probably make up my mind at the last minute, but both Music By Prudence and China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province also sound like they could be winners.

BEST ANIMATED SHORT
Oscar history favors the Wallace and Gromit short A Matter of Loaf and Death. Wallace and Gromit have earned their creator Nick Park four Academy Awards (three for short animation, one for feature length). The only time he lost was in 1990 for A Grand Day Out. That year’s winner? Nick Park for Creature Comforts.

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT
My friend Brantley recently saw these five films and posted a brief write-up on his blog, if you’re interested in seeing what they’re all about. The Door is the most widely expected to win. But every now and then this race favors something quirky and funny over something doomy and gloomy, so Instead of Abracadabra might pull it out of the hat.

And there it is. It will be fun to see how Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin handle co-hosting chores, and after last year’s really well-produced show, I’m curious to see how this year will go. Adam Shankman’s involvement has worried me from the beginning, but I read some interviews with him that led me to give him the benefit of the doubt. We’ll see. Enjoy the show, and we’ll meet back here one last time for a post-mortem…as soon as I can write it.

Is anyone still reading this, or have I pulled a Ted Striker?

This morning’s Cape Cod Times has a delightful wedding story that I simply must share with you.

It seems that Timothy Keene, 37, and Marissa Putignano, 22, shacked-up lovers residing at 77 Winter Street in Hyannis, MA, decided to make their love match official yesterday. So they headed down to the Barnstable town hall to get themselves married.

The ceremony went off without a hitch — Ms. Putignano changed her last name to Putignano-Keene — and the happy couple celebrated by splitting a bottle of champagne.

But as they made their way back to 77 Winter Street to consummate, still tipsy from the bubbly they’d quaffed, the new Mrs. Putignano-Keene spotted a woman and her son crossing the parking lot that fronts Alberto’s Ristorante.

Unfortunately for this woman, she was an ex-lover of Hyannis’ own Don Juan, Timothy Keene.

Despite the fact that T. Keene liked it enough to put a ring on it, Putignano-Keene flipped out at the sight of her new husband’s former flame. According to the published report:

The woman told the police she had just left work and was cutting through the parking lot, accompanied by her son, when the newlywed couple drove by. The woman told the police Putignano-Keene rolled down the driver’s side window and began swearing and using sexually charged language.

The bride’s bathroom mirror Facebook picture.
Note the telltale towel rack in background…

As they walked away, they heard tires squealing and an engine roar!

Hell hath no fury like a Putignano-Keene!

The woman said she and her son were walking away when she heard a car engine roar then saw Putignano-Keene’s car heading directly toward them, causing them to jump out of the way. She said Putignano-Keene then backed the car up, turned and in the process crashed into a fence behind Alberto’s Ristorante, which backs onto the parking lot.

The scene of the crime (was on the other side of this building)

Both Putignano-Keene and her husband were caught red-handed at the scene by police officers who noted that they were both wasted off a couple of glasses of bub. Learn how to hold your liquor, Cape townies!

The Cape Cod Times also noted that this isn’t Mr. Keene’s first brush with the law. Back in 2000, he was convicted of “lewd and lascivious behavior” and is now a Level 2 Sex Offender in the State of Florida. His sex offender information webpage lists this amazingly long series of aliases:

Timothy John Keene, Timtohy J Keene, Timothy Keene, James Tillman, Stephen Brenner, Tim Obell, Timothy Lee Keene, Timothy Lee Zeh.

My favorite is “Timtohy”. “What’s Tim short for?” “Timtohy.”

It also features this mugshot, which would fit nicely in Gene Weingarten’s ongoing “Guilty based on mugshot alone” series:

Yup, looks capable of lewd and lascivious behavior to me…

The newlyweds spent their wedding night segregated in separate cells.

Mr. Keene was charged with disorderly conduct, while his wife was hit with two counts of assault with a dangerous weapon, a count of disorderly conduct and a count of vandalism.

Every year, the nation’s staunchest conservatives gather together for a conference that joyously promotes the values of old white dudes and the women who love them.

It’s called CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. News from CPAC dominated the political wires last week, as one right-wing luminary after another held forth on our nation’s inalienable rights and the evils of the Obama/Reid/Pelosi triumvirate of doom.

Dick Cheney was there, snarling at all the harm that’s been done to national security since Obama took office…well, actually, since GWB stopped obeying his commands sometime during the second term. Marco Rubio, preferred conservative candidate for Senator from Florida, lit up the stage with some fiery Nobama rhetoric. The Massachusetts moderates, Mitt Romney and Scott Brown, were there looking like the fashion magazine studs that they are. The irrepressible Newt Gingrich gave a great speech, wowing attendees with his intellect and political chops.

My personal favorite of the headliners was Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who hoped to burnish his 2012 presidential chances with a speech outlining his principles. Principle Number One: “God is in charge.” Yeah, take that, heathen Deists who wrote the Constitution! Jesus for the win!

Then there were the wackier speechgivers: crazy Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, unhinged Internet troll Andrew Breitbart, terrifically honest but demonstrably bigoted Rep. Ron Paul, and former Senator Rick Santorum, who thinks gay rights are a slippery slope to man-on-dog loving.

And who could forget the inimitable Glenn Beck, who closed down the conference by hammering, of all things, the Republican Party?

But despite all these big names and highly-publicized moments, the greatest parts of CPAC were mostly under-the-radar. As Salon’s Gabriel Winant put it, “It’s only when you look beyond the headliners that CPAC starts to get fun.”

There was the conservative rapper who represents for Sean Hannity, a presentation called “Abraham Lincoln: Friend or Foe?”, and perhaps best of all, a speech by a self-described “rabid heterosexual.”

Yup, CPAC was awesome this year.

Ron Paul: honest on foreign policy, wicked off base with his views on race

As a bit of an introduction, let’s get a conservative take from Mickey Edwards, a founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation who chaired CPAC for five years:

I was asked yesterday whether I would be going to CPAC, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, which is currently being held a half-hour’s walk from my office in DC…

But the answer to yesterday’s question was “no.” No, I’m not going to CPAC. And, truth be told, most of the folks there wouldn’t want me there…I don’t begrudge these activists their views and they are entitled to use the term “conservative” to describe themselves if they so choose. But the views many of them profess have little in common with the distinctly American kind of conservatism that gave birth to CPAC and the modern American conservative movement.

[...]

Today there are few things that set a “conservative’s” teeth on edge more than a defense of “civil liberties;” yet that is what American conservatism was all about–protecting the liberties of the people. It was a system designed to protect the people from an over-reaching government, not to protect the government from the people. American constitutionalism was a historical high-point in recognizing individual worth. Stop at CPAC today and you will find rooms full of ardent, zealous, fervent young men and women who believe the government should be allowed to torture (we condemned people at Nuremberg for doing that), who believe the government should be able to lock people up without charges and hold them indefinitely (something Henry VIII agreed was a proper exercise of government authority). Who believe the government should be able to read a citizen’s mail and listen in on a citizen’s phone calls, all without a warrant (the Constitution of course prohibits searches without a warrant, but nobody cares less about the Constitution than some of today’s ersatz conservatives).

CPAC, ya burnt! Not exactly the ringing endorsement you’d expect from someone with Edwards’ conservative credentials.

In fact, CPAC is less of a serious gathering of citizens committed to conservative principles than it is a morning zoo of Fox News types, all jockeying for the “Most Wacky” ribbon.

As Ezra Klein put it, it’s the right wing’s chance to “let slip the dogs of tea!”

For instance, Christina Bellantoni brings us the tale of Hi Caliber, the purveyor of our nation’s finest conservative hip hop flows:

Don’t call Hi Caliber a Republican rapper.

He prefers conservative hip hop artist, and has lent his rhyme to the tea party movement.

Cal, who wouldn’t give his full name because he says he’s been threatened by “liberals,” starred in a FreedomWorks-produced video called “Patriotic People.”

He rhymes: “Politicians need the truth, it will set you free, and I hope you paid attention to the march on D.C. …Liberalism is like a cancerous tumor, just look at Harry Reid, Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.”

