The dubious potboiler earned the stars both of the night's top acting prizes, while The Secret Life of Bees outmaneuvered that, Cadillac Records, The Family That Preys and Miracle at St. Anna for the evening's Best Picture award. Bees's Jennifer Hudson won Supporting Actress in addition to three music prizes, including Best Album and New Artist. Event co-host Tyler Perry failed miserably on the film side while claiming four TV awards for his House of Payne series.

Shocker of the night: Jenny Lumet — snubbed by both the WGA and Oscars for the multiethnic utopian melodrama of Rachel Getting Married — won the evening's Best Original Screenplay hardware. Though consider adding an asterisk: It didn't have to face the formidable, jellyfish-aided denouement of Seven Pounds. Recount!

• Jennifer Hudson wins big at Image Awards [THR]

The fake-laughing, niacin-loving superstar sat down with Britain's Daily Express and revealed a long-held theory proven correct by the presidential election:

"It was as if some part of me was validated. It was something that I've known for a long time that I couldn't really say: 'You know guys, I really don't think America is a racist nation.' I know that I feel like that sometimes but I just don't believe that. There are racist people who live there but I don't think America as a whole is a racist nation. Before Obama won the presidency I wasn't allowed to say that out loud because people would say: 'Oh yeah, of course for you, Mr Hollywood!' "

Yes, except that Hollywood? Still racist! Moments later, Smith is asked whether executives are too nervous to give him love scenes opposite white actresses:

"Definitely nervous. You spend millions on a movie and the studio wants to do everything they can to protect their investment. The idea of a black guy kissing a white girl on screen becomes huge news in the States. Outside the country it's no big deal but in the US it's still a big racial issue."

Is Smith having his frosting-blind cake and eating it too, or has he pulled an untenable, Dixie Chicks-like act by criticizing from foreign soil the Hollywood executives who refused Leah Remini a Seven Pounds screen test? One can only hope that in our new, post-racial Obama nation, blandly written love interest parts will go to the actresses who most deserve them.

[Photo Credit: AP]

• AN INTERVIEW WITH WILL SMITH [Daily Express]

DEFAMER: So the nominees that emerged yesterday weren't official yet?
JOHN: What happened is we have press members on our mailing list, and this guy Larry Carroll from MTV's Movie Blog apparently misunderstood and thought that was a final list. And it kind of went viral for us.

So what was it, if not a list of nominees?
When we send out our nominating ballots, we also send out a list of suggested nominees—only because if you don't steer it somehow, you just get no consensus with as many people as we have voting. Those are likely nominees when the final ballots are tabulated and the actual nominations are announced on the 21st, but those are not the official nominees.

Are there any dark horses that could still emerge?
I'm assuming you're talking about The Spirit, which is getting a lot of write-in votes. One of the things that's happened ever since the Oscars jumped their show a month ahead is that we have to get our material out the week of Christmas, and anything that comes out on Christmas or later is not likely to make it out onto our ballot. [...] With Tom Cruise (in the Christmas-released Valkyrie), someone asked, "Well, how can Tom Cruise be on there if The Spirit wasn't?" And with Tom Cruise, the advance buzz was really awful. Although apparently the movie isn't that bad, so it'll be interesting to see if he does or does not get a nomination.

Well, one big star vehicle that seems to have supplanted Valkyrie as far as public ire is Seven Pounds, which a poll of critics recently voted the year's worst.
You know, I've seen that. It's weird, and it's an odd concept for a movie, but it's not quite to the standards of what we would consider for a Razzie. At least until the jellyfish part, which definitely belongs on the "nuke the fridge" list. Up to that point, it's a reasonably reputable movie, though I should admit that it also is getting write-in votes for screenplay. I don't think Will Smith is getting many votes for that, he's getting them for Hancock.

So what criteria do you consider for Worst Picture?
We look at box office—and big box office doesn't protect you from being Razzie-nominated—we look at the Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes, we pay attention to what's being said on the forum of our website. We look at the track record of the people involved. Like Uwe Boll—the guy over at Rope of Silicon was saying "duh." Well yeah, "duh"—it's the same thing as Meryl Streep getting an Oscar nomination! Uwe Boll is just as shitty a director as Meryl Streep is a terrific actress. They're kind of mirrors of one another, and nobody attacks the Academy for nominating Meryl Streep. Uwe's Boll's Postal...if you've seen it, you have my sympathies. I actually have, and it's right up there with Freddy Got Fingered as just an inexcusable, tasteless, unfunny, "why did anyone give this person money" movie. And Freddy Got Fingered is the only Worst Picture winner that I've actually hated.

