It looks like those naked Prince Harry photos have paid off for this single Brit. According to Town & Country magazine, this fine piece of royal backside is the Top Bachelor in the World. The list of 40 hunks is “a highly subjective, thoroughly opinionated survey of the princes, politicians, scions, DJs, and billionaires-to-be we consider the most eligible men in the universe,” says the publication, which has somehow ranked George Clooney at #33. And while that two-time Sexiest Man Alive would never speak out on his behalf, we’re asking readers to chime in below: Do you agree with the list? Which single stud would you rather take it from, Harry or George? And the Winner is? Prince Harry Click Here To Vote for Prince George Clooney Click Here To Vote for George Prince Harry or George Clooney? If you could only take one to bed, which would it be? View Poll »
So you might have heard that the 85 th Academy Awards nominations have been announced . Good for you, person who wakes up early in the morning. This year’s nominees contains some shocking snubs — no best director for Tarantino or Bigelow ? — as well as some pleasant surprises, but if the majority of the nominees will have us bitching or raving until March, the Best Original Song category plays it as frustratingly safe as ever. To be fair, the nomination of “Everybody Needs A Friend” from Ted comes as a surprise, and Adele’s Skyfall theme is a classic that would deserve to win regardless of the year it was nominated. Despite this, looking at the list of nominated songs one can’t help but be baffled, particularly given how interesting this year’s list of potential selections actually was. The list of eligible songs , released in December, reads like one of the craziest drug-fueled mix tapes ever made. There were three — three! — songs from Casa De Mi Padre. There were three songs from Django Unchained including “100 Black Coffins” by Rick Ross that would have finally put Three 6 Mafia’s 2006 win in context. “Razors.Out” from The Raid: Redemption , the sole good song ever associated with Linkin Park, was a potential. And dammit, Matthew McConaughey’s scene stealer “’Ladies of Tampa” from Magic Mike could have been a contender. Even Katy Perry’s “Wide Awake” would have been an interesting (and, I suspect, controversial) choice. The songs are selected based on how they work within their featured scenes, but even that doesn’t get the list off the hook. By that criteria alone, “Ladies of Tampa” should have been the hands-down winner. (Maybe the Academy hates male strippers?) Instead, the nominated songs confirm once again that the Oscars might as well cut a royalty check to Stuff White People Like creator Christian Lander and call it a day. Yeah, a nomination from Les Miserables was a given, because the Academy loves ambitious musicals like the day is long. But “Before My Time” from Chasing Ice and ” Pi’s Lullaby “? Snore. NPR has more interesting music during All Things Considered interstitials. What’s the solution? Probably nothing, aside from demographic shifts that inevitably will result from an influx of new voters with fresher taste in music. But that doesn’t make the risk-averse and tone-deaf nature of these choices any less disappointing. Let’s take a moment then to reflect on the fact that we won’t be seeing a topless Mcconaughey, or western-suit wearing Will Ferrell , performing at this year’s Academy Awards, and why not let us know in comments how you feel about this year’s songs. Ross Lincoln is a LA-based freelance writer from Oklahoma with an unhealthy obsession with comics, movies, video games, ancient history, Gore Vidal, and wine. Follow Ross Lincoln on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Jacki Weaver says she has no Oscar game plan except to buy a new pair of shoes. “I love shoes. I love shiny things,” the Australian actress told Movieline this afternoon, after learning she had been nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her fine work in David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook . Weaver, who plays an Italian-American Philadelphia housewife so well that you can almost smell the braciole when she’s onscreen, explained that she learned of her nomination while watching TV “in my Qantas pajamas” after flying into Los Angeles en route to Texas for her next acting gig, as Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, in David Landesman’s Parkland . “I wasn’t sleeping well so I turned on the TV. I honestly wasn’t expecting it, and it did take me quite by surprise,” Weaver said. “I yelled out a rude word.” That word began with “f, as in Freddie,” the actress said in her jammy Australian accent. “And it sounded like the way Australians say ‘park,'” she explained. “We drop the ‘r’ and say, ‘pahk.'” She went on to explain that said word is “a term of wonderment” in her country,” then laughed: I don’t know why I don’t just say the word.” She never did, but did tell us that she had not spoken to her fellow cast members and nominees, Robert De Niro , Bradley Cooper or Jennifer Lawrence , but had talked to Russell. “He told me that he’s really proud of me and he’s thrilled,” she said. “I adore David.” She likes Americans a lot, too. Weaver explained that “I haven’t changed but my life has changed,” in the two years she since earned her first Oscar nomination for the brutal 2010 Australian crime drama Animal Kingdom . “I’ve now done my fifth film in America and to be embraced so heartily by Americans has been wonderful. It’s a very generous culture, American culture,” she added. “I know you can’t generalize 300 million people, but everyone I’ve met her has been so lovely to me.” Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Appearing alongside husband Mark Kelly, Gabrielle Giffords was a guest today on Good Morning America , touching on a subject she sadly knows all too well: Gun violence. The ex-Congresswoman – who survived a shooting in Arizona two years ago – visited Newtown, Connecticut last week and had one word for Diane Sawyer when the topic turned to these bloody massacres: Enough . “After the shooting in Tucson, there was talk about addressing some of these issues, [and] again after Aurora,” Kelly said. “I’m hopeful that this time is different, and I think it is. Twenty first-graders’ being murdered in their classrooms is a very personal thing for everybody.” To that end, Giffords and Kelly have started Americans for Responsible Solutions. It’s an initiative described on its official site as being meant to “encourage elected officials to stand up for solutions to prevent gun violence and protect responsible gun ownership by communicating directly with the constituents that elect them.” On their visit to Newtown, Giffords and Kelly met with relatives directly connected to the tragedy. “[The] first couple that we spoke to, the dad took out his cell phone and showed us a picture of his daughter and I just about lost it, just by looking at the picture,” Kelly said. “It was just very tough and it brought back a lot of memories about what that was like for us some two years ago.” Giffords and Kelly both own guns and support the Second Amendment, but they denounce the NRA’s hopes to arm schools with security guards and are instead pushing for “common sense” legal changes. For starters, how about comprehensive background checks all around? “Why can’t we… make it more difficult for criminals and the mentally ill to get guns?” asks Kelly, adding that “extended magazines” should be outlawed because they are “only used to kill lots of people.” Giffords still struggles everyday with regular tasks and could only offer a word here and there during the interview, but each spoke volumes: Enough. Strength. Sad. What do you think? Does the country need major gun reform? YES. Fewer guns, fewer tragedies! NO. It’s unconstitutional and won’t stop anything! View Poll »
It’s been a violent year in Chicago , but long-time residents of Chatham are still fighting to keep their neighborhood safe after the death of one of their own rocked the community. And with the recession affecting small businesses, a once vibrant, middle-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side seems to be hanging on by a thread. Via The New York Times : The neighborhood’s best-known restaurants were failing, its crime rate was on the rise, and for the first time that anyone could remember there were foreclosures, with once tidy bungalows sitting empty and dark. For all that, the social scientists studying Chicago neighborhoods in 2010 were betting that the middle-class enclave of Chatham, on the city’s South Side, would remain stable through the recession. It had done so for decades, while surrounded by impoverished areas. It had somehow absorbed a wave of newcomers from recently demolished housing projects. And the researchers’ data suggested that its strong identity and scores of active block groups had helped protect residents from larger economic threats and offered clues about how to preserve threatened urban communities all over the country. Chatham should hold, barring some unforeseen cataclysm. The cataclysm hit on May 19 of that year. That night, a group of assailants jumped Thomas Wortham IV, an off-duty police officer and Iraq war veteran, as he was leaving his parents’ house. He resisted and was shot, bleeding to death on the street where he grew up. The entire city seemed to stop for breath, holding a memorial attended by hundreds of fellow police officers and citizens, Mayor Richard M. Daley and Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois. “We were blindsided by this; blindsided by what happened to Tommy,” said his mother, Carolyn Wortham. “And yes, you begin to question everything.” In Chatham, it seemed, all bets were off. Many residents began to think the unthinkable, that maybe it was time to escape the place they had done so much to build. The community’s response to the crisis would test a theory emerging from an ambitious, nearly decade-long study of all of Chicago’s neighborhoods — that a neighborhood’s character shapes its economic future at least as much as more obvious factors like income levels and foreclosure rates. “If Chatham could maintain its relative stability despite such great challenges,” said William Julius Wilson, a professor of sociology and social policy at Harvard and the author of the 1987 classic, “The Truly Disadvantaged,” “then I think this concept of a neighborhood effect will be a landmark contribution, helping us understand how to prevent the out-migration of citizens and