<![CDATA[Gawker: defamer, sally field]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: defamer, sally field]]> http://gawker.com/tag/defamer/sallyfield http://gawker.com/tag/defamer/sallyfield <![CDATA[Defamer Predicts the 2008 Emmys: The Dramas]]> We've already run through our predictions for Emmy's comedy categories, but now it's time to sit down for forty-four minutes (excepting commercials) and soberly judge this year's crop of dramas. Again, we'll be blogging the Emmys live from the East Coast starting at 7pm EDT/4pm PDT, so if Mariska Hargitay lets loose with an expletive-laden diatribe or Jeremy Piven has a nip slip on the red carpet, you can be sure we've got it covered. Now, onto the predictions:

Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series
Boston Legal - James Spader
Breaking Bad - Bryan Cranston
Dexter - Michael C. Hall
House - Hugh Laurie
In Treatment - Gabriel Byrne
Mad Men - Jon Hamm

Don't even bother, House fans. Though Hugh Laurie turned in the compelling, two-hour season finale as his submission, Emmy voters love three-time winner James Spader, and his submission (which finds him passionately arguing a case before the Supreme Court) provides Spader with his biggest tour-de-force yet. If he's ever to lose, it won't be this year.

Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series
Brothers & Sisters - Sally Field
The Closer - Kyra Sedgwick
Damages - Glenn Close
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - Mariska Hargitay
Saving Grace - Holly Hunter

A toss-up! In a category filled with film refugees deigning to do TV (which Emmy loves), Sally Field won last year and notoriously gave a bleeped speech that will only solidify her as the incumbent in voters' memories. Her biggest threat is the cool, nefarious Close, but we'll side with inertia and predict Field as the winner once more.

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series
Boston Legal - William Shatner
Damages - Ted Danson
Damages - Zeljko Ivanek
Lost - Michael Emerson
Mad Men - John Slattery

All but two of the nominees are newcomers to this category, and last year's winner Terry O'Quinn is nowhere to be found. We think voters will reward his co-star, Lost MVP Michael Emerson, whose blockbuster episode submission included horse-riding, piano playing, action scenes, foreign languages, and a juicy scene grieving the death of his daughter. Plus, Emerson is no Emmy novice: he won the award in 2001 for guest-starring on The Practice.

Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series
Boston Legal - Candice Bergen
Brothers & Sisters - Rachel Griffiths
Grey's Anatomy - Sandra Oh
Grey's Anatomy - Chandra Wilson
In Treatment - Dianne Wiest

If the category seems oddly mild this year, it's because of 2007 winner Katherine Heigl's infamous decision to pull her name out of consideration. As a reward to the co-stars who bit their lips and suffered in silence, we expect either Oh or Wilson to pull through as the winner, with a slight edge to Oh (after all, she once had to deal with Isaiah Washington, too).

Outstanding Drama Series
Boston Legal
Damages
Dexter
House
Lost
Mad Men

For party crashers Damages and Dexter, it's an honor just to be nominated. Like them, Mad Men is little-seen, but the difference is that it's watched by all the right people (and heavily appeals to older Emmy voters), so we expect a first-season surge to victory. What Would Don Draper Do if he had to go home empty-handed?

]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5052385&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Emmy Nomination Hell! 10 Plots and Subplots to Watch After Today's Big Announcements]]> The world awoke this morning to the chirping of little birds resembling Kristin Chenoweth and Neil Patrick Harris, perched at a podium in the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, announcing nominations for the 60th Emmy Awards. While most rolled over and tried to get back to sleep, we sat bolt upright as usual and sprinted to the window, our furious note-taking chronicling a few snubs, surprises and plenty of the conventional wisdom we've come to expect from the annual ritual.

The Academy has the full, looong slate of nominees, naturally, but we've narrowed our interests down to 10 easy storylines for our own Emmy dramedy — conveniently outlined after the jump!

1. Mad Men joined Damages as the first basic-cable programs to earn a nomination for best dramatic series. Its 15 other nods led the pack among all nominated dramas, while 30 Rock led all shows with 17 noms.

2. For the last time (literally), the Academy has snubbed The Wire for a dramatic series nomination. Critics at the TCA press tour will be symbolically immolating themselves by lunchtime.

3. In other snubs, FX is wondering this morning who it has to blow to get Denis Leary, Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver back on the list after nominations in 2007. Hint: It might be a bribe-friendly exec at AMC, which scored a kind-of-stunning two dramatic actor nods this year.

4. Silverman, Emmy Darling (Part 1): "I'm Fucking Matt Damon" was nominated for Outstanding Original Music And Lyrics. Silverman's competition is Flight of the Conchords and MADtv. As such, it bears saying aloud: " 'I'm Fucking Matt Damon' is going to win an Emmy."

5. Sarah Silverman, Emmy Darling (Part 2): Denied an actress nod for her own show, she earned a guest actress nomination for her turn as Marci Maven on Monk.

