I like my hot women with a side of uncomfortable questions. (Eye Candy)

Analeigh Tipton plays the (high-school-aged) babysitter in the movie Crazy, Stupid, Love,




a role that raises this (slightly) uncomfortable question: If someone is in real life over 18, but in the movie where you see her is supposed to be under 18, is it okay to think they're hot?

The Best Of 2011, and My Predictions For 2012 (Today: Celebrities!)

Back when I was a kid, I regularly read Doonesbury comic strips. I still do, in fact, but now I read them on the Internet whereas back then I would check compilations of Doonesbury strips out of the Hartland Public Library, an institution I used so often that I still remember my library card number (it was "4002.")

Back then, you checked books out by having the librarian write your library card number on the little card and take it, and then stamp the book with a due date and send you on your way. I bring that up in order to compare it to how I checked out a book the other day from the Madison Public Library: I logged on to the website, found the book I wanted, entered my 13-digit library card number (actually Sweetie's; I use her card because of my ongoing feud with the Middleton Public Library, a feud that I'm fighting in part by not paying a late fee on my own card, so I can't use it), clicked a few buttons, and then went upstairs and began reading the book on my Kindle.

My, how things have changed!

Except that they haven't, not really, because this little jaunt down memory lane has a point, and that point is that way back then, Doonesbury did a series of strips where Rick Redfern went to work for People magazine and had to go to a gossip symposium where he learned how to be a celebrity journalist. One of the strips commented that the then-modern-day "celebrity" had not really done anything worth celebrating, and proposed rebooting the whole system (presumably, not a gritty reboot) to refocus on those people truly worth celebrating.

That debate has gone on, obviously, for at least 30 years, and maybe longer; I'd be willing to bet that if you go back and look at a 1920s newspaper (or, as they were called back then, event-o-printoriums)(but they still had horoscopes, which said things like "Today, you will do the jitterbug in a speakeasy with a tall, dark stranger.)(Yes, my knowledge of the 1920s is based exclusively on once watching the film version of Chicago.)




if you went back to the 1920s, you'd find that back then, people were griping about other people being famous simply for fame's sake.

So maybe it's about time we stopped debating whether people are famous for the "right" or "wrong" reasons, and just accept that people become famous for all kinds of reasons, and sometimes once they become famous we want them to keep being famous, for whatever reasons. After all, is it any better to become famous playing an ultraviolent delinquent who rapes people than it is to become famous for nothing at all?

Which brings me to the Best Celebrity of 2011:





Oh, come on. Who else could it be?

Once you stop obsessing over whether celebrities need be required to do something worth celebrating before we obsess over them, the choice of Kim Kardashian as 2011's Best Celebrity is a no-brainer, much like the people who obsess over Kim Kardashian's fitness for the public eye.

The answer to whether celebrities have to do something worth celebrating lies, like a zen koan, not in the external world, but in the meaning to the question itself. When people say things like "Kim Kardashian is famous for nothing! She has no talent!", they are exposing their own ignorance and biases.

I note that I do not pay attention to those who say she's famous because of her sex tape. Kim's sex tape, like Harrison Ford's gig painting a doorway, allowed her the entryway into show biz, but, like Harrison Ford, Kim has stayed around longer than her dearth of any displays of talent would allow her to do so. If you say that Kim Kardashian is famous, now, because of her sex tape, then, you are saying that Americans will pay attention to someone for four solid years because of one sex tape, and while Americans will pay attention to a great many things in hopes that there's some sex in it somewhere (see also: all those Dragon Tattoo books), four years is a lot longer than one sex tape can hold even our addlepated attentions.

Plus, think of all the other people who have released sex tapes and who have not maintained the level of fame that Kim Kardashian has.

No, the sex tape was what opened the door, but Kim Kardashian has kept her foot firmly wedged in that door since then, which brings us back to that zen riddle posed by people who say she's famous for doing nothing and has no talent.

Who do you suppose, in saying that, that those people are thinking about as the 'rightfully' famous?

Scientists?

Doctors?

Judges?

Social workers?

Soldiers?

I could go on.

People who say Kim Kardashian has no talent and doesn't deserve to be famous classify the world into "those deserving fame based on their talent" and "those not deserving of fame because they have no talent."

And then, under the deserving fame column, they put people like actors, and singers, and dancers, maybe, and directors, and possibly comedians.

All talented people, of course. Or many of them, anyway.

But the fact that those people are not arguing that doctors/judges/social workers/activists, etc. should be more famous shows that they classify talent very narrowly: the talent that deserves fame, they say, is the ability to make me laugh or cry or hum the tune to a musical about the 1920s.




I've been humming that song all week, since I jogged to it on Monday.

That-- that -- is the talent that most people say is deserving of fame.

That's why it's so ridiculous that people argue that Kim Kardashian should not be famous: because if there is someone deserving of fame, shouldn't it be the people that accomplish something that matters?

I love movies, books, (some) TV shows, music, art, sports, all that stuff. But do those things matter enough that we should be going nuts over them, and not over other things?

Here's a thought to mull on while you work through this. This past year, a boy named Luke learned to walk again after suffering a rare case of encephalitis that hospitalized him for lengthy periods of time and left him unable to walk for four months. With the help of 8 therapists, this little boy eventually walked on a treadmill, and 4-day-a-week therapy sessions built around a show Luke loved ("Wipeout") helped him build up strength and stamina.

Luke still used a wheelchair for many things when the summer came and he got to visit the Jacksonville Jaguars training camp, and, inspired by being there, Luke walked unassisted across the field.

That is a remarkable story, isn't it? Very touching and heartwarming and it was headlined:

Jaguars center Brad Meester inspires boy, 6, to learn to walk again

Now, I don't mean to diminish Brad Meester's role in Luke's recovery: Meester visited him and urged him on and invited him to training camp and was in general a wonderful guy.

But Luke was already learning to walk, and had his life saved by a team of doctors and therapists and surgeons none of whom saw their name in a headline as inspiring a boy to walk again.

So let's get a sense of perspective, okay? It was nice for Brad Meester to help a little sick boy recover.