Has there ever been any overlap with Oscar bait? One of our editors suggested Revolutionary Road this year...
Three times, I believe, the exact same thing has been nominated for a Razzie and an Oscar. And in all three cases, it didn't win either. The best known one is probably Amy Irving as Barbra Streisand's wife in Yentl, who was nominated as both Best and Worst Supporting Actress. I'm trying to remember if the song from Con Air, "How Do I Live," that also may have been nominated for both.

Well there are so many terrible Oscar-nominated songs! That's probably the category that deserves the most overlap.
We actually had a Worst Song category for years, and we had a lot of fun with it. Generally speaking, though, if a song gets a Razzie nomination it's probably one that won't get played a lot on the radio. Although I guess "I Want Your Sex" from Beverly Hills Cop II did win a Razzie!

So what do you think are the top frontrunners this year?
I don't think I agree with our members or the public about The Love Guru. I thought that it was stupid, but I didn't find it offensive. Still, it looks like it has the inside track to get nominated all over the place. I know that when this list went viral yesterday, a lot of the public was disturbed that we had bothered to nominate Rambo. Personally, I think Rambo was a violent, pointless, ill-conceived, badly-written, horribly-acted, badly-edited piece of crap.

Tell us how you really feel!
Eddie Murphy has the highest-profile box office bomb of the year in Meet Dave. I will be curious to see how many nominations—not if it will get nominated, but how many—it will get. He swept three characters at last year's awards, so I'm sure he'll end up with some. The one I'm hoping gets a lot of nominations is Postal. The real enigma about Uwe Boll is not why he exists but why he continues to make movies! Who needs the tax loss so bad that they can spend $50 or $60 million on these movies? I can't wrap my head around it.

Are we going to see any love for M. Night Shyamalan this year?
It looks like it has the possibility, but if there's anything he's learned from the multiple Razzies that Lady in the Water won years ago, it's that casting yourself as a Jesus-like character in your own movie doesn't go over well. At least he isn't in The Happening. That was one that was a lot of fun to see with people when it first opened, because the audience doesn't know you're going to find out that it's bush—but not the President!—that's responsible for Armageddon. That twist he does in all his movies was particularly dunderheaded in this one. And I'm normally an admirer of Betty Buckley, but of all the elements in this movie that I hope get nominated, Betty Buckley as a crazy old lady who crashes her head through a window and screams at Mark Wahlberg is high on my list. That definitely deserves some attention from us!

PREVIOUSLY: Razzie Nominations Serve A Shocking Snub To 'The Spirit'

So Bad it's Good: The Spirit (Dec. 25). Perhaps it's best to know as little as possible going into this adaptation of Will Eisner's classic 1940s comic series, written and directed by Eisner acolyte Frank Miller in the arresting visual style of his debut (with Robert Rodriguez) Sin City. But the silhouettes, snow and sooty (if green-screened) Central City backdrops are less-convincing a reason to have a look than the gleeful pageantry of Miller's bad taste: The Spirit (Gabriel Macht), essentially a zombie cop turned oversexed masked-vigilante enforcer, introduces himself by way of an epic fight with equally unkillable Central City crime lord The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson). Mud is thrown, balls are crushed, toilets are slammed, and expectations are dashed. "This," you should expect to mutter to yourself and/or your incredulous date, "is fucking terrible."

Well, kind of. Your first impression — that Miller has no idea what he's doing — eventually surrenders to an intrigue with what he'll do next. Will Scarlett Johansson put her beguiling badness to work as Octopus right-hand Silken Floss, or simply stand around like a line-reading cleavage prop? Will Eva Mendes (as jewel thief Sand Saref) test the PG-13 rating with her de rigeur gratuitous nudity? Will doctor Sarah Paulson ever tire of her male-slut superhero crush? Will Jackson's fat, annoying cloned henchmen ever shut up? And is that actually Sam Jackson up there in Nazi regalia, shouting about eggs?