The article also contains some more of Hi Caliber’s tight lyrical genius:

I’ve been called a wigger, a cracker, a poet, a rapper, a racist,
but to me race is not a factor…
Don’t care if you’re white like Snow or much blacker –
all I want to hear is the sound of my children’s laughter.
And guess what, they are racially mixed!
So you could call me a bigot, I’ll call you a hypocrite!
I’ve been arrested for being white and hanging with blacks,
I’ve been robbed by brothers for being white and that’s a fact!

Eat your heart out, J.J. Redick!

Hi Caliber drops lyrical flows for those who think Pelosi’s a ho.

Hi Caliber was slated to perform a conservative hip hop throwdown at CPAC, but unfortunately, “the crowd disbanded early,” to the everlasting chagrin of those who love both Sean Hannity and right-wing hip hop insanity.

Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo held forth at CPAC on the topic of Abraham Lincoln, a historical figure regarded by the majority of historians as America’s greatest president, and venerated by Republicans as the party’s foremost founding father and by Democrats as a heroically progressive statesman.

So naturally, DiLorenzo threw down on Lincoln as a proto-Stalin!

The Lincoln Memorial is a temple to the idea that government in America is not voluntary, and never will be as long as Lincoln is its primary symbol and as long as Lincoln mythology remains the state’s cornerstone ideology. Lincoln micromanaged the murder of some 350,000 fellow Americans, including more than 50,000 civilians, in order to “prove” his point that the central government is indeed not voluntary, the states were never sovereign (so he said), and that any group of citizens who contemplate leaving it will be killed en masse, their cities and towns burned to the ground, and their wealth and personal belongings confiscated by the U.S. Army. If we standardize for today’s population, Lincoln’s killing machine would lead to the death of more than 6 million Americans.

To me, it sounds like how Soviet Russia was “united” in its own “glorious union.” Do these men really believe that Southerners in 1866 felt “united” with their fellow citizens in the North?

[...]

Lincoln is praised by “Lincoln scholars” for having been an obsessive micromanager of the war. He knew everything. He knew that Southern civilians were murdered and plundered from the very beginning, even before the Battle of First Manassas commenced. He authorized the bombing of Southern cities and he was also apparently obsessed with experimenting with larger and larger weapons of mass destruction – to be used on fellow Americans. He profusely thanked and rewarded officers like Sherman and Sheridan for waging war on civilians, as they did during Sherman’s March, the burning of Atlanta and Columbia, South Carolina, and the burning of the Shenandoah Valley. General Sherman wrote that Lincoln “especially enjoyed” his stories of how Southern women, children and old men were terrorized by Sherman’s “bummers,” as his looting, pillaging, plundering, and raping “soldiers” were called.

That is tremendous. Jubal Early is cheering boisterously from his grave. Bringing WMDs into it was a masterstroke.

I completely disagree with DiLorenzo’s argument in every way, but I will defend to the death his right to be a complete jackass and make an utter fool of himself.

That’s why they call it America, Man!

Sherman’s economic destruction = the al Qaeda of the 19th century

One of the greatest heroes of CPAC 2010 was Doug Giles, a true genius who was first brought to my attention by ROTI operatives C. Dave and Nils Coq au Vin.

He’s an inspirational speaker and writer who preaches against the malign forces of gaiety, feminism and liberalism, also known as the wickednesses that are squashing America’s greatness. Can I get an amen from the old, straight white dudes and their docile wives??

Here’s a sample of his published work:

If metrosexual pop culture, feminized public schools and the effeminate branches of evanjellycalism lay their sissy hands on him, you can kiss his masculinity good-bye—because they will morph him into a dandy.

To counter the organized hatred of men and masculinity that your son is facing, it’s important that you, the parent, completely blow off all the smack our PC-addled culture is trying to sell you. You’ll need two things to do this: attitude and inspiration.

Giles provides the attitude while looking to the Bible for inspiration in order to help you raise your son to be a classic man and not postmodern metrosexual.

Doug Giles is so hard core, even some evangelicals are too fruity for him. Equal rights for women? Silence, you dandy priss!

How to Keep Jackasses Away From Daddy’s Girl is here to help fathers with daughters. In my new book, I table scores of road-tested, historically proven, can’t miss principles for raising girls with a fighting spirit, discernment, a winning attitude, and a holy vision to overcome this feces filled culture.

You will learn in the next 150 finger-burning pages how to teach your daughters to fight, shoot guns, sense BS, be classy, despise anti-intellectualism, be visionaries, party without going Britney, the value hunting and the outdoors, the importance of traditional convictions, and how to avoid the date from hell.

There’s more where that came from. No doubt, Doug Giles has the answers that every conservative parent needs, but read carefully, lest you burn your fingers from the licking flames of right-wing truth!

He’s at his best when pronouncing his animus for teaching kids about homosexuality. You see, Doug Giles is 100% man and 1000% straight man.

When his member becomes erect at the sight of a sexy woman — make that his sexy Christian wife — it’s like the flagpole on Iwo Jima, proudly waving aloft the American standard as his nuts thump out the beat of “The Star Spangled Banner. ” His seed is made in the USA and destined only for the willing embrace of a childbearing womb.

Why don’t I let him preach it:

I’m a rabid heterosexual. There, I said it. I’m outing myself. I know it’s not cool in this gay day to like the opposite sex. And I’m sure there will be those reflexively irate gays who will call me latent. As far as I can tell, however, I’m straight and wholeheartedly love the fact that God blessed us boys with girls. Yep, good job with the girlies, God, and muchas gracias, Señor Yahweh, for creating the chicas bonitas. In the immortal words of Borat, “I like. Very nice.” Call me weird.

As far as I am concerned, the lovely lady lumps, in all their shapes and sizes, trump a dude any old day. Yep, I guess I didn’t get the “gay gene.” (By the way, the only gay genes that I know of are the ones Versace makes.)

So … don’t ever look for me to switch teams, as I am completely and giddily content—yea, even prideful—about my heterosexuality.

Needless to say, if you missed his session at CPAC, why don’t you go burn your bra, you fey communist feces-face!

Glenn Beck closed CPAC out with an inspiring speech that identified the real enemies to America’s freedom and greatness. Dana Milbank reports:

“It is still morning in America,” Beck said. “It just happens to be kind of a head-pounding, hung-over, vomiting for four hours” morning. “The question is what made us sit there in the john vomiting for four hours?”

He scribbled “progressivism” on the board and said it afflicts Republicans as well as Democrats. “I’m so sick of hearing people say, ‘Oh, Republicans are going to solve it all.’ Really? It’s just progressive-light.

“It’s like somebody sticking a screwdriver in your eye,” he continued, “and somebody else pulls it out and puts a pin in your eye. I don’t want stuff in my eye!”

In an apparent reference to John McCain, Beck condemned a “guy in the Republican Party who says his favorite president is Theodore Roosevelt.” He then read disapprovingly the Roosevelt quote that “we grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used . . . so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.”

“Is this what the Republican Party stands for?” Beck demanded. He was answered with boos and cries of “no!” “It’s big government, it’s a socialist utopia and we need to address it as if it is a cancer.”

Obama, no doubt, will be delighted to learn that he has been joined in the conservatives’ ire by the Hero of San Juan Hill.

Beck went on. “It’s not enough just to not suck as much as the other side.”

The CPAC activists gave this line a standing ovation.

Before everyone headed home, they took a straw poll to see who the conference attendees thought should be our next President once the Kenyan “half breed muslin” is tossed out on his terrorist-loving keister.

The winner? Not Mitt Romney (23 percent), not Tim Pawlenty (6 percent) — not even Sarah Palin (7 percent). Ron Paul dominated with 31 percent of the vote.

USA! USA! USA!

]]> http://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/02/25/cpac-was-awesome-this-year/feed/ 1 Alpine McGregor Cheney CPAC-Robert Giroux-thumb-600x350-21879 ron paul cpac hi cal dilorenzo neckties giles1 giles2 giles beck http://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/02/19/lisa-falcone-will-turn-you-straight/ http://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/02/19/lisa-falcone-will-turn-you-straight/#comments Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:42:30 +0000 Alpine McGregor http://rumorsontheinternets.org/?p=2492 ]]>

Today brings news of a delightful lawsuit being filed by a disgruntled former employee of Manhattan billionaire Philip Falcone and his wife, the extravagant, luscious Lisa.