It was heroic and talented and news- and fame-worthy of that team of doctors to use their skills, skills that did not involve "pretending people are shooting at us" or "standing resolutely in front of another large man for a few seconds at a time."

Whenever I hear people say "Kim Kardashian has no talent, she's famous for nothing," I think to myself "Yeah, but most people are famous for being marginally, if that, more talented." And the people who should be famous, the people who really are talented, rarely are.

With that out of the way, let's tackle the other big complaint about Kim Kardashian. No, it's not that she is serious about never being photographed from behind,




...it's that her wedding was fake.

That outraged people this year -- the fact that Kim Kardashian got fake married and then real divorced made people madder than any three things Netflix could have done; if I didn't know better, I'd have suspected that Netflix put Kim up to it simply so that they could get off the hotseat of "Americans being upset at stupid stuff".

But why?





Why, exactly, were people upset about Kim Kardashian's wedding-and-divorce news cycle? (The timing of it more or less exactly coincided with the premiere of various iterations of her shows, right?)

The general reason I hear is that she made lots of money off of it, and so people were really, really mad that she made them believe she was marrying for love and then she wasn't, really, and so she shouldn't have gotten paid for something that wasn't real and didn't matter.

Excuse me?

That is the standard we are now setting for our celebrities? You only get paid if we believe that what you're doing is real? I guess I ought to cancel my plans to go see Ghost Protocol tonight.

I can't believe that two decades into reality tv, this needs to be said, and I can't believe, further, that I'm going to mention Kim Kardashian and Erwin Schrodinger in the same sentence, but I just did.

Schrodinger, remember, famously said that it is the act of observing something that collapses the wave form and inevitably alters the possibilities of what can happen.




Schrodinger's cat is meant as a criticism of quantum mechanics; he used it to point out that the idea that all possibilities exist equally until we observe the outcome of an experiment; the act of observation reduces the waveform of probabilities to a single outcome.

Which is to say: observing changes the event.



Which is what happens when we create "reality" TV shows that follow people around and make them do things. No "reality" TV show is real because once you put a camera on someone, they stop scratching their butt and start doing things, and in the process of doing those things, they inevitably change their behavior, for better or worse.

The most obvious example of this was Horrible Kate Gosselin, who used her status as a "mom" to forget all about being a "mom" and try to become a reality star.

I do not object to people becoming famous; I do not object to people becoming famous by using their kids, either [provided the kids aren't ill-treated]. What I do object to is people like Horrible Kate Gosselin pretending to be a mom in order to get on TV; that's misusing kids and once people realized that Horrible Kate Gosselin felt about those kids the way you or I might feel about something nasty we stepped in, they stopped watching.

But that's not the point. The point is that when Horrible Kate Gosselin first got on the air, she was a struggling "mom" of 8 kids with an idiot husband and a fetish for natural peanut butter, trying to buy groceries at a savings club to make ends meet.

Within a season, though, the money Horrible Kate Gosselin was getting paid to pretend to care about her kids on TV had changed things: they took those kids to Disneyland and ate breakfast with Mickey, and vacationed in Hawaii and shopped for houses that included a horse farm.

Simply paying Horrible Kate Gosselin to watch her changed what people were watching.

That is what happened, I figure, with Kim Kardashian's wedding. TV shows have long featured big emotional hooks and suspenseful cliffhangers, which is why it's so hard to make a life into a TV show. Rarely does your life have a big emotional hook or suspenseful cliffhanger at the precise time you'd like it. Kim Kardashian may or may not have liked Kris Humphries for real -- seems pretty clear she didn't, though -- and may or may not have ever married someone if it weren't for the TV show. But we all are -- well, you all are, because I don't watch -- watching her, and so she had to do something important.

Her sisters had gotten married and had babies with a guy who is actively trying to look like a fictional serial killer, which, what?! How does that not worry the bejeesus out of you?! Is there a context in which someone can try to emulate a serial killer in a non-sociopathic way?!

But Kim Kardashian hadn't done much of anything for a while, had she? I'm pretty sure she hadn't, and so she got married because what else could she do? Try out to be an astronaut? Learn to kayak? Switch to Hinduism?

Kim Kardashian is in the entertainment business, and wants to remain there. So she got married, and if you watched the wedding, and then watched the divorce, you were entertained.



And yet, people got mad, because Kim Kardashian's wedding, they figured, was not "real."

You know: real like all the other stuff you see on television. Real like, say, Miley Cyrus' career.

You remember Miley Cyrus, right? She was someone, once. Miley -- not her original name, by the way, she was legally Destiny Hope Cyrus before she changed it in 2008 to Miley Ray Cyrus -- got famous playing a teenager who pretends not to be a rock star, and now Miley Cyrus is a rock star who pretends not to be a teenager, and nobody hates her even though nothing in her life is any more "real" than Kim Kardashian's wedding was.

Like talent, we apply the word real in an odd way: Kim Kardashian did, after all, get married for real, even if she didn't really intend to be married for long. But people felt it wasn't real because they wanted it to be real real, not just reality show real.

And THAT is why Kim Kardashian is the Best Celebrity of 2011. Not because she's so famous that merely looking kind of like her can lead to sort of offshoot fame itself -- as with Not Kim Kardashian in the Old Navy Commercial:




And not just because she's somehow managed to make everyone pay attention for four years of not doing much of anything while getting people to watch, and not just because she and her family make in excess of $65,000,000 per year just for hanging around their house and talking about themselves, which is a good reason why we should give up on our current civilization and start a new one: in a post-apocalyptic world, we might have to fight ravaging mutants for a can of avocadoes, but we probably would have our priorities rejiggered to avoid voluntarily donating $65,000,000 per year to people who don't need it simply because we want to see what they do next (answer: not much of anything, which is all they ever do! From what I have seen of the Kardashians, they don't do very much of anything).

No, all of those things are just offshoots of celebrity the way it has existed prior to 2011, and those alone wouldn't get Kim Kardashian to be the Best Celebrity of 2011.

Instead, I'm naming her because she completed the transformation of celebrities this year, and, in doing so, proved me right, in part, and then went beyond that.