By the time Miller answers most of these questions, you're already barreling toward The Spirit's climax — a convergence of the hero, villain and their intimates for a hyper-violent This is Your Life variant for the soul of Central City. With spectacle to spare and absolutely no interest in Iron Man's optimism, The Incredible Hulk's self-seriousness or The Dark Knight's social criticism, The Spirit instead emerges as the comics genre's semi-lucid inbred cousin. Hating this movie would be like booing at the Special Olympics.

So Bad it's Bad: Seven Pounds (now playing). At some point one might expect an ebb to the extraordinary critical tsunami that helped devastate Will Smith's morality play. Or at least a backlash of some kind, anything pledging some redeemability to the story of a purported IRS agent making a set of mysterious rounds to help an ensemble of sick, blind and otherwise downtrodden strangers.

Alas, we won't be the ones inaugurating that movement. Seven Pounds is everything its detractors say, with baffling plot contrivances and dramatic ineptitude compounded by the cardinal sin of utter boredom. As Smith's mission crystallizes and his motivations surface — in a twist so random it really does defy spoiling here — the likelihood of any emotional payoff diminishes behind the vast horizon of its star's ego. We imagine Seven Pounds' final 40 minutes may someday acquire some esteem in the Cult-Classic Canon for its adroit interweaving of printing-press repair, bone-marrow transplants, bad sex and killer jellyfish. But for want of anything worthwhile preceding them, it begs the question: If Will Smith falls in the forest and the audience walked out around the one-hour mark, does he make a sound?

So Bad it's Ugly: Revolutionary Road (Dec. 25) . While novelist John Cheever traced the glide path of America's fall from post-WWII euphoria to disillusioned ennui, his contemporary Richard Yates was the black box that captured every primal, panicked cry in the seconds before the crash. Nearly 50 years on, Sam Mendes likely fancies himself to share a little of each man's qualities, with his decade's worth of moodily revisionist entries surveying suburbia (American Beauty), crime and the Depression (Road to Perdition), the first Iraq War (Jarhead) and now Revolutionary Road, Yates's debut novel about an idealistic young couple's suffocation in the Connecticut suburbs.

But Mendes crafted not so much an adaptation here as he did a stunt. It was one thing to reunite wife Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, tricking the Titanic generation into a bit of po-mo awards-season whiplash; it was another entirely to impose his semi-literate condescension on Frank and April Wheeler, Yates's doomed ad man and his housewife, whose shared yearning for a life beyond the social constraints of their titular street capsizes in devastating slow-motion. Their unraveling was a symbolic end to the optimism of Eisenhower's '50s, no less nightmarish for its yowling, virtually unprecedented depiction of complacency's costs. It created a stir that never altogether faded, influencing American Beauty itself and prompting no fewer than a dozen failed screen attempts before Mendes and Scott Rudin coaxed around $40 million of DreamWorks' money to smear their quasi-pedigreed patina over the Wheeler family's implosion.

It would have been bad enough with screenwriter Justin Haythe digesting Yates's piercing dialogue into compact, Oscar-clip-compatible bursts. It would have been bad enough with DiCaprio and Winslet, each miscast, delivering those bursts in furrow-browed, you-shout-now-I-shout order. It would have been bad enough with Michael Shannon dropping by as the neighbors' candid loony son, the Connecticut equivalent of Southern dramas' "magical Negro" whose cruelly omniscient nuggets coincide conveniently with key junctures of the Wheelers' dissolution.

But Revolutionary Road's real failure transcends tone-deafness. Here, Mendes actively perverts his source's vanguard qualities — grossly commodifying the Wheelers, fetishizing their anguish, and in fact reveling in the excruciating emotional turmoil that tormented Yates until his death in 1992. We knew Mendes was a bit of a serial masturbator, but a necrophiliac? Moreover, a cold-blooded cultural murderer? Quick — someone save Kate.