The Falcones have used their immense hedge fund wealth to become major players on the NYC social scene, but along the way they’ve garnered both good and bad publicity. This latest story is certainly the most unfavorable they’ve seen to date. While it’s too early to say how legit the employee’s claims are, it’s definitely not premature to announce that these people are hugely entertaining! Move over, Countess de Lesseps, because you’re about to be out-classed.

Philip heads Harbinger Capital Partners, a hedge fund with major stakes in the New York Times company and a variety of satellite operators. He bet big against subprime mortgages and made a staggering amount of money when the market collapsed. Hooray!

His wife grew up in Spanish Harlem, raised by a single mother on welfare — they met in 1992 when she was a fashion model/waitress and he was a young junk bond trader. Today, he’s one of the 300 richest people in the world, which has redounded to the benefit of Lisa’s ambitions to influence the fashion, culture and society of New York City. Together, they purchased the city’s foremost sex mansion.

However, according to their former house manager, they are also homophobic sex-harassers who won’t leave a gay man be.

The best source for background on Lisa Falcone is a fairly glowing profile in the New York Times that somehow fails to mention that her husband owns a huge piece of the company.

Here’s the strangest passage, in which the exuberant Lisa just can’t help but make a scene by throwing money around at a gala event…

Who is that woman and what is she doing?

That is what seemed to be going through the minds of many guests at a gala dinner in early June atop the High Line, the elevated downtown railway that has been transformed into a landscaped esplanade.

The long, elegantly decorated tables were packed with luminaries of the New York social circuit, including Oscar de la Renta, Martha Stewart, Harvey Weinstein and Jerry Seinfeld.

Joshua David, a founder of Friends of the High Line, which had saved the structure from demolition and spearheaded its revival, had just announced a $10 million challenge grant to the project from the media mogul Barry Diller and his wife, the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, prompting a standing ovation. Suddenly, a leggy brunette in a cropped bob, flouncy Roberto Cavalli minidress and slingback, peep-toe heels by Christian Louboutin (who was in attendance) rose from her seat, approached Mr. David in the middle of his remarks, whispered in his ear and took over the microphone.

She was Lisa Maria Falcone, she said, and she and her husband, Philip A. Falcone, were so excited about the High Line and so moved by Mr. Diller and Ms. von Furstenberg’s gift that they decided to match it.

If that isn’t the work of a Grade-A Upstager, I don’t know what is.

DVF played it cool, but you just know she’s up in her weird penthouse buckyball plotting revenge on Lisa Falcone.

Arts institutions around the city took notice of Mrs. Falcone’s impulsive generosity, and as Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan put it, “suddenly recognized Lisa’s unique insight into, you know, culture.”

When City Ballet asked her to be on the board last June, Ms. Falcone said she asked: “‘Why me? Do you really want me on the board? Is it about my husband or is it me?’”

Peter Martins, City Ballet’s ballet master in chief, said Ms. Falcone had brought a breath of fresh air to the board. “She’s unlike anybody else,” he said. “She is young, generous, has lots of ideas.”

I’m totally sure that the Ballet honchos were sitting around trying to decide who to invite to their board, they all said “You know who is a complete ballet GENIUS? Wacky hedge fund wife Lisa Falcone! I heard her husband is wicked rich but that’s no concern of ours.”

The Falcones next made headlines with their purchase of Penthouse founder Bob Guccione’s sex mansion in the East 60s.

Let’s just say this was a very special residence; this money quote from the real estate agent tasked with selling it sums it up perfectly.

Speaking about features like the first floor’s massive, shimmering Roman-style pool, she said: “It’s odd to talk about houses like this, but that house had an odd energy to it.” So, were experts brought in to remedy Mr. Guccione’s energy? “Certainly… I hired two different feng shui people to look at it, and we had quite a few clearings on it. But that never stopped people from having odd feelings about it. Whenever people brought in children, they were ready to leave.”

The house featured honest-to-God 100% marble toilets:

To say nothing of its unparalleled collection of many-titted sculptures:

Unfortunately, this cultural landmark was promptly slated for destruction by the Falcones, who decided to gut it completely and rebuild from scratch.

For shame!! How dare they desecrate Guccione’s Caligulan perfection?

In an email to Gawker, Philip Falcone protested that he’s merely restoring the mansion to its original greatness, running some game about bringing the 1890s back. I ask you, would you rather see the 1890s brought back — or SEXY brought back? I think that question answers itself.

Then again, when you are married to Lisa Falcone, you bring sexy back every damn day.

Thus far the only real scandal associated with the colorful Falcones has been Gawker’s accusation that she draped her tittay balls around David Schwimmer in the movie “Breast Men,” but that proved to be a specious claim.

However, the accusations hitting the tabloids today are both explosive and juicy, like the time Rudy Huxtable and her fat white friend forgot to put the lid on the blender.

When it comes to tawdry Manhattan scandals, you need to go to the New York Post first:

A filthy rich Upper East Side couple treated their gay hired help like dirt, court papers charge.

In the Manhattan Supreme Court discrimination suit, William Gamble says billionaire Philip Falcone’s wife Lisa Maria subjected him to homophobic comments, repeatedly hit on him and struck him when he rebuffed her advances.

The couple also made Gamble work in a former pig-sty – literally. The suit says the previous occupant of Gamble’s office was the family’s pet pig, Wilbur, who was moved into more luxurious accommodations to make room for the help.

NY Magazine’s Daily Intel blog reports that Gamble ran into trouble the moment he started working for the Falcones, because he committed the twin crimes of gaiety and hotness.

Philip and Lisa Falcone will not abide it when you flaunt the twin crimes!

Upon his hiring to run the Falcones’ several houses, William Gamble was asked by Philip whether he was gay. When he said yes, this apparently sent both Falcones into a mad sexual shame spiral. “Falcone thereafter saw fit to utter homophobic comments directed at gay people in general and [Gamble] in particular,” the lawsuit claims…

Falcone’s wife couldn’t handle Gamble’s beauty any better, Gamble claims: According to the suit, she told him his “demeanor did not live up to her idea of what a stereotypical gay man should be, as [he] was not ‘effeminate’ enough.”

She teased him on a vacation for wearing bathing suits that weren’t skimpy enough, and then once, when she was drunk, “a visibly inebriated Falcone confronted and assaulted” Gamble, “forcibly pushing her hand down his pants to grab his genitals,” the suit says, as reported by the Post. “When rebuffed, Falcone struck [Gamble] three times with her hand forcefully enough to leave deep bruises on his abdomen.”

Quoting the terrifying straight woman from all gay men’s dreams, Lisa Maria then allegedly told Gamble “all he required was ‘a good fuck’ in order to change him into a heterosexual.” When the gang returned to New York, Gamble claims things never went back to normal. At one point, Gamble says, Lisa Maria hissed at him: “If you weren’t so beautiful, you wouldn’t be here.”

Lisa Falcone is used to getting her way, and you’d better play along like a docile ballet company unless you want to get your nuts squoze…

The Daily News piles on:

His brief stint with the couple came to an end shortly after a March 2008 trip to St. Barts, when Lisa Maria Falcone allegedly suggested that he don a skimpier swimsuit and mused that strangers might think he was her boytoy.

“She treated him like a barnyard animal,” said lawyer Jack Tuckner of Tuckner, Sipser, Weinstock & Sipser.

For their part, the Falcones vehemently deny the charges leveled against them. They call Gamble a money-grubbing liar who’s still bitter about getting fired.

Furthermore, they allege that he’s a fruitacious pansy with WAY too conservative taste in beachwear who might learn a thing or two if he would just loosen up and boof a cougar.

Lisa Falcone refused to reveal her age to the Times, saying she wants to be an example to young people. So take heed, young billionheiresses!

