Thursday, December 2, 2010

THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT! Although the eternal child Bart Simpson was EW's first Entertainer of the Year back in 1990, this year's Entertainer of the Year is Taylor Swift--the youngest real person to ever obtain the title--and in my view, it's certainly a defensible choice, given that she's had achievements in music (the armload of Grammys, Speak Now), film (Valentine's Day, which wasn't terribly good, but I found her hyperactive performance interesting), and TV (hosting SNL surprisingly well) over the course of the year. Unsurprisingly, the comments at EW are ablaze with how this is horrible, with folks arguing for (among others) James Franco and Jon Hamm. Make your arguments.

17 comments:

  1. Alternate winners:

    Cast of Glee
    The Animators -- or, hell, just John Lasseter
    Jay-Z/Eminem
    Cast of Lost
    Anne Hathaway

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  2. Joseph J. Finn11:51 AM

    Does John Lasseter have an equivalant counterpart at Dreamworks? If so, the two of them would certainly be a fine choice.

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  3. FWIW, people with two or more movies in the Top 25 grossers so far this year:

    Hathaway (Alice in Wonderland, Valentine's Day)
    Taylor Lautner (Eclipse, Valentine's Day)
    Steve Carell (Despicable Me, Date Night)
    Tina Fey (Megamind, Date Night)
    Will Ferrell (Megamind, The Other Guys)
    Mark Wahlberg (The Other Guys, Date Night)
    Leonardo DiCaprio (Inception, Shutter Island)

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  4. Anonymous12:44 PM

    Taylor Swift seemed like an odd pick to me. Granted, her album's huge sales in the latter part of the year certainly made her a candidate, but what did she do in the first nine or 10 months of the year? I actually thought she was a much stronger contender for 2009, when she was on the radio all year long with her assembly line of singles from the Fearless album. I suppose she becomes a much more sensible choice if you include all the Grammys she won in February, but I again consider that to be based on achievements from 2009.

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  5. StvMg1:38 PM

    Oops. That comment was from me.

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  6. Also, they're starting to disclose the rest of the Top 15--Jon Hamm, Jane Lynch and "Team Glee" (which I assume includes specifically Ryan Murphy), the kids from "Modern Family," James Franco, and Katy Perry.

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  7. Genevieve2:34 PM

    Big thumbs up for kids for Modern Family and for Team Glee.

    What day does EW usually show up in stores?  All during our Thanksgiving weekend trip, I kept stopping into CVSs and gas station stores and other purveyors of magazines, thinking I would pick up an EW along with the other necessities, but I never saw one.

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  8. Normally, it's a Friday street date.  Of late, though, the print magazine has started showing up in my mailbox on Thursday, and last week's issue showed on Wednesday.

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  9. I like all of Adam's choices better than EW's. I can not get past TS's terrible performance with Stevie Nicks. It hurt my ears.

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  10. sconstant3:51 PM

    My issue arrived today.  Didn't realize this was special.  The list is TS, Jon Hamm, Kanye, Chris Nolan, Modern Family kids, Social Network cast, Lady Gaga, James Franco, Katy Perry, Stieg Larsson, Team Glee, Ben Affleck, Suzanne Collins, male cast of The Good Wife, and Will and Jada's kids.

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  11. sconstant4:02 PM

    The Gaga spread is cute.  The cover shot of Taylor Swift is airbrushed right into the uncanny valley, imho.

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  12. sconstant4:05 PM

    The issue has that multiple cover thing, just rip off the first two pages and you'll have that cover.  (But make sure you have tape, so you can reattach Bullseye after you do.)

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  13. randy4:20 PM

    Wow, re street dates.  When I lived in Toronto, I could pretty much guarantee that it would appear on Friday, at a handful of newsstands at least (and about 50% of the time in my mailbox).  But now that I live in Calgary, it would only show up in my mailbox (and on newsstands, too) on the following following Tuesday, ELEVEN DAYS LATER.  So, I just let my subscription expire and just read the stuff I want on the website.  And it's not like Calgary's some small isolated town only accessible by dogsled!!  Seriously, eleven days later -- for a WEEKLY magazine, that's a little much!!

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  14. Jeff Katzenberg is its CEO, and Train Your Dragon/Megamind/Shrek 24 is a nice year.

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  15. Joseph J. Finn4:35 PM

    I guess that's about as close as you can get, but I was thinking a more artistic head.

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  16. I predict 2011's winner will be Miley Cyrus' ladybits. Seems like there's zero chance we won't be seeing quite a bit of them now that she's eighteen and has a compulsion to shoot herself with her celphone's camera in front of hotel bathroom mirrors...

    I think 2010's winner should be Mark Zuckerburg. 2010 was a watershed year for Facebook, and that stupid movie, rather than turning him into a pariah, seems to have broken him out of his shell, and has turned him into a sort of 'every-geek' ultra-rich folk hero of sorts.

    Also, social media's impact on entertainment is profoundly more pronounced at the end of 2010 than it was at the end of 2009, so as a way to represent that change, he seems like a good enough figure.

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