1. Yes Man - $18.16 million
It's rarer and rarer that we can call Jim Carrey the Biggest Star in the World, so let's savor this moment—granted a $10 million-lighter moment than we had predicted—and consider it a step in the right direction. Two years ago at this time, another forgettable Carrey comedy, Fun with Dick and Jane, opened to $4 million less, eventually earning $110.3 million domestically. With a little luck, this plucky little audience-pleaser could outdo even that, and before long Carrey will be rechristened Hollywood's Set-Terrorizing Jester King, urinating on child co-stars in improvised fits of actorly inspiration.

2. Seven Pounds - $16 million
As we had feared, Seven Pounds's challenging subject matter, and major newspaper reviews calling it the most "transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made," ultimately made it a hard sell. Still, some movies are just decades ahead of their time; something tells us that once society catches up to this rare Will Smith misfire, we'll realize just how in the dark ages Hollywood once was when it came to its big screen depictions of Jellyfish-Americans.

3. The Tale of Despereaux - $10.507 million
The CGI-shlock-making industry held its collective breath on the heels of Delgo's historic, Turds-font-popularizing box office flameout. But unlike that family film, audiences did not treat Despereaux screenings as if they were highly infectious, flesh-eating-contagion chambers, sparing this rodent fairy tale a place in the box office bed-shitting record books.

4. The Day the Earth Stood Still - $10.15 million
Plummeting 67% was this remake, largely accredited to poor word of mouth, as audiences who had hoped they'd be in store for some epic-scale sci-fi destruction instead wound up with two hours of Keanu Reeves on roller skates, sliding up to confused pedestrians and doing his best WALL-E impression.

5. Four Christmases - $7.745 million
This was it! The fourth Christmas. We pack this in the box now with the rest of those weird-smelling ornaments we made in the late '70s from that home-made dough recipe in the Zoom newsletter (are we dating ourselves?), and forget about it 'til next year.

• December 19–21, 2008 [Box Office Mojo]

Even the generally unflappable David Letterman seems to marvel at Smith's pseudogiddy range: the "Oh, a magazine photo of me" chuckle; the "What the fuck am I doing here" guffaw; the "I wasn't listening to your question" belly laugh; and other bought-and-paid for Celebrity Centre chestnuts.

Or, a little more optimistically, Smith was conditioning himself for his upcoming film It's Gonna Be Hot, which will reteam the Oscar nominee with his Seven Pounds director for the stirring true story of Arthur, a Port-au-Prince meteorologist whose hearty good humor and uncanny skill save thousands of underprivileged Haitians from the most scorching heat wave in a generation. Like Schindler's List, but with weather. Tell us we're wrong:

[Thanks to video whizzes Mike Byhoff and Josh Rachford for the editing.]

• The Late Show [CBS]

WHAT'S NEW: Warners, Sony and Universal are the first round of studios to drop what's left of their 2009 slates — not quite the grand finale any of them were looking for, if reviews and box-office forecasts are any indication. Yes Man and Seven Pounds will battle for the week's top spot, with Jim Carrey's comedy about a man who says "yes" to everything (including shagging Zooey Deschanal, despite himself, we're sure) favored to defeat Will Smith's suck-a-riffic Seven Pounds by less than a couple million dollars. We're calling Yes for $28.4 million versus Pounds' $26.7 million, thus ending Smith's No. 1-opening run dating back to 2002. Or maybe the sheer virtuosity of pans like A.O. Scott's or Scott Foundas's will compel more viewers than they alienate, like footage of the Hindenberg explosion or news reports coaxing spectators to the site of a uniquely spectacular train derailment.

Universal will open third with the animated mouse fable The Tale of Despereaux, which will benefit from a bit of adult/counterprogramming crossover to a take around $17.3 million. The art-house infantry is bringing up the rear, led in part by Paul Schrader and Jeff Goldblum's post-Holocaust curio Adam Resurrected, the Valerie Plame/Judy Miller dramatization Nothing But the Truth, and, all the way from France in its Oscar-qualifying run, the Cannes prize-winner The Class.

Also opening: The acclaimed, brutal Italian mob-novel adaptation Gomorrah; Bruce Campbell's misbegotten paean to himself, My Name is Bruce; John Leguizamo's working-class drama Where God Left His Shoes; the Southern-fried ensemble piece (led by William Hurt) The Yellow Handkerchief; and — ZOMG! — Uwe Boll's nasty Vietnam War venture Tunnel Rats.

