Hollywood's top 25 sexiest women of all time

Recently, I was channel surfing and came across an absolutely preposterous & absurd program called "Hollywood's Top 25 Sexist Women of All-Time". Why was it absurd? The following grand dames of Hollywood were all listed outside the Top 12:

1. Lauren Bacall
2. Eva Gardner
3. Katherine Hepburn
4. Ingrid Bergman
5. Grace Kelly
   

At the same time, the following contemporary dames were ranked inside the top 10:

1. Angelina Jollie #2
2. Halley Berry #3
3. Julia Roberts #5
4. Jessica Alba #8
5. Michelle Pfifer
   

If you have seen a dozen photos of these women, let alone film, you have to laugh out loud. I want to go on the record and tell you that Angelina Jollie can't carry the jockstrap on any of the old dames on the upper list. There is no woman in Hollywood today who can compare to any of the classic stars I listed above. If there was even one Lauren Bacall--let alone an Eva Gardner--in Hollywood today, L.A. County would be crushed by a billion stalkers.

It is a total wipe-out in favor of the classics. Everybody knows that one of the most lamentable aspects of Hollywood in the past 20 or 30 years is that it has not produced the kind of absolute bombshells we saw in the 30s-50s. They haven't even gotten close.

Before you call me curmudgeon, understand I that I was born in 1966. All of these classic dames of Hollywood were already in their 50s and 60s by the time I was 10 years old. Most were dead of old age by the time I turned 30. These were not the contemporary stars I grew up with. No, Pfifer, Bullock, and Roberts were. I always knew they couldn't hang with the classics.

So why did TV Guide produce such a preposterous list? How could these gurus think or utter such nonsense, much less broadcast it on their own network? TV Guide is part of the Hollywood marketing force. They make money by marketing for Hollywood. As Hollywood makes money, they make money. They have a vested interest in telling you that the stars today are greater than the stars of yesteryear. Right now is the moment. Hollywood has never been better than it is today. The women today are much hotter than the women of the past. Why? Because we need to recoup our investment dollars on recent production right now, that's why!

That's like arguing that Michael Jackson was innocent of child molestation because you would like to make money selling his next album. There are about 10,000 logical fallacies in there.

When you think about it, tho, how much different is the policy of the NFL Marketing department on Park Avenue? I personally thought it was absurd when marketing forces inside the NFL began to propound that Joe Montana was better than Johnny U. So did Dan Fouts. Now that Joe is fading into the distant fog of the past, there is now a new drum-beat coming out of Park Avenue. Peyton Manning is the greatest QB of all time. This will accelerate dramatically if the Colts win SB44, and if Manning has a big day.

Now I happen to think Manning is a lot better than Montana, and I have seen both of their careers in their entirety. I am not sure Manning is better than Unitas. I think Manning would go easy on that as well. In fact he did precisely that recently when he busted up a bunch of Unitas's records.

Just like Hollywood, the NFL has a vested interest in telling you that the greats today are the greatest greats that ever played. The stars of today would crush the stars of yesteryear. This is the magical moment when things have never been better. Ergo, you should pay diligent attention to the present moment, and appreciate this greatness.

While I am all in favor of living in the present moment, but be careful of the marketing crap. There is a great deal of bullshit in the marketing. Buyer beware!

Ain't Nobody Gonna Say Hooray for Hollywood this year.

The Motion Picture Academy has completely lost touch with the sensibilities of the common man, and they have become totally locked away in a pseudo-artistic Ivory Tower. The is a dangerous cleavage (and I am not talking about the fake tits on the red carpet) which is damaging the so-called Female Super Bowl. The Oscar broadcast is often called the Female Super Bowl because--at least in times past--the ratings were gianormous and the price of advertising during the broadcast was ungodly.

Now I am looking at the list of highly nominated films, and I see the weakest field I have ever seen. Hardly an entertaining or memorable movie in the lot of them. This field sucks.

This former institution is diminishing rapidly, and it is all because of one thing: The Academy has gotten locked in an artistic ivory tower, and they have lost touch with the people. So why is this true?

• One Oscar boss observed "This ain't the people's choice awards." He is certainly right about that... and it's not a good thing.
  
• There is now a describable type of film that can be nominated for and win an Oscar. These films are usually off-beat and on bizarre subjects. Frequently, they challenge common morality. The are loosely typed as "Prestige Pictures".
• Prestige Pictures suck: They are almost never entertaining. They usually don't make money. Rubbish like American Beauty, The English Patient, Million Dollar Baby and Crash are already well forgotten. I never liked any of these films in the first place, and I would not have voted for them.
  
• The big studios aren't supporting prestige pictures anymore: The hardened pragmatist inside the 5 major studios wonders why the firm wastes big money on movies that win Oscar gold but don't entertain or make money. They aren't even remembered well in retrospect. The result is that movies like The Wrestler, and Milk have been put out in extremely limited release. The studios know full well that these movies won't make money, even if they win the gold. The consequence is that very few people have seen these highly nominated films, and very few ever will.
  
• You can't predict victory: Odd ball movies frequently walk off with the title. How about last year's winner No Country for Old Men? That was an odd victory. A studio in financial trouble like Paramount may intentionally engineer a film like Benjamin Button with the objective of winning Oscar gold, but this is no recipe for making money or getting out of financial trouble. Further, Paramount is not guaranteed to win an Oscar this weekend. It could well be Slumdog Millionaire.
  
• When you nominate Milk instead of Wall-e, you have committed both an artistic and a marketing blunder. Milk has less than 2% of the artistic merit of Wall-e, and it has 1.0e-23% of it's long-term commercial value in terms of residual income. Wall-e will be popular for the next 50 to 75 years. Milk will be totally forgotten in the next 2 or 3 weeks.
• On the 2/20/2009 edition of All Things Considered, NPR's evening news broadcast, film critic Bob Mudello openly declared that if the Academy wants to reverse the negative slide in Oscar ratings, they are going to have to start nominating movies like Wall-e and the Dark Knight. You can listen to that audio HERE. Nominating these films would drastically increase the number of people who had seen one of the nominated films, and give the people a sense that they have a dog in this fight to cheer for.
• Speaking of not seeing any of the Oscar nominated films. MarketWatch.com printed a very nice piece in which they showed that the films nominated for Best Picture have the lowest combined box office total in the 81 year history of the Oscars. This is the pure effect Ivory Tower made manifest in dollars and cents. People don't like the shit that has been nominated. They won't pay money to see it, regardless of what the critics and the Academy says. You can read that story HERE.
  

So what have we learned?

1. Prestige pictures suck
2. The studios know it.
3. The people won't buy tickets for that crap.
4. The studios won't market that crap
5. The Academy nominates these crappy pseudo artistic, pseudo important, pseudo intelectual films and gives them the gold
6. Ergo the rating of the Female Super Bowl are sliding.
7. A lot of women are just going to watch for the fashion show.