Last year, I said that 2010 was the year celebrity died:

Celebrity, as a concept: the idea that there are those out there who are famous, celebrated, for doing something the rest of us have not. Those people no longer exist, at least not in the form that celebrity has taken since the 16th century, when the concept of celebrity was invented.
...

The door is wider open than ever...and as more and more people get let into the celebrity compound, the people already there have to try harder to get noticed: everyone's doing something else and frantically trying so hard to become, or stay, famous, that they will do anything to stay in the spotlight.

...It's the corollary to Warhol's famous comment: When everyone is famous, nobody is famous.

That's what I said then, and I concluded that in 2011,

The only way celebs get noticed now is to not exist... Hunger Games like, our celebrities in the future will increasingly be pitted against each other in a deathmatch for the fragmented public attention.

And I pronounced celebrity dead.

And it was, for a while -- but Kim Kardashian resurrected it, a mad scientist working in a mountaintop lair (or, in this case, a blue lagoon somewhere in the tropics), and like Frankenstein (read here why I call it that and not Frankenstein's monster), what now exists is not recognizable as a living form of celebrity, but celebrity is no longer dead.

Instead, we have a hybrid form of celebrity that has talent, of sorts - -it takes something to keep people watching for four years, and lots of people have tried to do that and failed -- and is famous enough for us to care about but not famous enough for us to not care about -- nobody cares that Tom Cruise's marriage is a sham, after all, and nobody is mad at Britney Spears for her string of failed marriages including one that lasted what, a day? -- and in doing so, created a new reality. After Kim Kardashian's marriage, there is real like what I do every day, and there is real like reality TV and then there is a different real altogether -- a new sort of reality springing up the way DC Comics used to create new universes. Call it Earth-K, and on Earth-K, real isn't real yet but it can be, if we wish real hard.

Kim Kardashian's marriage was Tinkerbell's fading glow, with one exception: whether you clapped your hands or not as Tink lay dying, Tink revived because that story had already been written. On Earth-K, the stories are written by what you demand, and that is why people are mad: They watched Kim Kardashian and willed her into a marriage, observing her until she collapsed the waveform into the reality they wanted. They clapped as hard as they could, and it didn't work.

Maybe that's Kim Kardashian's fault, but it's also her greatest accomplishment yet. Kim Kardashian, I salute you.

RUNNER UP: Rebecca Black. Because I really do like that song, and you people are all mean.

Predictions For 2012: Kim Kardashian will host Saturday Night Live, which has somehow become a thing to do again, will appear as a guest judge on either X-Factor or American Idol (if Idol is still on. Is it still on?) and at some point will be photographed with a foreign dignitary, before she goes on to become a spokesperson for Netflix, creating a singularity of hate that grows and swallows all the enmity in the world and starts a new era of peace and love.




Prior Bests Of 2011:

Books (And Other Smarty-Pants Things)

All I Really Need To Know I Learned From People Talking About Kim Kardashian's Divorce. (POP!Best!)

POP!Best! is a weekly look back at the week that just happened. In case you forgot. Or were in a coma or something. Or maybe you were just busy. Who am I to judge? But I do judge. Oh, how I judge.

Back in the fabled time we now think of as "the 80s," every assumes that life was all feathered hair, popped collars, and guys cutting the fingers off of their gloves



for no real reason, and that life was simpler and easier back then, what with Reagan being still 75% alive and Bill Cosby having not gotten all old and bitter.

But people forget that the unenlightened denizens of that darker time didn't have all the answers, like we do today, and frequently forgot all the important things in life, which is why they needed reminding of the things they needed to know to live via the awe-inspiring idea "All I Really Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten."

That simple idea -- that in kindergarten we'd learned everything we'd ever need to get by in the world -- took the 1980s by storm, even though it was published in 1988 and therefore was a little too late to do anything about all the bad ideas that had already been spawned by the 1980s:






But, late as it was, it's fair to say that Robert Fulghum's simple poem inspired the world, and for decades after the publication of his book of essays, we no longer sought out excesses, we no longer were mean to each other, we did not wage unjust wars or help trample the dreams of millions to enrich ourselves.

Which is why we were, until this week, living in a veritable paradise where people shared, and ate warm cookies and cold milk, and flushed, but then, this week, as we all know, the entire equilibrium of this and every other universe (yes, even that one where everything rhymes with orange) was upset when the unthinkable happened and a celebrity marriage turned out to not be based on romantic notions of love at all!

Never mind that, by my count, 99.9% of all marriages are based not on love but on other emotions, less fanciful, less poetic emotions like "She was the first and only person who would sleep with me more than once" or "I'll show my sister who can get married first," (both of which are lesser-recognized emotions in the pantheon but are still valid): whatever the standards we set for our own marriages (low, judging by the fact that Mexico now thinks 2 years is about how long anyone can stand to be married), celebrity marriages are something different. Something beautiful. Something for us to aspire to. Something for Americans to watch since we foolishly gave up having our own real royalty over 200 years ago and now live empty dreary lives.

Celebrity marriages are more than just a way for someone who stored bat guano in her house to legitimize our view of her and somehow become a U.N. ambassador and "role model" in spite of all evidence to the contrary; celebrity marriages are how we, as a people, made sure that traditional values of love, and romance, and four-hour TV specials, were still respected, here in the United States and probably everywhere else in the world but who cares about them because we now have forty-nine different states where it's totally legal to go into an elementary school carrying a concealed shotgun. (USA! USA! USA!)


Until this week, that is.

Past celebrity marriages never failed to live up to our standards and ideals. People like Britney Spears and Jennifer Aniston and...

...um...