THE BIG LOSER: Nothing opening this week will flop as mightily as, say, Delgo (what ever could?), but if Six Flags doesn't soon develop a Day the Earth Stood Still Hell Plunge — "the steepest drop of any film-themed thrill ride in America!" — to commemorate the film's 65% freefall in week two, we'll trademark that shit ourselves as the main attraction at Defamer Gardens.

THE UNDERDOG: Neither The Wrestler nor Mickey Rourke need our help to pull in about $260,000 in limited release this weekend, but listen: Like last week's recommendation of Gran Torino, our interest is in your total filmgoing satisfaction in the face of the Carrey/Smith threat. And The Wrestler is as good as you've heard (Kenneth Turan be damned): Rourke is a staggering screen hero in a season full of mere mortals, Marisa Tomei does some of the most dynamic clothes-optional work of her career, and Darren Aronofsky directs with purpose thought lost after the over-indulgence of The Fountain. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll cringe, you'll never handle a stapler the same way again. Increasingly this fall, we don't take that kind of magic for granted, and you shouldn't either.

FOR SHUT-INS: This week's new DVD's include your aunt's fourth most-requested holiday gift Mamma Mia!; the season's gag-gift sensation The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor; the HBO miniseries Generation Kill; and the Criterion edition of Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express. Spend wisely, and make your own sage recommendations below.

Rosario Dawson, meanwhile, came away from shooting the feature with some lingering questions of her own: particularly, doubts regarding her own desirability over co-star/CoS-dabbler Will Smith's seeming reluctance to dive into their scheduled love scenes. From LAT:

"Will wouldn't start kissing for weeks," she said, laughing. "It would be on the schedule, we'd have lights and everything set up, and he would end up being like, 'I'm not feeling it tonight. I don't think it's going to happen. Let's wait another week.' I was checking my breath, smelling myself, trying to see: 'Am I offending the man in some way?' "

"But we were talking about it from the beginning: He'd only done one other love scene, and that was with Jada [Pinkett Smith, his wife] in 'Ali.' I talked with Jada about it, and he asked if she could be there. It was a very, very endearing thing to see him be nervous."

It's sad that Dawson immediately pulled the old sexual-deficiency switcheroo of blaming herself, sulking back to her trailer worried that she may have put off her co-star with unpleasant body odors. Will is merely a consummate perfectionist—if one of cinema's more prudish leading men—and he was simply approaching the scenes from the truest place he could: by wooing his fictional lady with the same icked-out apprehension that greets her real-life counterpart whenever the Smiths get together for their monthly, Church-enforced conjugal visits.

• Rosario Dawson gets romantic in 'Seven Pounds' [LAT]

Well, for one, he's busy giving lots of that money away, and a hefty chunk is going to the Church of Scientology (of which he is most certainly not a member, OK?). Fox News breaks down the totals:

He also gave a combined $122,500 to the Church of Scientology, broken into these donations: $67,500 to the New York Rescue Workers Detoxication Fund, $50,000 to the group’s Celebrity Center in Hollywood and $5,000 to ABLE, another Scientology offshoot. Smith and his wife have also supported a private school called New Village Academy they opened this fall in suburban Los Angeles that uses Scientology learning concepts.

How psyched is the niacin industry right now? Considerably more psyched than Smith is, we'd wager; Variety didn't simply trash Seven Pounds, they actively called his sanity into question for making it:

Nor can it be said that Smith, whose most recent box office barn-burners, “I Am Legend” and “Hancock,” seemed consciously designed to set the star apart from the rest of humanity, shies away from the saintlike status conferred upon his character. Indeed, he embraces it in a way so convincing that it proves disturbing as an indication of how highly this or any momentarily anointed superstar may regard himself.

HAHAHAHAHA, Variety's Todd McCarthy. HAHAHAHAHA. Maybe you could use a little education, HAHAHA! Next time you've got the time, why don't you stop by Calabasas, where visiting professor Leah Remini is teaching a class on "Unlocking the Non-Critical Critic Inside You (What I Learned on the Summer Arc of Saved By The Bell)." SP's can audit for free!