When you hire a gay guy to work for you, don’t treat him like your own personal Stanford Blatch, ie. with respect and love. Instead, sexually harass the shit out of him and you too can live in a STD-ridden sex mansion.

It’s the American Dream that every little girl in Spanish Harlem clings to. For one, it came true.

It’s been over a week since the nominations were announced and I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to shoot off my reactions. I’ve been too busy writing about Lost. And running my meth lab. So for those who might care, here are my thoughts – where I have some – on what made the cut.

BEST PICTURE/BEST DIRECTOR
So the highly anticipated “10 Best Picture nominees” cat is out of the bag, and all in all I’d say it’s a good list. Like a lot of people – most people, probably – the nomination for The Blind Side caught me way off guard.

When the trailers for this movie ran last fall, I thought it looked sentimental and cheesy, and even if it was a true story, I was still turned off by a movie about rich white people coming to the rescue of a poor black boy. Which is weird, ’cause I loved me some Diff’rent Strokes back in the 80s.

Anyway, it didn’t surprise me that people turned out in droves. When Sandra Bullock started winning awards, I finally broke down and saw it. And I’ll admit that it was better than I thought it would be. I give credit to writer/director John Lee Hancock for showing restraint with a story that could so easily have gone down the road I was expecting based on those trailers.

But that said, there is no way this film should be singled out as one of the year’s best. It is a nice, “heartwarming” movie, but completely ordinary. With movies like Where the Wild Things Are, The Road, A Single Man, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Messenger and In the Loop all in the mix, a nomination for The Blind Side is a joke.

Other than that, the list went pretty much as expected. The consensus is that Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious and Up in the Air would have been the five nominees if the category hadn’t been expanded, so it’s interesting that those films’ directors all earned nominations: usually one or two of those people would have missed. James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow, Quentin Tarantino, Lee Daniels and Jason Reitman is a great list of directors to represent 2009 (he had no chance, but I wish Spike Jonze had been recognized for Where the Wild Things Are).

My only other comment here is that as I’ve followed the award season since it began in early December, one of the most pleasant surprises has been how well Inglourious Basterds has done. Christoph Waltz was a shoo-in nominee from the moment the film’s first scene was over, and Tarantino’s screenplay was also a safe bet early on. But I honestly didn’t expect Tarantino’s gonzo revisionist take on World War II to fare so well across the board – critics’s awards, guild awards, ten best lists, etc.

I would never have predicted it, but I’m happy that it came to pass, earning QT his second nominations as both director and screenwriter.  Bravo.

BEST ACTOR
No surprises here. Nice to see a young up-and-comer like Jeremy Renner hang in there with the big boys. He impressed me in North Country and The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, so I’m happy for him and the the opportunities that are sure to come his way as a result of this film.

I also have to take a moment and ask of the people who saw Invictus: do you think Morgan Freeman deserved to be nominated? I suppose there are some minor spoilers ahead, so continue at your own risk…

I was so excited about him in this role. Freeman is one of my favorites, and the thought of him playing Nelson Mandela was full of such promise. It’s too bad he blew it on this movie. It’s not that Invictus is bad or that Freeman isn’t good in it. It’s just…this is basically a sports underdog movie. It’s Hoosiers. Remember the Titans. Hell, it’s Major League. It’s the familiar story of a sports team rising above low expectations to win big, and maybe learning some important life lessons along the way. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but here you have one of the great actors of our time playing one of the great lives of our time, and this is the story he chooses to tell?

Freeman does well, but the script doesn’t allow him to dig into the character at all. There are a few moments that hint at what he could have done and where he could have gone had he chosen to do a film that was really about Mandela. But this one – he’s hardly even in the second half/last third of the movie. There’s so little depth for him to play that the film wound up being a pretty big disappointment for me. Freeman delivers as best he can with what’s there, but when you think about how much more he could have done?

It makes me sad to say so, but I don’t think he should have been nominated. Viggo Mortensen (The Road), Matt Damon (The Informant!), Ben Foster (The Messenger), Joaquin Phoenix (Two Lovers) and Sam Rockwell (Moon) all had the chance to do much more in their films than Freeman got to do in Invictus. I wish that Academy members had recognized one of them instead of doing the obvious thing and nominating Freeman for a performance that, through no fault of his own, failed to meet expectations.

BEST ACTRESS
Sandra Bullock’s nomination was no surprise by this point in the season, but it shocks me that she has moved up to take frontrunner status alongside Meryl Streep. She just doesn’t belong here.

I’ve always liked Sandra Bullock; she has great comedic timing and her small role in Crash proved that she could handle good drama. But she has chosen bad movies almost exclusively throughout her career; it’s almost like a gift she has. The Blind Side is better than most of the films on her resume, but there is nothing about this performance that calls for award talk. Bullock can do sassy, she can do tough, she can do sweet – these are not stretches for her, nor does this particular character leap off the screen. I enjoyed her, but at the end of the day it was Erin Brockovich Lite.

So what is this nomination for? Is it for finally picking a decent movie? For having a good year? Okay, I get that between the huge box office success of this film and last summer’s The Proposal, Bullock is having a Moment (though everyone apparently chose to ignore that her third film – All About Steve – was widely considered one of the year’s worst).

But does making two adequate movies that become commercial hits merit an Oscar nomination? No, especially not when Saoirse Ronan (The Lovely Bones), Emily Blunt (The Young Victoria) and Abbie Cornish (Bright Star) are sitting the race out.

Does it merit a Golden Globe win over Precious’ Gabourey Sidibe? No way. A SAG award over Sidibe and Meryl Streep? Seriously, no way. This performance isn’t in the same league as her competition.

Sorry Sandra. I can only hope the voters come to their senses by the time they mark their ballots.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Matt Damon has proven to be a great and versatile actor, and it’s surprising that this nomination is his first since Good Will Hunting. But it’s like Academy members just filled it out on auto-pilot. “Hmm, Clint Eastwood movie, Morgan as Mandela, important subject matter, scene where he gives an inspirational speech…I think by some Academy bylaw we’re required to nominate this.” Snore.

Like Freeman, Damon is good in the film, don’t get me wrong. But also like Freeman, the role doesn’t ask much of him. And like Bullock, Damon finds himself in this race without really doing anything that special. Matt Damon did give a nomination-worthy performance this year; it just wasn’t in this movie. I really don’t get it. There had to be a significant number of people who listed Damon as their first choice – their favorite Supporting Actor of the year – in order for him to score a nomination. I can’t fathom that, even in such an unusually weak year for this category.

The rest of it looks good. It’s nice to see Christopher Plummer earn his first nomination after so many years of excellent work. Stanley Tucci, too — he doesn’t have Plummer’s years under his belt, but he’s been playing the game well for a long time. And it’s great to see Harrelson back in the field. He’s done some terrific work these last several years.

Too bad they’re all gonna lose to Christoph Waltz.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Last year’s winner Penelope Cruz scored her second consecutive nomination, and while I would have singled out Marion Cotillard from Nine’s ensemble, Cruz was good and probably caught voters’ attention with one of the film’s more comedic performances, as well as general hotness. I think Maggie Gyllenhaal benefited from an all-around appreciation for Crazy Heart. There were stronger performances to choose from – I’d have gone with The Messenger’s Samantha Morton – and Gyllenhaal’s been overlooked for performances more interesting than this one, but I can’t begrudge her finally getting some recognition. And seeing Up in the Air’s ladies is no surprise; each is deserving.

Too bad they’re all gonna lose to Mo’Nique.

BEST ORIGINAL/ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
I thought The Messenger’s chances were slim given that the Writer’s Guild failed to nominate it even when other sure-thing contenders like Up and Basterds were ruled ineligible, so kudos to the Academy’s writer’s branch for acknowledging this small gem.

Major kudos for including In the Loop in the adapted race. Without a doubt this was one of the best scripts of the year – smart, tight, topical and hilarious. I thought the movie might get overshadowed by something higher profile, but it totally deserves the nomination. Rent this movie NOW.

