Mark Lisanti

An Alan Smithee Column

deep-inside-oscar_250.jpgNo shortage of ink, of both the virtual and finger-staining varieties, has been spilled discussing the Academy’s move to ten Best Picture nominees this year, a change that marks the first time since the wild, experimentation-happy period of 1932-1943 that we’ve had more than five films in contention for Hollywood’s most prized statuette. (One day, when the story of this paradigm-exploding Oscar season is written, the eureka moment when new AMPAS president Tom Sherak squealed, “Let’s nominate evvvverrrytthhhing!” to a mixture of thunderous applause and joyous weeping by the Academy’s inner circle, will be its most moving chapter.) As you probably know, the decision to double the Best Picture field has necessitated the adoption of a “preferential voting” system, a safeguard for avoiding a mathematical nightmare scenario in which so many contenders split the vote that the Oscar is handed over to a winner that’s earned a scandalously low percentage of check-marks. But how exactly does this preferential voting system work?, you are probably asking yourself, if you care way too much about how famous people are handed shiny trinkets. It sounds very complicated! Well, it is!

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An Alan Smithee Column

(SPOILER ALERT: If you didn’t watch the show last night, you are dead to us. Move along, move along!)

At the beginning of last night’s Lost: THE FINAL SEASON premiere, Juliet’s successful (ah, but was it?) detonation of the Jughead bomb cleaved our narrative in twain, setting the Lostaways loose in two separate timelines: the 2004 “flash-sideways” reality, in which Oceanic 815 lands safely in Los Angeles to allow everyone to carry on with their lives, and one that flung our characters forward to 2007, where they’re coping with a world in which twitchy physicist Daniel Faraday’s egg-headed plan to nuke the timestream back into alignment seems to have failed spectacularly. While it’s probably fair to assume that these two timelines will dovetail at some juncture over the coming 17 episodes, for now Jack, Sawyer, Hurley and the gang are carrying on along parallel paths, oblivious to the fortunes of their other-planed selves. Ahead, we take an inventory of where each of our players stands in each timeline, and try to evaluate which reality proves a better roll of Fate’s* Yahtzee dice. (*Old-fashioned Fate, not Man-in-Black-style fate. OR IS IT?)

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An Alan Smithee Column

Movieline Investigates: Why Did This Year's Grammys Do So Well?

Written by Mark Lisanti | 01 Feb 2010, 4:00 PM | 4 comments

Each year, we meet the Grammys with the kind of grudging obligation we usually reserve for medical check-ups: no, we don’t really want to bother, but we’ll show up because of the remote chance we might discover something interesting in a place where nothing interesting should be happening. And so on Sunday night, out of this sense of self-preserving curiosity, we flipped on the show (on a three-hour tape-delay; nice work, Recording Academy! Very brave of you to take a principled stand on the encroachment of technology and make half the country wait to see the things everyone was twittering/blogging/sexting about), blasted through several hours of the usual nonsense on the DVR, and then went to bed, assuming this show would at best mirror last year’s decent-but-not-great ratings performance. But imagine our surprise to wake today, the morning after the show had faded into nightmares in which Beyonce’s heavily armored, backup-dancing SWAT team invades our home to demand we immediately “put a ring on it,” to discover the telecast was nothing short of a Nielsen Bonanza™ for CBS, pulling in the best numbers in six years. How could this have happened? After the jump, we try to work through the mystery of the 52nd Grammys Awards’ sudden, blockbuster success:

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An Alan Smithee Column

We thought that Friday’s LiveTweet of Conan O’Brien’s final Tonight Show would be the last we’d need to worry about The Great Late Night Wars of 2010, really, we did. After the final bars of “Free Bird” faded out, we took off our foam CoCo wig, placed it on a high shelf, and were ready to move on with our lives. (Well, at least until O’Brien, rising like a phoenix that had just eaten a peacock whole and pooped out a pile of rainbow-colored ashes, alighted at Fox some seven months hence.) But: Leno. Here he comes again, offering us not even a week of peace, to give His Side of the Story on Oprah later today. The Chicago Tribune’s Mo Ryan has already heroically provided a transcript of Leno’s first stop on his damage control tour; after the jump, the choicest quotes from Leno’s effort to buff his irrevocably tarnished Nice Guy image before reassuming the Tonight Show throne in March:

