Top Ten Best Reasons Brokeback Mountain Shouldn't Win Best Adapted Screenplay Ever

1. “Jack Twist? Jack Nasty!”
2. “I wish I knew how to quit you.”
3. “And I’m not you, I can’t make it on a couple of high-altitude fucks once or twice a year.”
4. “You know, friend... This is a Goddam bitch of an unsatisfactory situation.”
5. “So what we got now is Brokeback Mountain.”
6. “Son of a horsin’ bitch.” Or “Son of a whore’s son bitch.”
7. “That Brokeback got us good, don’t it?”
8. “Is it somebody you cowboyed with, or what?”
9. “What I don’t know, all them things that I don’t know, could get you killed if I come to know them.”
10. “If you pair of deuces are lookin’ for work, I suggest you get your scrawny asses in here, pronto.”
10½. “You know your friend could come inside, have a cup of coffee.” “Oh he’s from Texas.”

Dunk Nut

In the category of things I suffer through so you don't have to, I present this snippet of a conversation between two of the most noxious personalities ever to grace a TV set, Rita Cosby and Brian Dunkleman:

COSBY: And do you still stay in touch with any of the folks from the show?

DUNKLEMAN: No, I don't. You know, I called Randy Jackson a couple years ago to wish him a happy Martin Luther King Day, and I never heard back from him, so...

COSBY: Well, thank you very much for being with us, Brian. We appreciate it. And we'll look at IdolGohome.com. Thanks so much for being with us.

Now that I've seemingly solved the case of Jamie Foxx's involvement with "Gold Digger," my new mission is to unravel the mystery of how Rita Cosby - a woman with the most irritating voice in the world, a not-particularly-attractive face, zero journalistic integrity, endless fascination with unimportant "news stories" and horribly insensitive interviewing "technique" - is allowed to be on television.

Crazy Like a Foxx

Does he think he's blind now, too? No wonder he always wears sunglasses indoors.

I've been meaning to post this for a while. You see, I thought I had reached Détente with Jamie Foxx. When last we checked in with him, it appeared he had finally given up his Ray Charles schtick. It appeared. I was ready to move on. He wasn't.

So, a couple weeks ago, just before The Grammys, I turned on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Jamie Foxx was the guest. This is some of what he had to say:

I’m gonna tell you why this CD is number one. For one, we did a movie called Ray Charles [sic]. And when we did Ray Charles [sic], a young man by the name of Kanye West who is so genius and myself and Kanye are kinda like the Batman and Robin of number one songs [shouldn't he say "Kanye and myself" because honestly, in that analogy, Jamie Foxx is Robin at best], you know, and after we did that, Kanye was looking at the movie when we were doin’ [sings:]“Well, I got a woman, uh uh, way over town, uh uh, that’s good to me.” And he took this “She take my money, uh, uh…” so he took that and made a special hook called “Gold Digger” as you know, [sings:]“I’m not saying she’s a gold digger, but she ain’t messing with no…” you know the rest…

Okay, so he still doesn't solve the mystery of who sings on the "Gold Digger" hook. Though this article from MTV News might (via Wikipedia):

"He did that beat a while before the movie ['Ray'] was even thought of," West's A&R rep, Patrick "Plain Pat" Reynolds, said of the song many [including, apparently, Jamie Foxx] thought was conceived after West saw Foxx's Oscar-winning performance as Ray Charles.

...

The idea to make Jamie Foxx a part of "Gold Digger," which had initially used a sample of Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman," came after West went to see "Ray" with his friend John Mayer.

"It was the natural thing," Pat explained. "If we couldn't clear the sample, we were going to use Jamie. There's actually a version with Jamie singing all the way through the song. It's good, but it didn't feel the same because we had to replay the instruments too.

So, there you go. Finally!

Anyway, back to Jamie and Ellen:

Yeah, so that’s why it’s so special that it’s number one because Ray’s album came out, after he passed away, it was the number one album in the country without a number one song. And this album is the number one album in the country without a number one song. So it’s because of that.