BEST ANIMATED FILM
What the @#%! is The Secret of Kells? Whatever it is, I was just glad that for the first time since 2002 there were enough eligible films to have five nominees instead of three. It’s a testament to how much great animation there is these days that any one of these would totally deserve the prize….this Kells thing notwithstanding, since I haven’t seen it.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
The nomination for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince took a lot of the pundits by surprise, but they must have forgotten how beautifully photographed the film is and how frequently the cinematography was mentioned in reviews. Great to see it recognized.

BEST MAKEUP
Another snub for The Road. Dirt, grime and muck may never have been so artfully, beautifully applied as they were in this movie. I have no idea what Il Divo is, so no comment on that one, but The Young Victoria?! Over The Road?!? Are you kidding me?? For what?? I can’t wait for this category to come up on the show so I can see exactly what sketches, behind the scenes footage and finished clip will highlight how this could possibly have taken a spot.

Ed Helms’ missing tooth in The Hangover would have been more nomination-worthy than anything I can think of in The Young Victoria.

And Star Trek was nominated? Maybe I’m forgetting something, but that seems to be a nomination for pointy ears and some tattoos on Eric Bana’s head. Big deal. I suppose someone else would look at The Road and say, “It’s just dirt. Big deal.” But of course, they would be wrong. How about something for Zombieland or District 9 in lieu of Trek and Victoria?

As there were no other huge surprises or snubs like last year’s Dark Knight/Bruce Springsteen omissions, that’s all I really have to say about the nominees until it’s time to predict the winners in a few weeks. Prepare to be schooled…in boredom and obsessive movie awards analysis.

It’s only February, but the 2010 elections are heating up fast…

In fact, ROTI has already chosen its favorite candidate of the upcoming election cycle. It’s Carly Fiorina, a California Republican who hopes to challenge longtime incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer in November. Fiorina may not be the most wise or deserving candidate out there, but she has one thing going for her that I personally find irresistible…a knack for enraging her opponents, entertaining onlookers, and setting fire to everything she touches.

What’s not to love?

Carly Fiorina first made headlines as the extraordinarily high-profile CEO of HP, and during her stint at the head of the electronics giant, she managed to turn the company’s most devoted loyalists into her mortal enemies, destroy HP’s legendary corporate culture, and ram through a massive merger that went awry. But no worries, because she scored a lucrative golden parachute!

She then became the high-profile economic spokesman for John McCain, propounding the economic ideas that carried him to victory in 2008. Oh whoops, actually flip that and reverse it. Her straw-grasping defenses of Sarah Palin were so effective, they ultimately led to the campaign dumping her altogether.

Now Carly Fiorina is running for Senate, despite the fact that she has skipped most every election she has been eligible to vote in during her lifetime. It hasn’t taken her long to electrify the Republican primary with an unbelievably stupid website and an instantly-classic viral campaign video. This lady is awesome!

One thing that even her mortal enemies have to give Carly Fiorina credit for is that she truly was a trailblazer in the world of business — one of the first women to become a power player in corporate culture.

After the former Cara Carleton Sneed (wouldn’t C.C. Sneed have made for an amazing political name?) graduated from Stanford in 1976, she worked as a secretary, assistant and temp at a number of corporations, including HP. After she joined AT&T in the early 80s, she worked her way up the corporate ladder, taking a jackhammer to the old glass ceiling and playing a critical role in AT&T’s spinoff from Lucent.

By the turn of the century, Carly Fiorina was considered one of the world’s foremost businesswomen. That’s when HP tapped her to lead the company into the new millennium. Unfortunately, what HP found out is that legendary status as a gender trailblazer does not necessarily entail the possession of top-notch corporate skills, especially when taking over a company as a complete outsider.

Fiorina’s main problem was that she busted into HP with guns blazing, hell-bent on transforming a company that had prospered for years through the “HP Way” established by its founders, Bill Hewlett and David Packard. Long before Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard was the original tech company started in a suburban garage, and it grew into a megacorporation by obeying the following maxims:

1. We have trust and respect for individuals.
2. We focus on a high level of achievement and contribution.
3. We conduct our business with uncompromising integrity.
4. We achieve our common objectives through teamwork.
5. We encourage flexibility and innovation.

As an informative article called “10 Reasons People Hate Carly Fiorina” on the site Business Pundit explains, Fiorina bombed at HP because she completely failed to respect any of these principles.

After the tech bubble burst, Fiorina started swinging the axe, canning 18,000 employees. Meanwhile, she was an outspoken proponent of globalizing the workforce (ie. outsourcing), and didn’t hesitate to buy herself a corporate jet so she could make her many, many speaking engagements. HP employees asked themselves, “We should trust her…why?”

Fiorina implemented a top-down management structure, shattering the collaborative processes that had served HP well for so long. While she was off launching new marketing initiatives with Gwen Stefani, her hand-picked cronies bossed around the department heads that had long been given latitude to run their own shops. Instead of pushing for innovation, she relied on market dogma and marketing platitudes. HP could have been the company to design the iPod or otherwise revolutionize the tech industry, but instead it simply milked its printer-ink profit center and hyped up its CEO.

Perhaps most insidiously, Fiorina pushed the company to crush leaks at all costs, initiating a program that ended up violating a number of federal laws, including wiretapping and “pretexting.” So much for Hewlett and Packard’s “uncompromising integrity.”

The HP Way was meaningless to Fiorina, who makes a point of trashing it to this day. In her world, the genius of a marketing executive far outweighs the technical chops of an engineer. That’s why some have called her the “Anti-Steve Jobs,” by unfavorable comparison to the brilliant engineer-marketer who has driven innovation AND business success everywhere he’s gone.

All this explains why when Fiorina made a push to acquire Compaq, one of HP’s main competitors in the personal computer market, the move was fiercely opposed by many shareholders and employees, leading to a massive public showdown that Fiorina barely managed to win. The deal led to some short-term hemorrhaging and ultimately to Fiorina’s dismissal.

While the purchase of a deflated Compaq ultimately proved to be a decent move on Fiorina’s part, it was nevertheless the impetus for her ouster. Fiorina had so utterly failed to lead HP, and had burned so many bridges along the way, that the company’s board and employees simply did not trust her anymore. Her willingness to continually shake up HP, ostensibly for her own glorification, proved too much for the company to handle. They sent her packing with a $20 million severance package and closed the book on the disastrous Fiorina Era.

Portfolio named her one of the Worst American CEOs of All Time. So naturally, her next move was to join political life.

Here’s Carly with her homeboy Johnny Mac. Ironically for someone with a reputation as a job-slasher and outsourcer, Fiorina carried the economic banner for McCain with an emphasis on job creation. But during the summer of 2008, McCain was still preaching that the US economy was basically sound and that the only real threat lay in an Obama victory. At the time, he clearly didn’t realize what a liability Carly Fiorina was to the campaign.

He found out soon enough, when Fiorina mentioned that Sarah Palin didn’t have the expertise required to run an American corporation, and then by way of clarifying her remarks, stated that NONE of the presidential or vice-presidential candidates had the chops to be a CEO, including McCain! Hilariously, all this occurred in the context of Fiorina’s attempt to defend Palin from “sexist” attacks.

The fact that what Fiorina said was pretty much the truth (and besides, the government is NOT like a corporation, no matter how many candidates with private-sector careers may claim that it is) didn’t keep the McCain campaign from flipping out in rage at Fiorina’s loose talk. She was quickly shoved off of the stump and not heard from again.

As we all know, McCain went down to a huge defeat, thanks largely to his tone-deafness on economic matters.

Another brilliant success story from the life of Carly Fiorina!

For the small band of Fiorina-watchers out there (I’ve personally been entranced by her incompetence since 2001), the prospect of her challenging Babs Boxer in 2010 was electrifying.

She has not disappointed thus far, either, launching a political campaign that has caused jaws to drop and eyes to roll.

It all began with the preview/launch of her absurd campaign website, preserved and savaged by this YouTube video:

Carlyfornia Dreamin’?! It wouldn’t take a lot of effort to work up some song parody lyrics comparing her horrible website to poop and deriding it as “gay,” but that would be an unforgivable insult to the color brown and gay people — oh and by the way, Fiorina is a big fan of sexual orientation bigotry, being a staunch supporter of Proposition 8.