... and other celebrities who got married*

*I'm kind of the wrong person to ask about this, in that I don't really know who celebrities are. I'm far more likely to remember the name of Jaggers' clerk (Wemmick) than I am to remember the name of the girl who played in those vampire/werewolf movies (Kate Beckinsale, whose name I only know now because it came up, improbably, in a work meeting yesterday). My go-to celebrity informant is Sweetie, who knows everything there is to know about celebrities, including, importantly, who they are. I asked her on the spur of the moment to name famous celebrities who got married famously and she gave me "Britney Spears to that Jason guy who lasted a day; Prince William and Kate; Khloe Kardashian, Brad and Jennifer, Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise..." before petering out, which, in retrospect, is kind of a disappointing performance from Sweetie.**

**After a few minutes she added "Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. And also I realized that Brad Pitt and Angelina never got married, but I'm not going to go back and change the post at this point. It's too late for that. We march onward! USA! USA! USA!

invariably served not just as conduits for our own frustrated emotions (Why can't I get paid $20 million just to run around on a movie set and fight Jonathan Rhys Meyers? Besides the fact that I can't act and am out of shape to the point where I look like I might be kind of melting, I mean?) but also as symbols of our highest ideals ($600,000 on a dress? USA! USA! USA!), but all that changed this week when America -- and, probably the world, but, again, who cares? Let them deal with Greece, we've got our own crisis going on right here! OCCUPY WHEREVER IT IS THE KARDASHIANS LIVE! -- began to feel that perhaps it had been duped by a celebrity marriage.

And we were duped, and that outrage you feel is not just regular ol' outrage, but a white-hot-burning kind of outrage that can only be inspired when Americans really truly really honestly have something to be mad about, like Netflix increasing their price by about twenty bucks a year, or Kim Kardashian making more money off people who can't understand why it was so dumb to let her make any money in the first place.

What happened this week was more important, I'd say, than every other thing that ever happened in the world, combined, judging by the outrage and talk and sheer amount of time I'm assuming The View spent talking about the Kim Kardashian divorce, and you're probably expecting me to make some point about how weird/stupid it is that people could devote so much energy to talking about the Kardashivorce when there are serious things going on in the world, like whatever it is Greece is up to, but I'm not because I, perhaps alone among people, understand that this is more than just Ewoks blinking, which, important as that was to denounce, wasn't quite as Earths-shattering as the news was this week.

The Kardashivorce (TM), as I said, upset the equilibrium of the multiverse, an equilibrium that had been established back in 1988 when, after exactly 1,988 years since God created the world, we'd finally learned how to live. Now, we stare bleakly into exactly the kind of post-apocalyptic world we've always dreaded and imagined, albeit one that admittedly has fewer zombies than recent pop culture would lead one to expect, but a post-apocalyptic world nonetheless, a world in which the rules have changed and nobody is sure how to proceed.

What should we look up to? What ideals will hold true in this new world? Will there still be Oreos?

Those are the questions that all week long, humanity was afraid to ask and nobody had the answers to... until now, when I have painstakingly pored over all of the coverage I could bear to read about the Kardashivorce, and gleaned from it a new set of rules for us to live by in this Brave New World*4

*4: Suck it, Aldous Huxley. You can't copyright a title. USA! USA! USA!

that we are about to march into. And I have put them together into a little poem I call:

All I Really Need To Know I Learned From People Talking About Kim Kardashian's Divorce.*5

*5: See footnote 4, Robert Fulghum.

Always make sure your marriage outlasts the engagement. It's more embarrassing to get divorced after six weeks than it is to get married after 10 months.

By the same token, it is irrelevant which lasted longer, the most important commitment you can ever make, or a stint on Dancing With The Stars.

No matter what happens to you in life, the biggest problem you will face is what to do with the gifts people gave you.

Australia won't shelter you from criticism.

Neither will Las Vegas.

Television is no longer a reliable source for moral instruction.

Nobody likes an "Indian giver."

It's apparently okay to use the phrase "Indian giver."

Follow your manager's advice when marrying; follow your intuition when divorcing.

There is no right or wrong. (That's a relief.)

Above all, do no harm to your brand identity.

Listening to the hoopla will only hurt the ones who post on Twitter about how supportive they are of you.

If you promise to give stuff to charity to get people off your back, you totally never have to go through with it.

Make sure that your heart is living where your mind builds its dreams, or some nonsense like that.

Angelina Jolie's poop smells like papaya.

The best way to avoid lots of attention is to go on television.

A gentleman does not neglect his abs during times of stress.

It's okay to take advantage of your children if you mention that you feel awkward about doing so.

What famous people do should affect your every waking moment.

And, in the end, never despair, because no matter what you do, you will always be better than Paris Hilton.

Steal this post: It's WHODATHUNKIT!? The 3 Best Things You Want To Know About the 83rd Annual Academy Awards!

It's time again for Whodathunkit!? - -that feature that takes a major public event like, say, The Academy Awards, or that time you almost barfed on the Tilt-A-Whirl, and focuses in like a laser beam aimed through a convex lens at a microscope held by a sharpshooter, looking not at what everybody else is talking about, but on the things you really want to know.

Would it be a convex lens? Or a concave lens? Does it matter? Nobody's going to try that, right? So it's not like someone out there would hook up a laser beam to all that stuff, only to have the wrong lens scatter the laser beams into the air, shooting down birds and causing a mass panic about what might be killing them until a quasi-governmental agency makes up a story that the birds were just confused by fireworks and ran into buildings, explaining it all away by saying that the birds had tiny little lumps on their heads surrounded by tinier stars and birds circling them in a comical cartoon fashion...

... but nobody fooled me, and when the Trilateral Commission puts Sarah Palin in charge of America, declares martial law and reveals that Twinkies have a secret mindcontrol ingredient, I'll be the one laughing, while you all say "What in God's name did that have to do with birds and/or the Academy Awards?"

Which is for me to know, and you to find out. And with that bizarre introduction, let's focus in like what I said before on those three things you really want to know about tonight's ceremony:

1. You know that Oscar statue you saw on eBay? It might have been real, so you probably should've bid more than $2.54. Much is made of the security of the Academy Award balloting every year, with the legend of how tightly the votes and results are guarding getting more and more elaborate with each showing of the awards ceremony; this year, according to reliable sources, the ballots were put into a locked treasure chest wound thrice about with chains made of equal parts steel and the tears of orphans, then sunk in a leaden box to the bottomless depths of the Marianas Trench, where they were guarded by mythical beasts made real by genetic experiments funded by Rupert Murdoch. Plus, there were accountants involved somehow.