Um, what?

Ellen responds:

That's incredible.

Uh, yeah. It certainly is. Incredible.

Jamie to Ellen:

Thank you.

Then later, Ellen brings up how he's up for a Grammy. He makes it sound as though he's up for more than one:

We were nominated for “Slow Jamz”, but this one is… I mean “Gold Digger”’s like the national anthem right now. So it’s up for, like, you know, Best Song of the Year [actually, it was up for Record of the Year and Best Rap Solo Performance, not Song of the Year, but that's an easy mistake to make] and also we did a tribute to Luther Vandross and so we’re up for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance [that category, he got right].

Now, he never outright says that he is nominated for his work on "Gold Digger" (he wasn't), but he certainly implies it.

Oh, and one last exhumation of his Ray Charles persona: Near the end of his performance of "Unpredictable" he tosses in this line:

I'm gonna make it do what it do, baby

Anything but unpredictable. Oh, and I just discovered that there's a song on his album called "Do What It Do."

Anatomically Incorrect Dolly

Unfortunate Chyron of the night:


That'll be one hell of a reduction surgery...

[Ed. note - It is pure coincidence that this post follows this one.]

Friends in Low Places

Friends may be long over, but its lawsuit lives on:

Justice Joyce L. Kennard appeared to find it significant that Warner Bros. had told Lyle to expect "a lot of sexual talk, very frank talk and at times vulgar" language. "She said, 'No problem,' " Kennard related.

Chief Justice Ronald M. George also noted that Lyle had been warned of "sexual banter" before she was hired.

But Scott O. Cummings, who represented Lyle, said she was never cautioned that one of the writers would be "drawing a woman's vagina and making jokes about it."

What would've been really vulgar would've been if they'd drawn pictures of a man's vagina.

Also, I wonder what clever wordplay Greg Malins could foist upon Ms. Lyle's lawyer's name...

Blow Hard

We have an early front-runner to be this year's Tom Cruise and Jump The Couch (though he probably won't be doing it on Oprah):

Bruce Willis!

Happy TValentine's Day!

Valentines are up over at SMRT-TV. These are some of mine that didn't make the cut (obviously, I have far too many TV crushes and not enough of a life):

A Little Less Super Bowl

How could Warner Bros. not place an ad for Superman Returns during the SUPER Bowl? Maybe the expense wasn't worth it for a movie that everyone is sure to be aware of anyway... but come on!

Not So Predictable After All

Okay, so I finally made it all the way through Jamie Foxx: Unpredictable. And well... I owe Jamie Foxx an apology. He made it through the entire hour-long special without once mentioning Ray Charles. And the only time he invoked the late singer at all was when he sang a snippet of "I Got a Woman," leading into the introduction of "Gold Digger" (for the record, this came at the 22 minute mark). Then he introduced a special guest... Snoop Dogg? So alas, no live performance of "Gold Digger" or its mysterious hook.

I guess this means Foxx's year-long (and then some) one man tribute band is finally as dead as the Original Famous Ray. I already kinda miss it...

Who would've thought that his special would feature more skits featuring an actress playing his sassy grandmother, more pregnant women on stage, more shots of crying women in the audience or more attempts by Foxx to squinch his eyes tight and force out a tear during the emotional finale than mentions of Brother Ray? Certainly not me.

I was way off. I'm sorry. I guess I should stick to predicting Academy Award nominations, which I did quite well this year (if I do type so myself).

I got 72½ (I'm counting the wrong song from Hustle & Flow as half right) out of 95 overall (for 76% accuracy) and in the so-called "Top Eight" categories, I called 36 out of 40 (90%), including all of the Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay nominees. Still, I'm most proud (if one can be proud of something so lame as Oscar prognosticating) of going 4 for 5 in the usually impossible categories of Best Documentary Feature and Best Foreign Language Film (the latter with very little information to guess on).