"Baby there's no other superstar you know that I'll be... ♫ "

Michelle Pfeiffer sightings are so rare these days that I have to share them every time (the last big day out was the White House Correspondents dinner in May of last year). Here she is at the Lady Gaga concert at Madison Square Garden yesterday. (I'm guessing she was on her way out because she's totally smiling and Gaga concerts are fun.) Which means she was right here in NYC last night. Wheeee.

They filmed that particular concert for HBO. She and David E Kelley were taking their kids Claudia Rose and John Henry who are now 17 and 16 respectively. This is all an effort to make me feel old since I still remember the first photo I ever saw of Claudia Rose, her daughter, (who turns 18 very shortly), which happens to be my favorite paparazzi photo of Michelle  since she looked ridiculously happy. I'm sure she didn't like the intrusion of the cameras though since Pfeiffer is not a Fame Monster. She once told Rolling Stone.

I act for free, but I demand a huge salary as compensation for all the annoyance of being a public personality. In that sense, I earn every dime I make.

What does Pfeiffer make of Lady Gaga and her ilk, the celebrities who LIVE for their own celebrity? Different times. Different breeds of stars. When Lady Gaga was born (1986), Michelle was probably filming The Witches of Eastwick! Bye Jack. Now Gaga is the horned one.

What do you suppose La Pfeiff's favorite Gaga song is?

Curio: Oscar Minimalism

Alexa here.  In the weeks since the Oscar nominees were announced, graphic artists have been busy designing alternative posters for the best picture contenders, and I've been busy bookmarking.  But this week, with all the competing films floating in my head, I'm especially fond of designs that manage to strip a film down to a single, representative image. David Lopez took it upon himself to design a poster for each of the nominated films by doing just that.  His poster for The Fighter is especially effective, but I do wish he could have included the full title in more of his designs.

More Minimalist Beauties after the jump

Click to read more ...

Supporting Actress (and Mothers & Sons)

It occurred to me when completing the Best Supporting Actress page -- now with "How'd they get nominated?" theorizing, Polls and Trivia -- that "The Wisdom of Crowds" might be in order for this category in terms of predictions. It's the only category that seems ripe for an upset, given both the nature of the category (the most frequently upsettable as it were) and the unfortunate turning of the tide against Melissa Leo. I say unfortunate because I think that Melissa Leo is absolute aces in The Fighter and far less deserving performances win Oscars every year! She'd be my personal winner in a year that didn't contain something as untoppable as Jacki Weaver's "Smurf" my first pencilled in candidate for Best of the Decade in 2020 when we pretend that the Oscars are only held once a decade.

So humor me by voting on this poll and explain yourself in the comments. Who IS going to win? Also make sure to vote on each of the categories for your "should win" on the Oscar pages

poll by twiigs.com

You know you want to.

It feels like a nailbiter as we just discussed on the podcast. I'm still leaning towards thinking that Leo is going to pull off the win, given that I think her competitors are probably too strong across the board to steal all the NOT LEO votes for themselves.

But while researching this category, I realized that if Bale and Leo both win for The Fighter, it'll be the first time since Holly Hunter & Anna Paquin in The Piano (1993) that actors playing immediate blood relatives have both won. But what of Mothers & Sons? It turns out there aren't very many of them that are ever nominated.

Ordinary People (1980) and My Left Foot (1989)

Past 50 Years of Mother & Son Oscar Combos - wins?
Melissa Leo and Christian Bale in The Fighter (2010) -we shall see
Julianne Moore and Ed Harris in The Hours (2002) -neither won
Toni Collette and Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense (1999) - neither won
Kate Nelligan & Nick Nolte in The Prince of Tides (1991) - neither won
Brenda Ficker and Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot (1989) -WINNERS!
Jessica Tandy and Dan Ackroyd in Driving Miss Daisy (1989) - only the mom
Mary Tyler Moore and Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People (1980) -only the son
Meryl Streep and Justin Henry in Kramer Vs. Kramer (1979) -only the mom
Gladys Cooper and Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady (1964) - only the son
Thelma Ritter and Burt Lancaster in The Bird Man of Alcatraz (1962) -neither won

