Some Came Linking

Vulture dreams up sequels for The Fault In Our Stars. We'll obviously take the Laura Dern one
The Awl "The Tortured History of Entertainment Weekly" - god I was so in love with that magazine when it debuted in the 1990s. The first issue I remember buying was #5 with Jamie Lee Curtis on the cover for Kathryn Bigelow's Blue Steel
Pixar Times Pixar teases the first five minutes of Inside Out their June 2015 release
Theater Mania Laura Benanti auditions for Peter Pan Live! 

Boy Culture RIP supporting actress Martha Hyer, Oscar-nominated for Some Came Running (1958) 
Kenneth in the (212) teases a new stage production with the music of the The Go-Gos?
Comics Alliance a giant statue of Spider-Man in Korea is causing a stir thanks to its Spider-Manhood
Empire there's a new trailer for The Boxtrolls
Variety expects crazy ladies to dominate the Guest Actress race at the Emmys 
THR has a lengthy cover story on the suicide of the director of Searching For Sugar Man 

Foreign Film Oscar Watch
The Great Beauty, Italy's Oscar winner just lost its home-field Oscar race to a film called Human Capital which also won three acting gongs. Human Capital wasn't eligible for submission by Italy last year (since it hadn't yet opened by the cutoff date) so it could well be Italy's submission this year.

P.S.
I'm not sure how I missed this excellent interview with Lori Petty over at The Daily Beast on Sunday but it's a must read if you have any affection at all for Lori or the 1990s when she just kept doing her inimitable thing all over now classic movies like A League of Their Own, Point Break, and... well, the interview weirdly neglects Tank Girl but what can you do? She talks working with Jodie Foster, Madonna, discovering Jennifer Lawrence and how she got her cameo part in Orange is the New Black despite definitely being off the radar in recent years. 

Lori Petty & Naomi Watts in Tank Girl (1995)

Why do you think the roles started drying up after Tank Girl?

Well, because I was thirty-something and I hadn’t married my agent, married any guy co-stars, or gotten fake titties or Botox. I never wanted to be a bombshell; I wanted to be an actor. I would much prefer to be a woman than a man, but if I was a dude, maybe I’d have Johnny Depp’s island because women in this industry after a certain age definitely don’t get to do Pirates of the Caribbean. Poor Keira [Knightley], they even airbrushed huge tits on her on the poster, and she’s flawless! I was trying to play football with a baseball, and you can’t really do that.

Beauty Break: Logan Lerman

When I met Logan Lerman in 2012 to talk Perks of Being a Wallflower and Noah (right here icymi) he was as nice as movie actors can get. We even strayed off topic quite a bit over coffee. I was eager to see what he'd do next but, I must confess, he seemed so young that I wasn't exactly thinking of him as a contender for leading gigs, just as a very promising actor. During my screening of Noah, my best friend (who is not at all into movies and had no idea who Lerman was) was all a-drooling and I felt weirdly protective. He's just a nice boy, put your tongue back in your mouth!

But, uh, I need to rethink. Lerman is now 22. This new spread in Interview magazine, to accompany an interview conducted by one of the young actor's idols Michael Shannon seems determined to update perceptions about his age and his romantic leading man potential in the wake of Noah.

More after the jump...

LERMAN: I'm in New York right now. I came out here for the photo shoot for this piece.
SHANNON: How many outfits did you put on?
LERMAN: Um ... there wasn't a lot of clothing involved.

Click to read more ...

"The Last Days of Mad Men" (I'll Just Be Over Here Crying)

In 17 days the final season of Mad Men begins. 

Time Magazine is already prepping us for the end though the final season will be annoyingly severed at the center and stretching well into 2015. We live in such extreme pop culture times, right? Movies and televison both are now in the habit of splitting endings into two parts. On the other side we have binge-watching. Sensible pacing, somewhere inbetween, may well soon be extinct. 

I'll just be over here in the corner crying when the show wraps up whenever it does. Generally speaking when a successful show wraps up we should be happy to say goodbye. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example, was part of my soul but it was time for Sunnydale to crater. Too many shows overstay their welcome (shows that maintain their quality past season 4 or 5 are as rare as unicorns) but Mad Men. Are you ready? I am not. Maybe by 2015?

Which shows were hardest for you to say goodbye to? 

Links & Ink

Awards Circuit is hosting a March Madness tournament featuring all the Best Actress winners ever - the games started yesterday
Rope of Silicon a special remix of "Hero": Mariah Carey feat. Matthew McConaughey
Daily News Cate Blanchett & Amy Adams went to a tattoo parlor together with their men in tow after the Oscars! I would never have predicted that for a double date between them, would you? The bandages indicate that at least Cate and Amy's man got tattooed.

D-Listed The gowns from the Vanity Fair party (I'm so far behind I'm still reading about Post-Oscar partying)
PopBytes sneak peak at Lindsay Lohan series on Oprah's channel (I forgot all about this!)
Hollywood Elsewhere blurry snapshots from the set of Warren Beatty's Hughes film 

<--- Variety Alfonso Cuarón on life post-Oscar. Um... it's been 72 hours! LOL. But we'll excuse it because isn't that cover image great?
The Cut Lupita Nyong'o breaking the mold of the "ingenue 'it' girl" as a dark skinned 31 year-old
Twitter... but apparently Christian Bale is not impressed?
EW why Vivienne Jolie-Pitt is in Maleficent
Pajiba on Anna Kendrick's Oscar weekend diary
Self Styled Siren interviews Mark Harris on his new book "Five Came Back" 
Defamer how much booze was consumed at Vanity Fair's Oscar party? Celebrate the excess. Hey, it's only once a year and it's all over. *sniffle*

A Well Preserved Beauty

This week's New Yorker cover by Barry Blitt

"Ready for His Closeup"

Who cares if Oscar has had work done? He's still a beauty.

I love the cover but Blitt's take, not so much (no surprise but I loathe the smugness people who don't watch the Oscars sometimes have about it... as if watching sports is some kind of civil disobedience. Ha! Sports... very inconoclastic, that. You've really shown society!) but I like Anthony Lane's column. He gets dinged by critics for valuing his wit above the cinema but he's still  a good read.

Oscar night is anxiety central: TV needs the stars to light up the ratings, and the stars, for their part, use TV to stage what is, in essence, a communal bath of self-love. “Just a small group getting together for a pat on the back,” in the words of Janet Gaynor, who won the first Oscar for Best Actress, in 1929. Since then, the pat has become a caress, and the caress has grown into the kind of activity that in “The Wolf of Wall Street” is reserved for yachts and jets.

Are you excited for the big night? I suddenly am after a week of the blahs. After the jump my two favorite New Yorker Oscar covers ever and they're both by the same artist.

Click to read more ...