strengthen neighborhoods” at risk of falling into poverty. …Older residents, perpetually anxious that the younger generation is losing their values of tidiness and mutual respect, now had visible evidence of social erosion. They saw it in the habits of their new neighbors, many of them moving from the Robert Taylor Homes, which were torn down in the mid-2000s. “The big change going on is that the grandparents are moving out, and some of the younger kids coming in here are picking up behaviors that you would never have seen in Chatham before,” said Worlee Glover, a salesman who runs a blog called Concerned Citizens of Chatham. “Loitering out on 79th. Walking up and down the street, eating out of a bag. Eating out on the porch. Those kinds of things.” “Chatham and neighboring Avalon Park are both working class communities, not core ghetto areas, and both were hit hard by recession, particularly Chatham, which got hit economically and with incidents of violence.Twice in previous weeks, young men from outside the area had fired shots into the scrum around the basketball courts at Cole Park, just across the street from the Worthams’ house. Cole Park, all picnics and playgrounds when Thomas IV was growing up, now resembled a street party on most evenings, with teenagers coming just to hang out, Mrs. Wortham said. Seniors and parents of young children stayed away. “People came from all over the South Side to play at Cole Park for the very reason that it was a safe park,” said Thomas Wortham III, his father. “But it got to where no one was controlling it.” Chatham has more than a hundred block groups, citizen volunteers who monitor the tidiness of neighborhood lawns, garbage, and noise, as well as organize events, Mr. Tate said. The neighborhood has something else that many nearby areas do not: uniformly small buildings. Neat rows of one-story brick bungalows and ranch houses stand shoulder to shoulder, at attention, astride modest commercial strips, with few buildings more than three stories tall. …The ultimate verdict, for Chatham and for the neighborhood effect, may lie in what the Worthams and people like them do in historically cohesive urban communities threatened by creeping poverty and violence. “I sure did consider leaving when Tommy was killed,” Mrs. Wortham said. She took a deep breath. “But you know, whenever something like this happens, there’s plenty of blame to go around. People want to blame the city, the community organizations, the churches, all that. But nothing changes unless people look after their children, and the neighbors do, too. If people aren’t behaving, you say something. When I went to school, if I did something wrong, by the time I got home my mother knew about it.” Community involvement is key in any area. Do you think Chicago’s lack of racial integration on social, economic, and educational scales is a factor in part of the problem? Images via AP
Dear Mitt: Karma is a beyooooooootch! Official Presidential Election Vote Total For Mitt Romney Was 47 Perecent It turns out that Money Mitt’s math might have actually worked out after all….just not quite the way he planned. And ohhhh, the irony…. via THG Mitt Romney’s final vote total in the 2012 presidential election has been tallied, and the Republican challenger received – wait for it – 47 percent of the vote. Yes, it took this entire time to finalize it (you just didn’t hear about it because it wasn’t close), and Romney came in almost exactly at the 47 percent figure. 47.2 percent to be exact. Many will find the number appropriate and ironic, as Romney made waves when a secret video of him talking with donors surfaced late in the campaign season. In the 47 percent video, he said that segment of the country would never vote for him, because they’ve become dependent upon government programs. That Romney final vote is based on the percentage of all presidential votes he garnered in November, and it works out to 47.2 percent of all Americans. Quick! Somebody go get Mitt a glass of water to wash down that foot in his mouth.
Mitt Romney’s final vote total in the 2012 presidential election has been tallied, and the Republican challenger received – wait for it – 47 percent of the vote. Yes, it took this entire time to finalize it (you just didn’t hear about it because it wasn’t close), and Romney came in almost exactly at the 47 percent figure. 47.2 percent to be exact. Many will find the number appropriate and ironic, as Romney made waves when a secret video of him talking with donors surfaced late in the campaign season. In the 47 percent video , he said that segment of the country would never vote for him, because they’ve become dependent upon government programs. That Romney final vote is based on the percentage of all presidential votes he garnered in November, and it works out to 47.2 percent of all Americans. Looks like his calculation was quite wrong, or at least backwards. On the plus side for Romney … 47.2 percent is more than 59,000,000 people. Also, if you excluded all third party candidates and looked at only Romney and President Barack Obama, the GOP challenger reached 48 percent. Not a terrible showing; John McCain won just 45.7 percent of the vote four years earlier. Still, don’t expect a third run from Mitt in the 2016 election .