• Will Smith Gives $1.3 Million to Charities [Fox News]

• Seven Pounds [Variety]

No one can be too sure for now, with the studio's review embargo firmly in place until Pounds' Dec. 19 release date and only the trailer to hint at the saccharine to come. But at least NY Post critic Lou Lumenick isn't waiting to hoard massive, steaming piles of rancor for opening day, teasing the film's big twist ending (which he actually gave away in a recent conversation with colleague Kyle Smith) and suggesting awards oversights are the least of Sony's problems with this one:

This diabetes-inducing reunion with director Gabriele Muccino (The Pursuit of Happyness) also didn't score any nods from the easily persuaded Broadcast Film Critics Association, not to mention any awards from the L.A. or New York film critics (there were lots of snickers when somebody jokingly nominated Smith at yesterday's NYFCC meeting, which gives you an idea of the critical reception Seven Pounds is likely to receive when it opens) [...]

I wasn't giving away anything that couldn't be deduced from looking at the trailers or a careful consideration of what the title Seven Pounds is actually referring to. Even with the world's biggest star, Seven Pounds is going to be a very tough sell without nominations or good reviews [...] and an ending ... well, I'll let you figure it out for yourself.

Well, let's see: Smith is a moody guy. Who lives by the ocean. And sits in cars a lot. And wants to help a few lucky, if infirm people, including a blind Woody Harrelson and comely Rosario Dawson. And he's giving stuff away, like belongings and money. So... he turns out to be the Publishers Clearing House Prize Van driver? We're stumped. Help us suss further in the comments, and thanks for nothing, Lumenick.

• No Awards Happyness for Smith, Sony Or 'Seven Hundred Pounds of Schmaltz' [NYP]

boomp3.com


While visiting his son, Connor, on the set of his first film Seven Pounds, Tom Cruise and the rest of the Cruise clan also celebrated Suri going without a baby bottle for two days. According to sources on the scene, Suri only displayed minor withdrawals symptoms, but Suri's mother, Katie, appeared to be showing all the signs of withdraw; Katie told friends on set that she's been having trouble sleeping lately. Cruise was all smiles and decided to reward Suri with a stuffed animal and told Suri that if she makes it a full month, she may get own helicopter.

[Photo Credit: X17]

The production is based at a house on Sierra Bonita, between Hollywood and Sunset boulevards, just three houses up from Graham's home, where she has lived since the mid-'80s....She doesn't like the fume-spewing trucks parked running in front of her house, where the production has placed portable toilets. She's not that keen on the planned night shoot that will go to 3 a.m., either, because it calls for bright lights, rain machines and Great Danes. [...]

Residents are grumbling, though, even though many work in the entertainment industry and are reluctant to speak out against a big star like Smith, the production companies (Overbrook and Escape Artists) and a studio (Columbia). They complained about noise and the loss of parking spaces, which force certain apartment residents to park at a nearby church and take a shuttle bus to their building.

The report goes on to note that Graham has since negotiated an "agreement" with the Seven Pounds production company, the terms of which she refuses to divulge. ("It's not about the money. It's about having the neighborhood stand up and say, 'This is too much.'") Her frustration is entirely understandable, perhaps only to those who have personally experienced the inconvenience of missing the once-per-evening St. Thomas the Apostle SuperShuttle, only to later find yourself doused by an artificial typhoon and attacked by Great Danes as you attempt to retrieve a Trader Joe's Fearless Flyer from your front porch.

[Photo Credit: THR]

• Neighborhood's head pounds from production [THR.com]

According to People, Connor went through the audition process just like every other nobody pounding the kid star pavement and, lo and behold, won the part of playing a young Will Smith in the film. We hate to play the cynical card here, but there is one giant elephant in that casting room. Seven Pounds also stars he of the firmest buttocks in the land, Woody Harrelson, and internet TV star Rosario Dawson. So how did Connor, a kid whose acting experience has thus far been limited to pretending he loves his kooky dad, nail the part? Something tells us Cruise's all-powerful wizardly ways as gifted to him by the late King Hubbard, may include the ability to whisper evil nothings in Will's ear, leading to an instantaneous confirmation that Connor is The One. Call it a conspiracy theory, but we're just pondering out loud (well, pondering silently at our laptops, but you catch our drift).

• CONNOR CRUISE IS MAKING HIS BIG SCREEN DEBUT [People]