Have you ever wondered why we need accountants to count the Oscar votes? And, have you ever wondered why accounting schools don't use that as a selling point to get more people to be accountants?:

"Come to Murray's School Of Accounting, accrediting pending, and while you might spend 364 days of each year toting up how much your boss spent on Post-It notes, there's a possibility that someday you'll get to know a few hours before everyone else who's going to win best supporting actor."

But that security over the votes seems to have missed a beat when it comes to guarding the statues themselves. Which is especially surprising given that the Academy is insistent that nobody but nobody except the winners ever own an Oscar statue (as I noted last year.)

On at least two occasions, the actual Oscar statuettes have been stolen; the more recent was a heist of 55 statues back in 2000. Two men were charged with grand theft for taking the statues from a Roadway Express site where they were waiting to be shipped. One of the thieves got 6 months in jail and 5 years' probation, plus was ordered to pay back the reward money that his employer had offered to help find the Oscars. An alleged accomplice, Anthony Keith Hart, was arrested but never charged, and later sued for false arrest (but lost.)

52 of the 55 missing Oscars were located by a man named Willie Fullgear, who got the $50,000 reward the thief had to pay back, but it wasn't exactly a happy ending for Fullgear, who put the money in a safe in his apartment only to have thieves steal $40,000 or so of it. Fullgear did get to go to the ceremony that year.

One of the still-missing three Oscars was later found in the Fort Lauderdale, Florida area during a drug investigation, because under federal law Florida must be involved at least tangentially in every news story. The remaining two are still missing.

2. You said there were two thefts, but you only talked about one. What's the deal?

You're reading this pretty closely. Good for you! See if you can decipher the code I've hidden in here; one lucky winner who unscrambles it will be awarded one million dollars!*

The other Oscar theft was more brazen and even more deserving of being made into a TV Movie Of The Week. It's the story of Alice Brady and the Oscar Thief, which should be a Bob Dylan song, but isn't.

Alice Brady was an actress back in the 1930s, when all it took to be an actress was a quick trip to Hollywood by train, quick being "about four and a half weeks," longer if you got sick with typhoid, which happened automatically on the railroads back then unless you upgraded to the first class ticket. Nowadays, becoming an actress is much harder; you have to work and slave at your craft and appear in dozens of tiny parts while working your way "up the ladder" in the hopes that eventually you'll land a starring role and will sweep America off its feet, giving you fame and fortune which you can then turn into even bigger fame and fortune by marrying a dirtball biker who wants to sleep with Nazis so that when you get dumped right around the time your generic feel-good movie is being considered for an Oscar itself, you'll sweep the Awards.

Or you could wash somebody's car, if you get my drift.

Anyway, Alice Brady appeared in a bunch of movies that nobody remembers because they were made in the 1930s, when nobody had any money because we were in the middle of The Great Depression, an economic downturn that lasted a decade, if not longer, sticking around that long because nobody had the foresight to simply fire all the government workers, a solution that we all know now to be a miracle cure for any economic problems; and, if that doesn't work, you could always just deny basic health care to terminally ill people, saving as much as $0.12 per capita, which money can be used to help keep private jets for billionaires flying smoothly. If only FDR had known!

Even though nobody saw the movies back then, because, as your grandfather said over and over when you were only pretending to listen to him, they only made 2 cents per year and they had to use that money to buy V-Bonds to help fight Jerry in the war, the Academy still existed and still gave away awards to people like Alice Brady, who couldn't attend the ceremony in 1937, when she was up for (and won) Best Actress for her role in the movie "In Old Chicago." Alice couldn't attend because she had a broken ankle, which in the 1930s was fatal.

During the ceremony, a man came onstage to "accept" the Academy Award for Alice, but that turned out to be a clever ruse -- Alice later called the Academy to say she'd never gotten her award (having to wait to do so until the telephone had been invented), and only then did the Academy learn that they'd been duped.

Alice never got her Academy Award, either; her IMDB page notes that she passed away before the Academy could issue a replacement; she died two years later, which backs up every single thing I said about transportation in the 1930s. Although, in fairness, the Academy just probably had trouble finding gold because FDR had it all locked away so that he could impoverish the country into being forced to accept his socialist reforms. Too bad for us all that didn't work and he had to fake the Pearl Harbor bombing.

3. It would be hard to top that story. Are you going to try?

You bet. I'm not one to shy away from a challenge.

How do you top stealing an Oscar?

How do you top stealing fifty-five Oscars?

By stealing an Oscar winner.

Yep, that happened, to Charlie Chaplin.

Charlie Chaplin was an Oscar winner, but not for what most people think he'd win for: his "little tramp" movies (which he copied from Johnny Depp's routine in Benny & Joon) and other famous "comedies" never caught the fancy of the Academy, which back then hadn't yet begun nominating every single movie released during the year for an Award. Chaplin's film career, in fact, never led to a single Oscar for him... but he got one for composing.

Chaplin was an accomplished composer, having scored his own films. His song "Smile" his number 2 on the UK charts in the 50s:

,

and he later hit number one with "This Is My Song,"



but it wouldn't be until 1973 that Chaplin got his Oscar, for best film score on his movie Limelight.

Not content with stealing his Oscar, someone five years later dug up Chaplin's grave and stole his body -- don't worry, Chaplin had died by that time; it wouldn't be until 2010 when America got around to sneaking a "mandatory interment of all people over the age of 65" clause into Obamacare (unluckily for us, but luckily for Grandma, that particular clause was ruled unconstitutional!) -- demanding a ransom of $40,000 for its return, a ransom his widow, the Lady Oona Chaplin refused to pay, saying that "Charlie would have thought it ridiculous."

Two men were later caught and charged with the crime, with the police catching them by not only tapping the Chaplins' phone, but also keeping watch on 200 separate phone booths, in what can only be described as a complete misunderstanding of how phone taps work.

They caught them, I bet, when they realized that one man who kept coming to a certain booth was lugging a coffin with him.

