Predicting...gossip and hype

There's a great editorial by Mark Harris in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly that skewers our good friends in Hell, er, Hollywood (and, uh, bloggers, too). Harris can sometimes be a little self-righteous for my taste, but this one was priceless, so I knew I had to share it. Among his hunches for what the 2008 summer movie season has in store:

A furious controversy will arise over whether Heath Ledger deserves a posthumous Best Supporting Actor nomination for The Dark Knight. This will begin when an anonymous informant on morbidlyobesefilmgeek.com pronounces Ledger's performance brilliant. Three days later a flurry of chat-room postings on iwannabefirst.com will say that Ledger's work is being overpraised. A week after that, a major film blogger will pronounce him a shoo-in for the Academy Award. A couple of days later another blogger will write that he senses that the movie is basically over and the public has rejected it. Three weeks after that, the movie will open.

Random proclamations of opinion treated as fact? We bloggers never do that. Harris goes on to talk about movie stars in general...or rather, the lack thereof:

There will be many, many dull discussions about how we are now living in the "post-movie star era." As you may recall, a recent TIME magazine cover story pronounced George Clooney ''The Last Movie Star.'' But that was before Leatherheads, so now, apparently, the species is completely extinct. [...] A great sorrow will hang over the industry, as executives throughout Los Angeles pray for someone to lead them out of the darkness while they stare with intense concentration at photographs of Will Smith. If the shortage persists, every TV actor between 17 and 45 will be hired to star in at least one movie, leading to 700 bad movies starring people who turn out not to be the next Katherine Heigl.

Every TV actor between 17 and 45? Sweet, I can't wait for the inevitable Rob Lowe/Jennifer Love Hewitt/Milo Ventimiglia disaster movie.

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