The LA Times busted her for skipping dozens of elections throughout her time as a California resident, and she gave some lame excuse about not feeling “connected” to politicians. The CA Democrats were only too eager to paint her as a corporate fat-cat and failed CEO, while her Republican opponents blasted her as a Juanita-come-lately in search of another powerful perch from which to preen.

But Carly’s no dope. She recently retook the offensive with a political ad so amazing, it’s gone massively viral and entranced even the most disinterested of political watchers.

Behold, the now-legendary Demon Sheep Spot!

When it comes to negative political advertising, it simply does not get better than this.

This ad has it all — intellectual dishonesty regarding government spending, comparison of the opponent to swine, amazingly damning voiceover guy, weird acronyms, and the elusive “WTF” factor. (This could only be the work of the weird and wonderful Fred Davis, who also created the Obama Celebrity spot and the King Roy ad.)

No wonder the “FCINO” ad has captivated the attention of even disinterested political watchers. I’m obliged to give a hat tip to ROTI contributor C. Dave, who first noticed this amazing spot, but since then I’ve seen it shared on Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader. It really is a masterpiece.

This version is amazing:

Then there’s this amusing Twitter page that purports to be from the Demon Sheep himself:

Carly Fiorina has done it again — taken an otherwise boring, pedestrian moment and transformed it into something combative, dramatic, and extraordinary.

As far as ROTI is concerned, she makes a superb candidate for office. If she finds a way to get elected, she’ll only continue her record of spectacular disasters and high-profile blunders. Yes, this will be unfortunate for the people of California, but think of the material she’ll bestow on our little corner of the Internets!

I guess she’s not the only one who’s “Carlyfornia dreamin’.”

]]> http://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/02/09/carly-fiorinas-got-my-vote/feed/ 1 Alpine McGregor carlytop carly fired up fiorina mccain memoir demonsheep http://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/01/28/indy-vs-nola-museum-directors-sack-up/ http://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/01/28/indy-vs-nola-museum-directors-sack-up/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:35:13 +0000 Alpine McGregor http://rumorsontheinternets.org/?p=2454 ]]>

As Super Bowl mania heats up — a two week hype-fest unlike any other — the eyes of the nation eagerly turn to the traditional Mayor’s Bet, in which each city’s executive wagers the finest edible goodness his burg has to offer.

The only problem: Indianapolis is in the Super Bowl this year. Unfortunately, the sleepy Midwestern corn-tropolis has very little to offer New Orleans, one of the best places to chow down in the world.

Indianapolis mayor Greg Ballard made his wager: “shrimp cocktail with plenty of horseradish.” Whoop de doo, like they don’t have shrimp in New Orleans?! Is that the best you can do, Indianapolis? Lame.

Probably because he was so underwhelmed by Ballard’s bet, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin (remember him?) put up a similarly boring offer of “CDs by local musicians and Mardi Gras cakes.” Seriously? I would have thrown down a Mississippi river barge loaded down with oyster po-boys and beignets, followed by an oil tanker full of Hurricane…all of which would be released for free to the Bourbon Street masses following a victory. Weak sauce, Nagin.

This is why it sucks when second-tier cities make it to national championship games: not only are the ratings limp because they don’t have that many fans, but they can’t even get the Mayor’s Bet right.

If this was New York vs. LA, you’d have all kind of cheesecake, french dip, chili dogs and corned beef sandwiches being thrown down. You know — the good stuff.

Happily, the Mayor’s Bet is not the only wager in play a week from Sunday…

Thanks to some amazing prodding by ARTSJOURNAL’s “Modern Art Notes” blogger Tyler Green, the directors of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art have thrown down masterpieces in one of the most exciting gambling showdowns the art world has ever known!

After Green encouraged the museums to get into the act via Twitter, Indy MOA director Maxwell L. Anderson (pictured above) took the bait.

Here’s the work of art that Anderson proposed to bet: Ingrid Calame’s “Tracings from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the L.A. River.“

It’s a pretty cool piece, but come on. As epic Super Bowl bet material goes, it’s the equivalent of Ray Nagin’s lame compact disc collection.

When NOMA director E. John Bullard (pictured above) heard about this wager, he responded in hilarious fashion:

“Max Anderson must not really believe the Colts can beat the Saints in the Super Bowl. Otherwise why would he bet such an insignificant work as the Ingrid Calame painting? Let’s up the ante. The New Orleans Museum of Art will bet the three-month loan of its Renoir painting, Seamstress at Window, circa 1908, which is currently in the big Renoir exhibition in Paris. What will Max wager of equal importance? Go Saints!”

His spirit mildly stirred by the trash talk of his southern colleague, Anderson replied with a diss of his own and a raised ante:

That’s rich…your original bet was the less-than-legendary Ingrid Calame, but you’re too good for Renoir?

Adding to the Indy-style lameness was that the newly proposed bet was this Jean-Valentine Morel jeweled cup:

Now, don’t get me wrong, this is a masterpiece that I would kill to acquire on behalf of one of my various fantasy sports leagues. It’s got gold, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and superb workmanship. But come on now, IMA. NOMA is throwing down a Renoir deemed worthy of touring the world and your response is this frilly French trifle?

Bullard agreed with my take. He demanded that the IMA agree to some REAL high-stakes betting, and called Anderson out via email and tweet: “I am amused that Renoir is too sweet for Indianapolis. Does this mean that those Indiana corn farmers have simpler tastes? If so why would Max offer us that gaudy Chalice — just looks like another over-elaborate Victorian tchotchke.”

Bullard added, “Sorry but we have no farm scenes or portraits of football players to send you.”

You see that, Ray Nagin? THAT’S how you call out a lame Indianapolis bet.

Having been adequately needled, Max Anderson rose to the occasion by throwing down a true masterpiece:

BOOM! This is “The Fifth Plague of Egypt” by the great English landscape painter JMW Turner. It’s one of the early works that helped the painter make his name on the London scene, and it’s definitely worthy of an epic Super Bowl gamble.

The only problem? In return, Anderson requested the NOMA’s prized Lebrun “Portrait of Marie Antoinette,” which isn’t in good enough shape to make the trip to Indy…

While NOMA had to beg off this proposal, at least it did so in amusing fashion:

As Bullard noted by email, “This great French artist is considered the father of landscape painting and was one of Turner’s great inspirations. These two paintings would look splendid hanging together in New Orleans — or miracle of miracles, in Indianapolis.”

A fair, thoughtful counteroffer — and it was accepted by Max Anderson:

So there you have it, folks.

While we really liked Deadspin’s idea (“If New Orleans wins they get Van Gogh’s good ear, and if the Colts pull it out, Dallas Clark gets to take a dump on a Cezanne”), the Turner/Claude bet gives this year’s Super Bowl a little bit of added drama that the Mayor’s Bet simply did not deliver.

Now when Pierre Garcon goes up for a grab in the end zone, he’s not just looking for six points — he’s looking to hang a Claude in the IMA.

And as Reggie Bush catches a kickoff and looks to take it to the house, he’s also got a chance to bring a Turner to NOMA!

Huge, huge hat tip to Tyler Green for sparking this curatorial rivalry. For those of you who think Twitter is lame/pointless, this major wager never would have happened without the microblogging site…so reconsider your assumptions, chump.

Hopefully this will become a proud tradition in the world of sports. Think of it now — Italy beats France in the World Cup and reclaims the Mona Lisa! The Lakers beat the Celtics and the Getty punks the MFA for a Cezanne! The Rangers beat the Cubs and the Sears Tower is relocated to Dallas! The possibilities are endless.