6. Amy Poehler's supporting-actress nod for Saturday Night Live is the first for an SNL actress since Gilda Radner and Jane Curtin were each nominated in 1978. Radner won.

7. There's apparently a formula for earning a few dozen Emmy noms: Just make a loooong historical epic like HBO's John Adams, which pulled in 23 mentions including outstanding miniseries — as Variety notes, the third consecutive year a period miniseries has drawn the year's biggest haul. Awards-bait film stars like Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney — both nominated as well — can't hurt either.

8. Come to think of it, film actresses on cable dominated dramatic categories in general, with four Oscar winners (including Susan Sarandon and Holly Hunter) and three Oscar nominees (Linney, Catherine Keener and Glenn Close) among the ten performers recognized. We presume Sally Field got Katherine Heigl's spot.

9. Speaking of whom, we're guessing ABC had higher hopes for Grey's Anatomy than two supporting-actress nominations and "Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup For A Series, Miniseries, Movie Or A Special."

10. If we must split up the reality and reality-competition categories, surely the Academy can find a way to further separate things like A&E's grueling Intervention from trifles like Extreme Makeover Home Edition and Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List. Really.

]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=398726&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Stars Choose Sides as SAG Strike Apocalypse Descends]]> Everywhere we've been around the LA Film Festival this week, the chatter du jour is either oversexed studio minions or how folks plan to spend their off-days during the increasingly inevitable-looking SAG strike. The latter conflict came into even sharper relief today in Variety, which published a SAG-AFTRA Bullshit Scorecard (hardly an improvement over our SAG Strike Mad Libs™, but whatever) breaking down the lies, celebrity endorsees and various other spin the unions are wielding in their steel-cage labor war:

As SAG begins its 38th day of negotiations with the majors today, the pro-AFTRA forces have added Alec Baldwin and Kevin Spacey to their list of several hundred endorsers, led by Tom Hanks and Sally Field. ...
SAG announced Tuesday it had added high-profile supporters including Jack Nicholson, Ben Stiller, Josh Brolin, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Viggo Mortensen, Nick Nolte and Martin Sheen. It's also amped up its PR campaign via print ads.

The SAG-AFTRA brawling also raises the key question of clout. SAG has blasted the notion of the AFTRA deal serving as a template, because AFTRA's last primetime contract generated $40 million for members while SAG's last three-year feature-primetime pact generated $4 billion over the same period. Observers say the argument makes little sense, because SAG has so many more members working in the primetime and film arena.

Elsewhere in the paper, the AMPTP gets the backhanded benefit of the doubt: "Studios could stop haggling over pennies, but that's sort of like telling an insurance company to quit low-balling you. That's just what they do — relying on any sane person to give up first." Which suggests to us there's only one solution — a fun, unscripted, winner-take-all slugfest that would conveniently circumvent any potential work stoppage following AFTRA's ratification vote next month: Ladies and gentlemen, let's play the Feud!

]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=397101&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Celebrity Taxpayers Alec Baldwin, Tara Reid Among Dozens Rocked by Alleged IRS Breach]]> If you've ever wondered how far below the poverty line Tara Reid is living these days or what kind of child support Alec Baldwin doles out to Kim Basinger, there is a guy in Cincinnati named John Snyder who is living your dream right now. Illegally, of course, and maybe under threat of prison time, but still: Snyder, an IRS tax examiner, is accused of viewing the confidential records of 197 celebrities over the last five years, including Kevin Bacon, Sally Field, Vanna White, John Cleese, Portia De Rossi, Randy Quaid and even "the late Eddie Albert of the classic sitcom Green Acres." Eddie Albert! Has this man no shame? Maybe not, but you can bet he has a lawyer:

Snyder was caught when authorities audited who was accessing personal and tax information stored on a federal database called the Integrated Data Retrieval Systems, according to the affidavit.
Authorities said Snyder had access to the database, but works almost exclusively with business accounts and had no legitimate reason to review individual taxpayer accounts. ... Snyder, 56, faces up to a year in prison and a $250,000 fine at this time if found guilty of improperly accessing IRS data, a misdemeanor.

Come on, now — if learning the closely guarded truth about how much Vanna makes to laugh at Pat Sajak's jokes and stroke huge letters for a few hours a week doesn't constitute a "legitimate reason" to bump around a tax database, we don't know what does.

[Photo Credit: AFP]

]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=394290&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Sally Field Reacts To Fox's Censorship Of Her Antiwar Blasphemy]]>
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.

Inside Edition was quick to get Field's post-show thoughts on being a victim of Fox's ultrasensitive network censors, who appears satisfied that it was more the comment's goddamn-iness than its antiwar-iness that led to one of the evening's conspicuous disco-ball cutaways. Edition also managed to poll Oscar-winning Hollywood shadow president Al Gore about Field's speech, who "agreed with the sentiment," but refrained from accusing conservative Fox overlord Rupert Murdoch of personally pressing a dump-button that simultaneously silenced the actress's outrage and triggered the deployment of 10,000 additional News Corp-funded mercenaries to Baghdad to assist in a surge.

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