The body is now buried in Grant's tomb, next to Jim Morrison's corpse and alongside Walt Disney's cyborg shell.

No, I'm just kidding; that would be ridiculous, since everyone knows that Disney wouldn't tolerate being buried with a Jewish man. The body is instead buried in what's described as a "theft proof concrete grave" to deter septuagenarians, the only people who remember Chaplin, from digging him up again.


Click here to read last year's Academy Award Whodathunkit!?






*Prize cannot be collected until October 8, 2094, and will be awarded in the only currency that will be recognized by then, "Bristol Bucks," to be named after President-For-Life Bristol Palin. Don't ever doubt the power of the Trilateral Commission!

The Best Tom Hanks Movie (That Demonstrates That He's Always Playing Himself.)

You know why we love Tom Hanks so much as an actor? Because he really sinks into every role.
You know why he sinks into every role so well? Because we don't know anything about him as a real-life person.

You know why we don't know anything about him as a real-life person? Because Tom Hanks deliberately keeps himself separate from his fans and most of society.

You know how I know that Tom Hanks doesn't want anyone to really know anything about him and deliberately cuts himself off from people? Because that's the role he plays in every movie.

Psychoanalysis by movie role can be tricky, so I don't recommend that everyone try it, but I am a certified expert in this field, as I always assume that the character an actor is playing is pretty much the character that actor plays in real life.

(Yes, that's all it takes to become certified in the field of Movie Role Psychoanalysis.)

So Bill Murray is a sometimes-thoughtful, mostly goofy guy with some issues about getting older, in real life and the golf course and movies. Angelina Jolie is a self-important trampy narcissist. Bradley Cooper is that guy in The Hangover, exactly. Jennifer Aniston is Rachel, period.

That's how it works: actors (and I say actors because both women and men can be actors, in the sense that an actor is a person who acts) try for roles here and there, getting big roles mostly by chance rather than skill or looks. Skill and looks are about even, in Hollywood, by my estimation, and in the estimation of anyone who's ever seen one of those Life+Style exposes showing stars without their makeup. Celebrities... they really are like us, in that they, too, look pretty terrible without four-plus hours of work by a professional makeup artist and good lighting. That makeover they gave Golden Voice Ted Williams proved that: if a homeless guy can look that good, then all men are pretty much Tom Cruise, absent the Hollywood effects.

No, looks don't differentiate celebrities, from each other or the rest of us. Do you think that there aren't 1,000,000 girls as pretty as Megan Fox in Hollywood? How long did it take them to recast the new Transformers movie, 3.2 seconds? It probably took longer for them to announce they were going to do that than it did to actually replace her, what with nerve impulses just meandering around at their own pace.

Nor does talent really differentiate actors. Take Harrison Ford, a guy who's always been playing "Harrison Ford." Does he strike you as especially talented? Does this take a whole lot of talent?



That scene actually featured the real Harrison Ford, in a cameo. (He was the drink glass on the table.)

That scene also is included specifically because even I'm not immune the siren song of the extra hits that come from mentioning Star Wars.

Harrison Ford isn't any more talented than any other actor working in Hollywood, and he might be a lot less talented than some. (Or all.) But he's a big-time actor, because he found his niche.

That's what big-time celebrities and actors have to do: They have to become one-hit wonders, of a sort: They have to find a role that suits them -- suits them because it is them-- and then run with that role in every movie, TV show, television commercial, and other media outlet until the public tires of it and goes back to watching Star Wars' mashups:



Actors find a niche and run with it: Steve Carell is Michael Scott. He was Michael Scott on The Daily Show, then Michael Scott on The Office, and since then he's been Michael Scott the married guy and the spy and more Michael Scotts, but he's always Michael Scott, just as Bob Denver was always Gilligan.

If that niche is popular enough, then Hollywood will create roles for it, like it did with Julia Roberts for years, allowing her to be Pretty Woman in a variety of different settings, ranging from Pretty Woman Marries Richard Gere repeatedly to Pretty Woman busts up a toxic chemical scandal. But it won't let people break out of that niche -- Pretty Woman couldn't go to Transylvania, as Julia Roberts found out. (But she can go to Italy and fall in love with Javier Bardem.)

That's how Hollywood really works: actors and actresses, all about even in talent and looks, get lucky enough to be noticed (Harrison Ford was putting cabinets into George Lucas' house when Lucas decided to cast him in American Graffiti) and get put into a role that mirrors their personality, and if that movie or TV series becomes popular, they're set for life.

(If you want absolute proof that this is how Hollywood works, you've got it: Look at Charlie Sheen, who's career arc absolutely mirrors his life.)

That's the key to superstardom and career longevity in Hollywood: be an actor who's lucky enough to land a role that mirrors your personality, and a role that happens to be superpopular. Bruce Willis probably is a wisecracking, pretty tough guy, in real life as he is in his movies.

This all makes sense, too, on a gut level: what role would be easier to play than yourself. What role is more believable than yourself?

So big actors are always playing themselves, which brings us back to Tom Hanks and how I cracked the code about him the other day while I was jogging and listening to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me and thinking about the movie The Terminal and how it was underrated.

That's really what I was doing. I'm an odd guy.

That's The Best Tom Hanks Movie (That Demonstrates That He's Always Playing Himself), the movie The Terminal, because it really was a great movie and very clever and different and kind of sad and kind of funny and because Tom Hanks genuinely was very good in it; it's the kind of movie that should be heralded as a classic but for some reason isn't, probably the same reason that Better Off Ted isn't on the air and The New Pornographers aren't constantly on the Top 4o: people don't like good stuff.

Well, not good stuff that's a little unusual or quirky or requires a lot of attention and intelligence.

Tom Hanks, in The Terminal, is a man who's entirely cut off from the world around him, an unknowable enigma who, if he doesn't exactly want it that way, can't help being that way. He's arrived in our country without the proper papers and he can't leave the airport. But he can't go back, either, and he can't really speak our language very well, and he doesn't know anybody, so he has to craft an entire life, surviving and making friends with people in a very limited area with few tools to go by and nobody to lean on. Following his adventures as he does that is both thrilling in a small way, and interesting in a larger way, and I loved that movie.