]]> http://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/01/28/indy-vs-nola-museum-directors-sack-up/feed/ 1 Alpine McGregor superbowl anderson bet-tweet-1 calame bullard renoir bet-tweet-2 cup bet-tweet-3 JMW marie bet-tweet-4 claude bet-tweet-5 http://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/01/25/son-of-a-millworker-father-of-a-sex-tape/ http://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/01/25/son-of-a-millworker-father-of-a-sex-tape/#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:06:01 +0000 Alpine McGregor http://rumorsontheinternets.org/?p=2437 ]]>

John Edwards has been on a downward spiral for some time now. While he once seemed like the dictionary definition of a rising political star — Senator from North Carolina, 2004 Democratic Vice Presidential nominee — he is now the biggest joke in the history of smooth-talking politicians.

His attempts to become president, then vice president, then president again, ended in total defeat. His good looks and charm were turned against him and his haircut expenses became a national punchline. He got busted cheating on his cancer-stricken wife. He planted a love child in the womb of a wacky New Age video vixen and tried to get one of his sycophantic aides to take the fall. He tried to negotiate for a Cabinet post and Obama laughed in his face.

Now for the ultimate dishonor: John Edwards reportedly made a sex tape!

The story of John Edwards’ descent into total ignominy is a Vegas buffet of schadenfreude delight. What’s more, while the major media hubs completely dropped the ball on this story until it was basically undeniable, the National Enquirer was all over the story from day one. Frankly, they deserve a Pulitzer Prize for unmasking Edwards as a gross, sleazy fraud who came disturbingly close to holding a top position of power in American government.

It all started when Dick Cheney whipped his ass in their vice-presidential debate. Although Edwards was allegedly some hotshot trial lawyer, he managed to land just a few jabs against the widely-loathed VP before being pummeled to the mat and TKOed like a true Glass Joe. Even though many people disagreed with the policy positions that Cheney was defending, it didn’t matter, because he demolished Edwards’ silly arguments, leaving the slick Southerner yelping about the irrelevant issue of Cheney’s vote against MLK Day. For most of us, this was the first inkling that John Edwards wasn’t all he claimed to be.

After Kerry and Edwards lost an incredibly winnable campaign against the unpopular GWB, Edwards was undaunted. It must have been the fault of that windsurfing Francophile flipflopper, not him! So he went around building houses for Katrina victims and talking about “Two Americas” like a real Jimmy Carter. Edwards was going to run for president again, and this time he was gonna win…not even his wife’s Elizabeth’s breast cancer could take him off the path to save Americans from injustice and inequality.

That’s when he met a floozy named Rielle Hunter.

The explosive 2008-scandal tome “Game Change” (guilty pleasure excerpt via NYMAG) relays this version of their first encounter, seen through the eyes of now-disillusioned aide Josh Brumberger:

“My friends insist you’re John Edwards,” Rielle Hunter said. “I tell them no way—you’re way too handsome.”

“No, ma’am. I’m John Edwards,” the candidate replied.

“No way! I don’t believe you!”

Brumberger saw this kind of thing all the time. Women were always hitting on his boss. He and Edwards had a well-oiled system in place for dealing with these situations tactfully and politely.

“He is John Edwards,” Brumberger interjected, “and I’m sorry, but we’re in the middle of something. Thank you.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Hunter said, and retreated to her table.

Brumberger thought that she was trouble from the get-go. She looked like a hybrid of Stevie Nicks and Lucinda Williams, in an outfit more suitable for a Grateful Dead concert than an evening at the Regency.

A few minutes later, after Edwards departed for a dinner around the corner, Hunter came back over to Brumberger and started quizzing him about his job. “I think I can help you guys,” she said, and handed him her business card.

The inscription read, BEING IS FREE: RIELLE HUNTER—TRUTH SEEKER.

Despite his campaign staff’s growing horror, Edwards soon hired Rielle Hunter to make campaign videos about “the REAL John Edwards.”

She was eminently qualified to do this work because…well, no real reason, but we can only surmise it was due to her vast experience in media, as exemplified by her appearance on the Chuck Woolery game show LINGO.

As soon as the campaign team saw the videos that Hunter was making, they knew that the candidate was thinking with his dong, not his mindbrain…

For Baldick, the alarm bells had already started ringing when he got a look at the first webisode produced by Hunter. It was filled with so much flirty banter and overfamiliarity between her and Edwards that it made Baldick cringe. When he and his wife watched it at home in bed on Baldick’s laptop, she turned to him at once and said, Oh, my God! He’s fucking her!

The campaign staff, with the assistance of an increasingly suspicious Elizabeth Edwards, finally managed to run Hunter out of town, but not before she conceived a love child with the candidate.

At first, l’affaire Rielle was just a sidelight to the fading fortunes of the Edwards campaign. Obama rose to take the not-Hillary role he’d imagined filling, and he was left a distant third place.

As Edwards’ presidential hopes faded, the National Enquirer struck…

Nobody believed it, because it was being reported by the National Enquirer, but the story was 100% true.

Team Edwards had known that the Enquirer story was coming for some time. Fred Baron, John’s friend and finance chair, had scrambled to coordinate statements from lawyers for the candidate and Hunter denying John’s paternity, which the piece included. It also introduced a new character to the drama: Edwards’s longtime personal aide, Andrew Young, who was asserting that he was the father. The details in the article around Young’s involvement were as squirrelly as could be…the story noted, “Some insiders wonder whether Young’s paternity claim is simply a cover-up to protect his longtime pal Edwards.”

[...]

Edwards denounced the Enquirer piece vehemently to his staff. On the campaign bus, he railed at the tabloid: “How could they fucking say this? How could they do this to me? How could they do this to Elizabeth?”

Some Edwards aides believed John’s denials, thought the story was too far out to be true. But others decided to stop spinning the candidate’s disavowals to the media, so certain were they that their boss was lying. Too many of them knew that Young had talked openly about having had a vasectomy a few years back.

Please Barack, hook a brother up

The denouement of Edwards’ presidential campaign was simply laughable. Knowing he had no chance to win, he tried to peddle an endorsement to Obama or Hillary in exchange for the vice-presidential spot or a plum Cabinet post. Not surprisingly, this effort yielded little fruit. Obama reportedly said that if he was willing to cut a Cabinet-spot deal with Edwards in exchange for backing him, he didn’t deserve to be president.

Edwards ended up endorsing Obama in exchange for a speaking slot at the convention, which was later yanked away from him for making such a joke out of himself.

The National Enquirer kept up the pressure…splashing a picture of Edwards holding Hunter’s baby across its pages, trumpeting the results of a “secret DNA test,” and exposing Edwards for additional roguish deeds:

Actually, he just hit on her and got rejected

In August 2008, John Edwards admitted that he boned Rielle Hunter.

But despite declaring honesty time, he lied about being the pepaw of little Frances Quinn Hunter to ABC’s Bob Woodruff!

It wasn’t until last week that he finally confessed to seeding the truth-seeker’s womb.

It turns out that fooling the American people wasn’t as easy as John Edwards thought it was, and he blubbered, “It was wrong for me ever to deny she was my daughter and hopefully one day, when she understands, she will forgive me.”

But just when it seemed that the embarrassment was finally coming to an end, would-be patsy Andrew Young went animal-style on the Edwards legacy.

Elizabeth Edwards unwisely dissed Young in her book “Resilience,” writing that he was just as bad as Rielle Hunter — two sleazeballs who wanted nothing more than to soak up that Edwards goodness.

Young’s friends say…he decided that the Edwards would never set the record straight after he read Elizabeth Edwards’s description of him as a “pathetic,” grasping male mirror image of Hunter.

“They look at our lives, which from the outside, in particular, are pictures of joy and plenty, and they want it for themselves,” she wrote of Hunter and Young in “Resilience.”

“I think he wouldn’t have [decided to write his book] unless he felt just absolutely heartbroken and betrayed, which is the sentiment I get from him when I talk to him,” said Young’s friend Toben. “It took a lot, and probably Elizabeth’s book was the final stimulus for that decision.”

You’d think that Andrew Young wouldn’t have much to offer beyond, “Yeah, it’s bullshit, Edwards boned that lady, not me.” Since everyone already knows that, who cares what he has to say, right?

Well, what if he told you he found an unmarked DVD while poking around one day…and on that DVD was John Edwards getting his Rick Salomon on with Rielle?!