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An Alan Smithee Column

jerseyvineyard.jpgA little while ago, my esteemed Movieline colleague Louis Virtel made the case that MTV’s The Jersey Shore should take the opportunity provided by a reported contractual standstill to jettison the cast and replace them with a new lineup, arguing that a fresh Guido infusion is necessary to save the show’s second season from repetition, disappointment and mediocrity. And to him I say: Whoa, pump the brakes, bro! (Then I pause, lift my shirt, and with a flourish of my hand across my stomach, warn, “We’ve got a situation right here,” before realizing that the presentation of a pasty, distended belly doesn’t do much for the thrust of my argument. Anyway.) Before we rashly abandon the pop-culture megastars MTV has worked so hard to cultivate, let’s offer up some ways that we can make Season Two work with the original cast intact. After the jump, some attempts to Save The Shore:

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An Alan Smithee Column

Bye Bye, Coco: Livetweeting The Final Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien

Written by Mark Lisanti | 22 Jan 2010, 8:30 PM | 1 comment

Join us, proudly ginger-pompadoured members of Team Coco, while we tweet away the pain as Conan O’Brien hosts his final Tonight Show. Hit the jump and enter the Cover It Live widget to follow along, chat-style:

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An Alan Smithee Column

The Super-Secret Conan O'Brien Exit Deal Points, Revealed!

Written by Mark Lisanti | 21 Jan 2010, 3:10 PM | 3 comments

topsecretconan1.jpgThe Great Late Night Wars of 2010 are over. They’re finally over. They. Are. Finally. Over. Pardon our weary overemphasis of this fact, but we were made a little anxious by the expectation that a statement would be issued on Tuesday, only to be made to wait an additional two days to get the closure we all so desperately craved. (Though part of us feared that NBC was going to opt for an unfortunate “We Have A Dream…That Jay Leno Is Returning To The Tonight Show; Conan Free At Last, Free At Last” announcement on MLK day, unable to avoid the self-destructive streak that got them into this mess.) But now, after those extra 48 or so hours of intense, acrimony-fueled lawyering, it’s all done, and we know that O’Brien’s free to chase his late-night dreams elsewhere, while Leno will soon regain his cherished gig putting the coveted Life-Alert demo to bed with a bowl of warm Headlines at 11:35 pm each night. So, you might be wondering, what were the big hold-ups in the annoyingly protracted negotiations? Through its usual channels*, Movieline has discovered the most contentious points in Conan’s exit deal, which, in the interest of finally putting this whole mess behind us, we present after the jump:

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An Alan Smithee Column

Leno vs. Conan: What We've Learned

Written by Mark Lisanti | 19 Jan 2010, 3:10 PM | 6 comments

Following Jay Leno’s much-anticipated statement on ConanGate (the real one, this time!) last night and the presumably imminent announcement that a deal has been reached to restore Leno to his now thoroughly tarnished Tonight Show throne and release O’Brien from his NBC captivity, it seems that we’ve finally reached the end of the Great Late Night Wars of 2010. As contractual gag-orders kick in and hostilities return to a low boil, the relative quiet of this post-armistice moment gives us a chance to reflect on the unfortunate events of this turbulent couple of weeks, when Conan emerged as our noble martyr, Leno a Machiavellian mastermind, and NBC boss Jeff Zucker a relentlessly upward-failing boob. After the jump, we try to make some sense of it all as we present What We’ve Learned from this fiasco:

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An Alan Smithee Column

l3noii.jpgSensing that he’s losing the late-night PR war — somehow, disingenuously joking about being “fired” by NBC when he stood to possibly regain both his old time-slot and Tonight Show desk hasn’t won many converts to his side — Jay Leno today responded to Conan O’Brien’s withering, fist-pumpingly received open letter to the People of Earth, hoping to persuade O’Brien partisans to cast aside their ginger-tinged bouffants of support in favor of a Team Leno chin-prosthetic. For reasons we can’t fully comprehend (did he sense a slight crack in our resolve?), Leno issued his statement exclusively!* to Movieline, which you can read in full after the jump:

*Please put on your 3-D glasses now and enjoy another fully immersive Movieline Fakery Experience™.

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An Alan Smithee Column

How To Deal With Simon Cowell's Departure from American Idol

Written by Mark Lisanti | 11 Jan 2010, 4:10 PM | 5 comments

Knowing what an emotionally devastating development Simon Cowell’s departure is for an Idol fanbase still reeling from the gut-punch of smothering, coherence-impaired den-mother Paula Abdul’s cruel banishment from karaoke Eden, Movieline would like to wrap its strong arms around the grieving and let them know that everything’s going to be all right, our whispered, calming assurances slowly halting their convulsive sobs. After the jump, our advice to those having difficulty coping with this most unpleasant news.

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