But, as I got to thinking-while-jogging, I realized that "he has to craft an entire life, surviving and making friends with people in a very limited area with few tools to go by and nobody to lean on" sounds a lot like another great, and not under-rated Tom Hanks movie. You know the one I'm talking about:

Toy Story 2.

Wait, what?

You thought I was going to say Cast Away, didn't you? And I could have, because that obviously mirrored Hanks' experiences in The Terminal, but so did his roles as Woody The Cowboy in Toy Story and its sequels.

As Woody, Tom Hanks is a toy cowboy living in a little boy's room - -but he's an old toy, near the end of his life and not as cool as newer toys like Buzz Lightyear. He's not like any of the other toys around him, in fact -- because, as it turns out, he's a collector's item from the 50s and there's not really many of him around, so he's insanely valuable. He might be the only Woody toy left in the world, judging by how Al got excited when he found him.

In other words, he's all alone. In a small world. Trying to build a life. As a cloth toy. And people don't get his fears and he can't relate to them and he's always going it alone only to try to bring the group with him -- he never goes with the group, he's always on his own or they join him.

Just like The Terminal.

And just like every other movie or TV show Tom Hanks has ever made. I even went and checked them, on IMDB. Going all the way back to Bosom Buddies, Tom Hanks is an outsider in whatever world he's in: he's a cross-dressing guy in a woman's hotel. A nerd who plays D&D. A loner who falls in love with a mermaid. The only guy who doesn't want to be at his own Bachelor Party.

He's an iconoclastic musician who's entirely unaware he's at the center of a spy drama, and who's cheating with his best friend's wife. He's a lawyer fired for suffering from AIDS at a time when people were still suspicious that they could catch AIDS just by looking at you. In The Money Pit he literally was trapped in a hole and cut off from everyone for hours - -and he lived in a house in the middle of nowhere and almost never saw anyone else. His wife went off to work in that movie, but did he? I don't remember it.

A man suffering from a brain cloud adrift in the ocean all alone on his way to jump into a volcano. A soldier without a name (in Saving Private Ryan). A cop partnered with a dog, a man on vacation in his own house who sends away his wife and kids. All people living in one small geographical area almost or entirely on their own, surrounded by people who don't understand them and are not part of their world.

Tom Hanks The Loner exists even in characters that would seem not to be loners. Sherman McCoy is a part of society... or is he? His character in the book, remember, was teased by other rich kids as being Sherman McCoy the Mountain Boy, and he was accused of murder, which will tend to isolate you from your peers. He was a man coaching a woman's league while other men were at war. He was a bookstore owner who's main connection to the world was his email account.

And, in the role that perhaps made him the most famous of all, he was Forrest Gump, possibly the most misunderstood and alone character ever created, outside of Darth Vader.

(See what I did there? I created an opening for this:



I'm no dummy.)

I've sort of driven the nail into the ground here, or whatever the metaphor is, but I think you'll have to agree I'm on to something, and that something is that Tom Hanks is playing Tom Hanks, in every movie and TV show he appears on -- even as a guest on talk shows, where you'll see he rarely talks about himself. He's always willing to join in the fun, but he's never very forthcoming about details, is he, just like his character in Volunteers. Or That Thing You Do! Or Apollo 13, where his world consisted of a tiny space capsule and two crew members.

And the Tom Hanks that Tom Hanks is playing -- the real Tom Hanks -- is someone who, by choice or fate, is not part of our group; he's a misunderstood loner who can't ever quite fit in, and maybe doesn't want to. He's only going to run away with a mermaid, after all, or leave you on your own while he tries to win the stand-up competition, or, ultimately, reverse his wish and move back home as a kid who didn't fit in as a kid before, didn't fit in as a grown-up, and now doesn't fit in as a kid again, because he's been Big.

Looked at in that way, it kind of makes me feel sorry for him -- why should Tom Hanks, who seems like a nice guy and pretty talented, be all alone in the world? I'd be his friend, after all. We'd probably all be his friend, given the chance.

But he won't give us the chance. Not according to his movie roles.

Click here for more celebrity posts.

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Whodathunkit!? 2010: The Year In Bests (Celebrities)

There's a lot of different ways I could go with this post. I could say who was The Best Celebrity in 2010 -- setting that up entirely by my own criteria. Or I could go with The Best Celebrity News Stories in 2010, or I could even use the end of the year as an excuse to publish photos of celebrity butts, a la The Superficial (which site wins the prize for best repurposing of old Star Wars quotes).

But I didn't. Instead, I asked Sweetie, last night, a question. Sweetie is very knowledgeable about celebrities; she's the kind of person who knows which Real Housewife is related to which actual actor or president. (But not the kind of person who, at my office party, could recall that Al Pacino was in a movie that had something to do with crooked cops, and also recall that the movie in question was Serpico. I did that. Me.)

So I asked Sweetie: "What do you think was the best celebrity story in 2010?"

And she didn't answer right away because she was brushing her teeth.

Then she said "Why?" And I told her that I wanted it for this post, but she still had no answer. Ultimately, she shrugged and said "I don't know."

So I had nothing to go on until about 10:30 last night, midway through one of those baffling articles in The New Yorker in which a food lover convinces the magazine to send him to Barcelona where he'll have earnest conversations about desserts using words that sound like they're talking about way more important things -- is there anything more pretentious and awful sounding than a chef talking about food as though it was significant? You're heating up meat. Get over yourself.-- midway through that article, I thought to myself, that's it.

As for what's it, you'll have to wait, because, as is the way with

WHODATHUNKIT!? 2010: The Year In Bests; The First-Ever TBOE What You Were Told, And What You Should've Been Told Instead Best Of The Year List.

I first tell you

What Everyone Else Said: As I said, Celebrity is kind of a vague, broad category that overlaps all the other categories, even, judging by The New Yorker, the food category. So I narrowed down the chatter and googled two phrases, The Best Celebrity 2010 and The Best Celebrity Stories 2010.