Take it away, Gawker!

Sources have told us that, in the throes of their affair, John Edwards and Rielle Hunter made a sex tape that contains “several sex acts.” And that his aide, Andrew Young found it on an unmarked DVD.

The tape, say both our sources, is explicit and reveals that Edwards “is physically very striking, in a certain area. Everyone who sees it says ‘whoa’. She’s behind the camera at first.”

When rumors of the affair first broke Young was so loyal to Edwards that he pretended that he was the father of Hunter’s daughter Frances Quinn, now 2. But part of Young’s disillusionment with the 2004 vice presidential candidate and 2008 candidate came one day as he went through a stack of DVDs at Rielle Hunter’s house.

It was this betrayal that prompted Young to write his tell-all book, The Politician.

Cocksmen at large

Politico gleefully piles on:

Young, with all the fury of a spurned lover, may be holding out yet another threat to his old idol, if it comes to that: an explicit videotape, two people who have seen it said, of Edwards and Hunter together.

“It’s his hole card,” said the source.

Young’s friends said they had no knowledge of the tape, which is reportedly described in his book proposal. But Young has not, to date, sold it. And another person close to Young described his motives in, reluctantly, writing the book:

“The question I would ask everybody is ‘What the hell alternative do I have’?” the person quoted Young saying. “Are you just supposed to be kicked mercilessly and never say anything yourself?”

How far we’ve come since 2004. John Edwards, once a respected presidential prospect, is now being accused of gruesome sextapery.

It’s definitely not the first time a Democratic superstar has been busted fiddling and faddling with comely help — LBJ getting busted by Lady Bird while screwing a secretary in the Oval Office comes to mind, to say nothing of Bill Clinton’s cigar chicanery — but there are several aspects that make this particular case especially gross. Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer, for one. The absurd attempt to trick the American people into thinking another man was responsible for his misdeeds. The sex tape reports, which simply boggle the mind.

Finally, there’s the ad hominem attacks against the National Enquirer, which was on the money from the beginning and never let up until Edwards’ ass was nailed to the wall.

Gawker has started a Pulitzer Prize campaign for the Enquirer, rightly noting that “If the Washington Post, or the New Orleans Times-Picayune or any paper really, had broken a story of this magnitude their Pulitzer nod would barely be in doubt. Edwards called the Enquirer, while trying to disparage its claims he was cheating and had fathered a child “tabloid trash.” That stigma is the only reason its investigative reporters will not be considered.”

Politicians, if you want to bone skanks, we don’t really care — as long as you aren’t known for public moralizing or selling yourself as a family man. But when a publication completely busts you, don’t lie to us.

And whatever you do…don’t make a sex tape.

]]> http://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/01/25/son-of-a-millworker-father-of-a-sex-tape/feed/ 0 Alpine McGregor edwards montage debate nymag enquirer sanctimonious nenq 2 parents mayer four trials http://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/01/19/shocker-the-hot-babe-you-met-online-is-really-a-squeaky-voiced-dude/ http://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/01/19/shocker-the-hot-babe-you-met-online-is-really-a-squeaky-voiced-dude/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:39:55 +0000 Alpine McGregor http://rumorsontheinternets.org/?p=2425 ]]>

Today’s LA TIMES has a story about an online scam that should surprise no one.

A bunch of rich, lonely dudes surfing the internet in a quest for companionship were duped into thinking they were “involved” with a hot Guess model.

They never actually met this woman, but hours-long steamy conversations with a feminine voice on the other end of the line had them convinced. Many of them sent money and expensive gifts. In return, they received naked photos that were supposedly intended just for them.

Unfortunately, these would-be sugar daddies weren’t actually talking to the sexy 23-year old model, Bree Condon.

Their online romance was with a 24-year-old man with a high-pitched voice and a talent for Photoshopping and internet research.

This story by Harriet Ryan is simply delightful:

For would-be sugar daddies perusing SeekingMillionaire.com — “the meeting place for wealthy and beautiful singles” — there was much to like about profile #160127. “Bree” identified herself as a 23-year-old model from Newport Beach, and the accompanying photos showed an emerald-eyed beauty with a mane of silky brown hair and a wraparound smile that seemed both sexy and sweet.

“Just looking for Mr. Right,” her brief self-description read. If the pictures — one in a backless dress at a party, another in a clingy halter top — seemed somehow familiar, a quick Internet search offered an explanation: Bree Condon, 23, of Newport Beach was a successful model and aspiring actress who’d done a Guess jeans campaign and posed for Maxim magazine’s swimsuit issue.

The profile beckoned on the site for nearly two years, and some who responded soon believed they had embarked on a romantic relationship with Condon. There were no face-to-face dates, but there were intimate phone conversations, nude photos and the enticing possibility of a future with a gorgeous cover girl.

None of it was true, a fact that came to light last month when police officers, prodded by a private investigator hired by the real Condon, knocked on the door of a budget motel room in Austin, Texas. Inside, according to police, they found an iPhone that had been a gift from one suitor, a small dog paid for by another and a 24-year-old man with a very high-pitched voice.

Authorities say the man, Justin Brown, had been impersonating Condon online and on the telephone for years. A grand jury indicted him last week on a felony theft charge. He’s accused of duping a wealthy Miami Beach doctor out of about $15,000 the doctor believed he was sending to Condon. Los Angeles police also are investigating.

Not pictured: Justin Brown

It turns out that Justin Brown figured out he could basically make a living as a pseudo-Bree Condon; who knows how many other women he’s also impersonated in his travels on the Interwebs.

As the Times story points out, there was enough data about Condon easily available online – her parents’ jobs, how many siblings she has – that Brown was able to amass plenty of believable information for use in his impersonation. At the same time, Bree Condon is not so famous that the tabloids would want to report on what she was up to – allowing Brown to avoid scrutiny while he was phone-sexing sugar daddies in distant cities.

He was ultimately indicted for felony theft after coaxing $15,000 out of a Miami doctor.

One victim interviewed by the Times, Jason Carbona, a “private investor and inventor,” delivered a pretty funny quote: “You have to hand it to this kid. He stayed in character for two years.”

Usually, identity theft is perpetrated on a short-term basis: the scam is usually centered around obtaining enough information to go on a spending spree, after which the credit cards are cancelled and the scam ends. In this case, however, Brown assumed Condon’s identity as a lever to extract money, consumer electronics, and even a dog from horny dudes he tempted online.

Simply saying “I’m Bree Condon” wasn’t enough — Justin Brown had the wherewithal to turn up every bit of information on her personal life that he could, the motivation to create profiles on any number of sugar-daddy and social networking sites, and the Photoshop talents to craft fake naked candids that helped him seal the deal. According to the story, he also used social currency to trick his victims, claiming acquaintance with a “mutual friend.”

But Justin Brown’s secret weapon wasn’t his technological talents or cyber savvy — it was his startlingly girlish voice.

“I’d been talking to this person for three months,” Carbona said. “I’m telling you this guy has either had his gonads removed or he is talking through a voice synthesizer.”

For her part, Bree Condon was well aware of the scam, having hired a private investigator to track down Brown’s identity months before his capture. Jason Carbona “tracked her down at a film shoot in Wales” (stalker much?) and she confirmed that no, she wasn’t his online girlfriend. That’s what led Carbona to set up a sting operation which drew Justin Brown into the hands of police.

Because I am a heartless jerk, I couldn’t help but laugh when I followed a link in the Times article to this page at whosdatedwho.com:

Aww, Michael Curry…

When will lonely dudes looking for love online learn that just because someone claims to be a girl, and sends you naked pictures of an attractive woman who shouldn’t have to troll the Internet to meet strange men that will support her, and calls you on the phone with a sexy girlish voice — okay, that last one is a new wrinkle for sure — you should still remain extremely skeptical.

Chances are, unless you are the improbably-successful-with-the-ladies Marko Jaric, you are not going to be grabbing Colin Farrell’s rebounds.

This is why ROTI strongly recommends assuming everyone online is a fat, middle-aged dude living in a group home somewhere in Nebraska, until proven otherwise.