With Kim Kardashian pregnant , only one real question remains: The gender of the baby? The name? Please. Whether or not the child will be featured on the family’s reality show, of course! Network President Suzanne Kolb told The Hollywood Reporter that “we love it when this close-knit family gets even bigger,” implying producers would love to film every waking second of Baby Kimye. But will the parents sign off on raising their child in front of the camera? No, according to TMZ sources, which allege Kim and Kanye actually plan to be protective of their offspring. No spinoff, no E! special, no series regular status on Keeping Up with the Kardashians . Is this a good idea? You tell us: Should Kardashian and West feature their kid on reality television? Yes, that’s so healthy for kids! No, it’s a bad idea View Poll »
Many West Virginia residents are not fans of Buckwild, MTV’s new reality show – and replacement for the retiring Jersey Shore – which premiered last night. Set in Sissonville, W.V., the network’s latest “authentic comedic series” follows the antics of nine twenty-something cast members who are … a little bit country. Punches are thrown and words are exchanged. Turmoil brews among the roommates. Buckwild Season Preview MTV teases that the show follows “an outrageous group of childhood friends from the rural foothills of West Virginia who love to dodge grown-up responsibilities.” Sound familiar? Only in the backwoods and not the Garden State coastline? As we saw with New Jersey residents upset at the portrayal of their homeland by Snooki & Co., some West Virginians are angry about it feeding “redneck” stereotypes. Samantha Markos, a nearby waitress, said if MTV filmed a “real” show about the state, “You would find a lot of hardworking people that provide for their families.” Melissa Whitman, who lived across the street from where the Buckwild gang resided during shooting last year, witnessed more than she probably wanted to see. Especially as arguments and even some nasty fights broke out . “I watched producers actually talk to a lady and tell her exactly how he wanted her to come off on film,” she said. “I guess they thought we were all uneducated.” Danny Jones, mayor of Charleston, W.V., added, “You can find all kinds of people that live here and they’re not people that are going to be portrayed in Buckwild .” U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) also criticized the program. During the premiere, Cara, Katie and Anna moved in together in an attempt to trade country life for city life, but things quickly took a turn for the worse. Neighbors frequently called the police over noise violations, but the girls, with the help of Southern belle Shae, decided to throw a summer bash. This resulted in the first fight of the season, involving Anna. “I’ve known Anna since I was 4 years old. I know she has a horrible temper. And watching the footage back, that fight, I was surprised,” Shae recalled. “I was impressed because she usually snaps like that. I think she handled herself well. She was pushed to her limits and was just going to snap at anyone.” “If anyone gets in her face she’s going to snap at them.” Shain added, “I didn’t want to be around, I’m going the other way when she gets mad. I’m tucking my tail and running like a little puppy dog.” Sadly for the girls, the party ended … in eviction. “I thought it was pretty awesome that they got kicked out because it brought them to the country,” Shain said. “I didn’t have to go to the city to get my flirt on.” Good to know. What do you think of Buckwild?
A controversial Israeli law banning too-skinny models is in effect as of January 1, 2013, prompting praise, controversy and debate over how much weight it will hold. So to speak. The law requires models to prove they have maintained a Body Mass Index (BMI) of at least 18.5 for three months prior to a fashion shoot or show. That means a 5’8” woman can weigh 119 pounds minimum. The law also requires advertisers to disclose if they have retouched or doctored photos. “This law is another step in the war against eating disorders,” said physician and law co-sponsor Rachel Adatto (with Danny Danon) of the act. Underweight models, she explained, “can no longer serve as role models for innocent young people who adopt and copy the illusion of thinness.” But critics of the law in this country say it is misguided, focusing on weight instead of health, and doomed to fail due to the muscle of the fashion industry. “I think it’s an approach that isn’t going to work,” eating disorder expert Susan Ice, V.P. of clinical services at Renfrew Center, told Yahoo! Shine . “I’ve learned that designers are really artists, and we have free speech here.” “We can’t tell anyone how to do art. If designers want women to look like boys or designers want women to look like 8-year-olds, you’re not going to change that.” But a champion of the new law, Adi Barkan, a former fashion-model agent in Israel, says the threat of eating disorders and body image issues is too great. “I became immersed in this world very quickly. I gave up the agency and photography and delved into the dark world of anorexics and bulimics,” he said. “I realized that only legislation can change the situation. There was no time to educate so many people, and the change had be forced on the industry.” “There was no time to waste, so many girls were dieting to death.” Even critics, including Ice, say there’s no denying that images from Hollywood and the fashion industry can be difficult for young women to deal with. “Certainly I don’t believe the modeling industry has caused the rise in eating disorders, but it makes it harder,” she says of the struggle faced by many. “It’s a difficult recovery environment, worshiping thinness as the beauty ideal.” One amazing upside? These Kate Upton bikini photos . No scary-low BMI worries on that page. Just a whole lot of distractions at work and school.