Even then, I got fragmented answers -- links to best-dressed celebrities (Someone named "Florence Welch," which sounds like a hipster play on Lawrence Welk), best celebrity baby names (Marky Mark's daughter Grace Margaret, because people love royal throwback names) best celebrity photos (Justin Bieber singing Jingle Bells to a fan)(here's a riddle for you: I've resolved to try to go my entire life without hearing a Justin Bieber song, but if he sang Jingle Bells and I know that song, even if I didn't hear his version, have I broken that resolution?) and even "best celebrity Tweets," at the top of which list was, of course, Kanye:



That was the best celebrity Tweet of 2010? I have to differ: I think Donnie Wahlberg's belief that the Waffle House was under attack was clearly tops:


PLEASE tell me Waffle House Armageddon starring Donnie Wahlberg is going to be a movie this year. Because I need that.

There was also a listing of The Biggest Celebrity Stories of 2010 on PopSugar, and I kind of assumed that biggest equals best, so I was disappointed when [SPOILER ALERT! BUT NOT REALLY!] the biggest celebrity story of 2010 turned out to be "the growing evidence of love between Twilight stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart," about which didn't they break up already? Or never date? I can't remember which but I'm sure it's one or the other.

All of that was somewhat surprising, other than the Kanye tweet, and I gave it some thought to decide Why I Assume They All Said That, and especially why they couldn't all agree on what was the biggest or best celebrity story -- or even what category of celebritization we're going to talk about. Unfortunately, I can't reveal this yet, so I'm going to skip to

What I Thought They'd All Say, because that at least seemed easy: I assumed that any year-end retrospective of celebrity in 2010 would have to include, at the top of any list about anything, Kanye West and/or Kim Kardashian, two people who achieved ever greater heights of fame in 2010 by doing, essentially, nothing.

Yes, I know, Kanye West "dropped" an album that was supposedly brilliant and beloved by critics, but I don't know anyone who's actually planning on buying it, and I don't know anyone who's actually heard anything off of it, but I do know that Kanye's album was more controversial/noted for supposedly being banned by Wal-Mart or something -- and for having racy covers, as though racy means anything anymore, so what I mostly know (and you and all of us, be honest) about Kanye West has nothing to do with the music he (supposedly) made in 2010; it has to do with him tweeting and getting drunk at various places and picking a fight with Wal-Mart, and that's stuff we all do, while at the same time Kim Kardashian further distanced herself from her sex-tape background and Reggie Bush and became ubiquitous, literally appearing at a bathroom opening, having a (briefly-available, probably predatory) debit card and constantly being photographed on celebrity blogs -- photographed in the act of living: shopping, coming from workouts, going to dinner... all of which brings up

What They All Should Have Said, and a continuation of Why I Assume They All Said That, which is this:

2010 Was The Year Celebrity Died.

Not celebrities, although many did. Celebrity, as a concept: the idea that there are those out there who are famous, celebrated, for doing something the rest of us have not. Those people no longer exist, at least not in the form that celebrity has taken since the 16th century, when the concept of celebrity was invented. (Along with the glockenspiel.) For the past 5 centuries, celebrities have stood apart from the human race: they were vaulted to fame and perched up there more or less comfortably, towering over us with their grace and beauty and money and inscrutable behavior, leading us to speculate about them and gossip about them and hound them for autographs when they appeared amongst us...

... but now they're always amongst us and we don't have to speculate about them because they tell us everything. They tweet everything the moment they think it. They show us how they did the stunts on their film. They rant into a tape-recording -- knowingly?-- and talk about their underwear and publish biographies that are more scandalous than the old unauthorized books we got about them, and they are filmed and photographed and Youtubed doing everything -- and mostly what they do is what we do.

The door is wider open than ever: People become celebrities by accident, by creating Youtube videos, by crashing White House parties for the sole purpose of being filmed crashing White House parties -- and the drive to become a celebrity is dangerous, or would-be dangerous, as Balloon Dad showed us -- and as more and more people get let into the celebrity compound, the people already there have to try harder to get noticed: Brett Michaels can't just keep singing Every Rose Has Its Thorn on the State Fair circuit; he has to date skanks on Rock of Love and then be a businessman on The Apprentice, working for a man who claims he might run for president because hosting The Apprentice isn't enough to keep him famous anymore. Actors become singers, singers become writers, writers become... well, they don't become anything, because they have talent... everyone's doing something else and frantically trying so hard to become, or stay, famous, that they will do anything to stay in the spotlight.

And the end result is that we know more than ever about what celebrities do and we care less than ever: we talk about their hair, for Pete's sake, and put Bristol Palin on Dancing With The Stars just so we can claim it's rigged in Bristol's favor. There are magazines with features devoted to topics like Celebrities: They're Just Like Us, and it's true, they are: We never knew that before, but we do now, and it means that we care less. It's the corollary to Warhol's famous comment: When everyone is famous, nobody is famous.

And we'll continue to care less; I can tweet just like Kanye. Maybe I don't have 7,235,654 followers and a gold tooth -- but when I see what his followers read, I don't care as much. In fact, we care so little that we've started to do things to make celebrities more interesting - -matching Kanye's Tweets with New Yorker cartoons, for example. If Kanye alone were interesting, would we have to do that? I think not.

The only way celebs get noticed now is to not exist: (Which, I note, I predicted would be the trend, all the way back in June.) They have to drop out of the limelight, "killing" themselves on Twitter to raise money or retiring from movies a la Amanda Bynes (who shortly therafter unretired) or refusing to do interviews. When Joaquin Phoenix tried to pull off the worst-disguised hoax ever, he wasn't just making a crummy home movie; he was presaging the 2010 death of celebrity and what havoc it would wreak on the popular culture as, Hunger Games like, our celebrities in the future will increasingly be pitted against each other in a deathmatch for the fragmented public attention.

Celebrity's body, like a headless chicken, is still moving around, but make no mistake: Celebrity is dead. And 2010 was the year that it died.

Previous Entries From The Year In Bests:

The Best Book I Read In 2010

The Best Short Stories Of 2010.