Every Thursday, Hollywood.com lists the 10 coolest celebs, movies and goings-on in the world of entertainment.
1. Showtime’s new series Weeds, for trashing suburbia and its utopian delusion. The show centers on a recently widowed woman, played with sardonic relish by Mary-Louise Parker, who sells pot as a means to continue raising her two kids in cushy comfortable surroundings. While Middle America will undoubtedly hate the big business marijuana mom gets from the soccer mom-and-dad set, we love it. Does Middle America watch Showtime?
2. Weed and the stars who overtly talk about it, because everyone knows it’s not really a gateway drug. During last week’s round of press junkets for The Dukes of Hazzard, star Johnny Knoxville said he found it impossible to turn down a joint from his co-star Willie Nelson. While the former Jackass insisted he isn’t interested in smoking the herbal drug, he said he didn’t know how to politely turn the country legend down. “I’m not much of a weed guy,” Knoxville tells the New York Daily News, “But when you’re on Willie‘s bus–you don’t try and say no to Willie. Let Nancy Reagan try and say no to Willie. Bet she can’t do it. I couldn’t either.”
3. Tom Cruise and his consistent but odd behavioral antics, for unwittingly impacting pop culture. The War of the Worlds star’s chair dancing jaunt while protesting his love for Katie Holmes on Oprah Winfrey‘s chat show has spawned the term “jumping the couch.” The now well-used phrase, which was recently added to UrbanDictionary.com, means: “The defining moment when you know someone has gone off the deep end. Inspired by Cruise‘s behavior
on Oprah.” E.g.: “My new boyfriend Benny… jumped the couch and started rubbing spicy brown mustard on his body at my family reunion.”
4. Smoking–Gun TV series, that is, for retooling its tell-all TV series with a cast full of marionettes, hand puppets, bobblehead dolls, and animated characters. The show presents the incriminating and outrageous material found on the Web site, with a focus on celebrity-related scandals and legal cases. Does this mean host Mo Rocca is out of a job? The series debuts on Court TV this Tuesday.
5. Jude Law‘s former nanny and sex toy Daisy Wright, for airing her grievances on national TV. Wright is set to tell three top showbiz programs about the hurt she suffered at the hands of the Alfie star following their month-long fling earlier this year. “Jude is a huge star in America and I will be able to explain how I was left with no choice but to tell my story because I lost the nannying job I had been doing well for a year simply because he and I had been sexually involved,” the vixenish nanny confesses. Shame on Jude for using his children’s caregiver for his own care.
6. Landmark Manhattan club CBGB for winning a court bid in its battle to stay alive. Manhattan Civil Court Judge Joan M. Kenney ruled that CBGB does not owe its landlord, the Bowery Residents’ Committee, any back rent and declined a request to evict the club, noting it would be “unjust and harsh especially when, for over three decades, this tenant has been a pillar of the community.” Kenney also pointed out CBGB, the birthplace of punk rock, was “the anchor of what has become the “renaissance’ of the Bowery.”
7. Glam diva Jennifer Lopez, for going out and buying herself a $4 million ring for her own birthday last week. That’s the spirit, Jen–if you want something, just go and get it. The ring will make a nice addition to the $2 million finger gem her husband Marc Anthony bought her to celebrate their first wedding anniversary in June. An insider tells In Touch magazine: “It’s a very serious rock. Very few women in the world have diamond ring of such magnitude.”
8. Lost star Matthew Fox, for giving TV viewers faith in the spellbinding series’ future. Fox has laughed off doubts the castaway drama has a limited future due to the nature of its plot, insisting it could go on for years. “When we’d just done the pilot, everybody was asking, ‘How do you make a series out of this?'” Fox said. ” All I kept thinking about was that I did 144 hours of a show (Party of Five) about five people in a house in San Francisco, and you’re going to tell me you have issues about making a long-term show out of 14 main characters, 46 survivors on an island, with this huge, epic story to be told? This show could easily do an eight-year run.”
9. Everyone’s favorite coffee house–Starbucks, for making waves in the water market with its new brand of bottled H2O, Ethos. Ethos Water, a tiny startup acquired by the java giant in April, will donate five cents for every $1.80 bottle of water it sells to fund drinking water projects in poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Here’s some fascinating water trivia: Last year, Americans drank an average of 24 gallons of bottled water per person.
10. San Jose State University’s annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, for entertaining us, albeit with bad prose. The competition, which recognizes the best of worst writing, takes its inspiration from minor writer Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford began with, “It was a dark and stormy night.” Highlights from this year’s competion includes Microsoft computer analyst Dan McKay’s entry, which reads: “As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire.” He was comparing a woman’s breasts to “small knurled caps of the oil dampeners?” San Jose State English Professor Scott Rice called the entry ludicrous, adding, “We want writers with a little talent, but no taste.” McKay will receive $250 in prize winnings.