I think I've accounted for all of them. Are you fond of these pairings? Do you think we'll have another (fictional) mother & son set on Sunday night?

p.s. the SUPPORTING ACTOR Page is also updated

Lypsinka Linka

Fandor a preview of a conversation between Nick and I. This is Nick's brilliant observation that 2009 and 2010's best picture lineups have more than a little in common.
Cinematical Did you hear about this shooting at a Black Swan screening. I'm still confused about what actually happened given the way these posts are written and updated.
Scott Feinberg "Deep Vote" reveals his final Oscar ballot
Black Voices 20 Questions for Anika Noni Rose. Turns out she's really fond of the movie Mother & Child. And really glad to have been Disney's first black princess and loves the fan response.

I actually got a video from a little boy. He was three and he was bouncing on his bed singing 'All The Stars Up There' and telling his mommy, "She is my favorite princess. I'm going to marry her."

Let's wrap up.

I am a huge fan of Lypsinka and I kept meaning to mention her in connection with Black Swan. So it was really fun to read The Daily Beast's interview with John Epperson (aka Lypsinka's "hideous maid") who plays "Jaded Piano Player" in Darren Aronofsky's Best Picture nominee. Seeing Lypsinka live is SO incredible. If you ever see an advertisement for a Lypsinka show in your city you'd be wise to buy tickets. The amount of sheer mnemonic and physical skill required for her act is unreal. Imagine memorizing hours worth of dialogue that's totally unconnected to context and schizophrenically shoved together. Here's a sampling of her inimitable way with Old Hollywood sound clips.

One of my many dreams in life is to host fabulous A list Oscar parties in which I could enlist true Divas to perform. Imagine Lypsinka doing a delicious glamour-fit mix of all the diva lines (and there are lots of them this year) from Black Swan, Animal Kingdom and The Fighter! "You've done some bad things Sweetie!"

Desperately Seeking Good Movie Posters

For all of you 80s film buffs, movie poster enthusiasts and/or Madonna fanatics out there, My Life as a Blog has a terrific behind the scenes retrospective of the making of the Desperately Seeking Susan poster. From someone who was directly involved at that.

Movie fanatics often like to bitch about the lack of illustration and graphic design in today's movie posters but even the photography-based movie posters, rarely are pulled from photo-shoots these days. They just do quick slapdash photoshopping of different images of the actors or blow up their faces from stills and work around that.

It's so depressing. Especially when a movie poster that's illustrated or photographed separately merely using the movie as inspiration can be so iconic and worth loving apart from the movie they're attached to.

I Could Go On Bitching.

Reid writes...

Nowadays photo shoots like these are a big deal, with limos for talent, and a gaggle of publicists and studio executives, but the only people from the movie were me and the wardrobe supervisor Melissa Stanton (who brought the jackets, costumes and accessories), Herb’s crew, and Madonna and Rosanna, who cabbed over themselves. [Why am I so sure they didn’t get cars? Because afterwards Madonna complained that she couldn’t take the subway anymore. She had only recently reached the level of fame where people hassled her on the trains...]

I've always really loved this poster and it's hilarious to read that studio executives were worried that people would think it was a lesbian movie. GASP.

Rosanna and Madonna had a peculiar relationship. On one hand they were friends and even hung out together outside of work, but on another… Madonna had a way of sucking all the air out of the room. It’s my understanding that the movie was greenlit because Rosanna, red-hot after “The Executioner’s Song” and “Baby, It’s You,” had agreed to be in it. Rosanna was unquestionably the lead and worked practically every day, while Madonna’s role was much smaller in terms of actual scenes. But there was no denying that Madonna was Madonna and she was “Susan,” in a movie called “Desperately Seeking Susan.” Once, when somebody on the street asked who was in the film, I heard Rosanna say, “Madonna.”

Madonna sounds incredibly bitchy in this article (as she often does in such anecdotal evidence) but I love her all the same. She's like an inextracticble  part of my soul.