It's telling that seemingly the only thing worth discussing following last night's Emmys—an exercise in show business self-gratification only marginally more entertaining than watching a Lassie stand-in lick its genitals between camera set-ups—are the three words we weren't allowed to hear (to review: "screwing," "[shit]," and "goddamn") during the telecast.
Was the production team behind last night's Emmy awards oversensitive or just incompetent? During three separate incidents, the camera cut away to an overhead shot and killed the sound. While a case can be made that cutting away from Sally Field's anti-war polemic was probably for the best (she went on and on), and that it made sense to pull back from crazy Katherine Heigl as soon as she mouthed the word "shit," what in the world was Fox thinking by interrupting Ray Romano? Guy couldn't say something offensive if he tried. Unless, you know, you find banality offensive.
We're still (pretty unsuccessfully) trying to shake off our Emmys hangover—drinking was really the only way to make it through all three-plus hours of last night's telecast without going insane from boredom—but we're now lucid enough to tackle the "mystery" of that trio of perplexing cuts (compiled in the above clip) from Ray Romano, Katherine "If You Call Me Hi-Jel I Will Fucking Cut You" Heigl, and Sally Field to the giant, profanity-erasing Sphere of Censorship hanging in the rafters of the Shrine.
Did you catch the Emmy awards last night? In cased you missed it, our Richard Blakeley has put together a montage of host Ryan Seacrest's queeniest moments and provided some subtitles for the three of you who might miss the joke. (We think Richard is auditioning for a job doing video for Perez Hilton! This is like, one step away from drawing splooge bubbles™ on Ryan Seacrest's face.)
Click to view
There were two careers we worried about after MTV's Video Music Awards last Sunday. Obviously, we (and others) were concerned about Britney Spears, but Sarah Silverman's equally listless performance also gave us pause: Had she lost it? Was she no longer funny? (If, you know, you ever thought she was.) Well, we've seen a few episodes from the new season of "The Sarah Silverman Program" and you'll be happy (or sad, if you hate her) to hear that the show is pretty goddamn hysterical—career crisis averted. And we found the first season to be wildly uneven, so we came with eyes open. Take this clip, where Sarah looks back at her three abortions. We can't wait for the Bill Donohues of the world to start fulminating.
We'd always assumed that freshly voted-off American Idol also-rans were mercifully slaughtered backstage and later ground into the Simon's Sloppy Joe filling served at each Friday's Idol-themed lunch at the Fox News Cafe, but according to TMZ TV, the losers suffer a far more degrading fate: immediate assignment to the county fair circuit. We bet that after a week or so of warbling bittersweet renditions of "This Is My Now" to a warm up a dozen or so people for the hot-dog-devouring and pig-measuring thrills that await them, most of the fallen Idols find themselves praying for the sweet release of the Fox meat-grinder.
To the tune of Weird Al Yankovic's "White & Nerdy," Steve Wozniak is pimping his 2005 Nissan 350Z Anniversary Edition at Hotswap.com. The Apple co-founder thinks America is losing its engineering and technological competitiveness, so he wants to donate the proceeds to UC Berkeley's Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The lucky buyer gets the pick up the car at Woz's pad and join him for lunch (and hopefully a Segway ride). He'll even provide his autograph (hopefully on the car, not lunch) and talk to you. But his generosity doesn't stop there — he's created a parody of a Datsun 280Z commercial he starred in back when his hair was a healthy brown and he was half as wide. Unfortunately, Hotswap is rather protective of their embed code, so you'll have to jump over there to see Woz in his Segway riding glory. For comparisons sake, take a gander at the 280Z commercial.
Publicity averse hip-hop artists Kanye West and 50 Cent, as you may have heard, have mutually agreed to participate in a "feud" over the sales of their just-released albums, wherein 50 has promised to retire if West's CD outsells his, and West has pledged to suffer a marginally more intense conniption of wounded self-regard at the next awards show that fails to recognize his greatness if outdone by his rival. As we're deeply invested in the outcome of this competition, we dispatched Defamer videographer Molly McAleer to Hollywood's Amoeba Records for an update on the early results of the local sales race and some incisive analysis of the rapping frenemies.
To celebrate the end of Fashion "Week" (seriously, didn't it feel like three years?), let's take a look at someone whose style is a little more "real." Richard Blakeley comes to you from Williamsburg, where he encounters an adorable Flavorpill editor who dispenses some key fashion advice for those who live in New York but not in New York.
Admit it: You're dying to see "Gossip Girl" (premiering September 19th at 9 p.m.!), the new CW show that pulls back the curtain on the lives of spoiled rich kids on the Upper East Side. It's not just aimed at the youngsters. It's also brilliantly engineered, we think, to be enjoyed by those over 16 as a guilty pleasure—though we know there's no such thing. Now we've obtained this one minute clip, which demonstrates exactly why "Gossip Girl" is the show that will define a generation of New Yorkers. Culturally, this just might be bigger than... gosh, we'd say 9/11, but Chris Crocker already used that one about Britney today.
On Sunday night, HBO debuted new drama Tell Me You Love Me, the flagship show in a post-Sopranos lineup the suddenly hit-deficient network is promoting under its unwieldy new slogan, "It's Not TV, It's TV With Tons of Graphic Fucking. Like, a LOT of Fucking. Hey, Did We Just Show You That Guy's Balls? You Bet We Did."
· Just for the proverbial shits n' giggles, here's another clip from Dr. Phil's Late Show appearance last night. Panties, or the lack thereof, are discussed.
· The LAT gets to know Hoboken Beach Diet Guy, with whom you're already probably pretty well acquainted by now.
· Leave Britney Alone Guy gets his Gallery of the Absurd moment. Also, his Howard Stern moment. And his ABC News moment.
· Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone might not become a huge hit in the UK.
Here's another capsule of unrepresented-artist-on-the-street interviews, lovingly captured and compiled by Defamer staff videologist Molly McAleer. At Artist Force, a wide-open mic for emerging and undiscovered talent held at Safari Sam's, it doesn't matter what you look like or what your act consists of: It's probably better than Britney Spears was at the VMAs, and that's good enough for them. Just ask Smalls, the evening's intimidatingly sized emcee, who himself looks like he may have stumbled into the showcase emceeing business after he deemed bodyguarding the bottomed-out, cooch-flashing starlet a job that offered little long-term security.
Our Liz Glover caught up with multi-"talented" tool Vincent Gallo at some Fashion Week event yesterday, we're not sure which, they're all starting to blend together as that nightmare concludes, and the actor/singer/director/model/sperm-vendor was kind enough to share his wisdom on the issues of the day.
