During his ordeal, he learned to dodge angry Los Angeles County Sheriff’s jailers and to trade with fellow prisoners for dried ramen toppings. He was helplessly trapped in a Kafka-esque corner of America’s immigration war, where he disappeared into the bowels of the system without explanation or apparent legal recourse.

In 2006, Roy was an up-and-coming star of the British independent-film community. His first picture, AKA, had received notice and awards around the world, and he followed the well-worn path to Hollywood in search of a bigger canvas — in particular, a film adaptation of The Picture ofDorian Gray, to which he was attached to direct. He purchased the Las Flores house with the help of his then-boyfriend, a Malibu real estate agent who later would be featured on Bravo‘s Million Dollar Listing.

Five years later, the dream had fizzled. The relationship with his partner had ended. TheDorian Gray film hadn’t materialized. Roy even sought counsel from Dr. Drew on his show Sex Rehab, where the director’s outspoken manner made him a reality-TV cause célèbre. A bout with cancer led to the removal of one of Roy’s testicles. With his visa due to expire in December 2011, he prepared a move to his apartment in Berlin.

But in Los Angeles, the most tangled dramas ultimately come back to real estate. Selling the house was proving thorny. Once it was on the market, geological issues arose, dramatically lowering its value. Then, Roy says, he received a middle-of-the-night phone call from someone claiming to be the geologist who had worked on the house’s assessment. He told Roy that he had been pressured to cover up problems in the foundation but, having become a born-again Christian, felt obliged to come clean.

George Clooney has lost Oscar races before. In the past decade, he’s been passed over four times (twice for Best Actor and once apiece for Best Director and Best Screenplay). While he has reigned atop the pyramid of Hollywood glamour as perhaps the most critically praised, most well-liked mainstream actor currently working, Clooney’s trophy case boasts a lone statuette in the leading man’s consolation prize category of Best Supporting Actor (for Syriana).

In his three decades of acting, Woody Harrelson has gleefully taken on the roles of serial killers, psychopathic zombie hunters, and criminally stupid bartenders, but in his 50th year of life, he finally took a role that forced him to exhibit his greatest demons: a uniformed officer of the LAPD.

Of all the wacky stories in this year’s Oscar race, perhaps none is more unlikely than the fact that America’s bard of nerddom, comedian Patton Oswalt, finds himself a very serious contender to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor—one of this year’s most competitive categories—for his role in Young Adult, the new film from the Juno duo, director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody. But after years of mocking Hollywood’s foibles as a stand-up, and leading a band of ill-shapen misfits from the sidelines, Oswalt, the cherub-faced comic, may very well have earned himself a seat at the Oscars ceremony against other possible contenders no less notable than Christopher Plummer, Max Von Sydow, Nick Nolte, Ben Kingsley, and Kenneth Branagh.

In May, an 84-second trailer of “Work It” hit the Internet, instantly attracting more blogger rage than most shows accumulate over the course of several seasons. Gobsmacked by the very fact that “This got made! And is going to series!”, The Futon Critic lambasted the show’s “limp attempts at misogyny,” “groan worthy madcappery” and “Mrs. Doubtfire hijinx.”

The Best Week Ever blog took special umbrage at the network’s attempt to position the series as “high concept”: “Holy moly, ABC. If you’re going to put a terrible show on the air, the least you could do is not try to make two bumbling fools dressed up like women for cheap laughs a ‘high concept’ in which the guys become moral compasses. It’s not the iconic Louie poker scene, for heavens sake.” The Dallas Transgender Activists Alliance launched a petition to keep “Work It” off the air, and a blogger for the Gay Voices section of The Huffington Post predicted that the series would face summary cancelation, “not because the content is offensive to queers, but because the show itself is just bad.” (ABC did not respond to requests for comment.)

(Read the rest at Huffington Post entertainment)

In enacting this vision, Cowell set himself in direct conflict with the show his electrifying presence had helped turn into a colossus. Two lawsuits, a prolonged negotiated peace, and a painful breakup with Idol later, The X Factor finally arrived on American airwaves Wednesday.

The talent-contest marketplace has gotten a lot more crowded, however. Once, Idol stood alone on American networks as the show that had managed to achieve major success. In the interim, the TV schedule has been flooded with musical competitions, from the dance genre—led by Dancing With the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance—to shows like Cowell’s own America’s Got Talent. Now the launch of X Factor comes not only three months after the mega-finale of Idol’s 10th season, but also after the conclusion of the first singing contest to give Idol a run for its money, Mark Burnett’s The Voice, which attracted very respectable numbers in its debut season on NBC.

Read the rest at The Daily Beast.

Sixty some years later, a panel of seemingly randomly selected comedians and tabloid fodder convened in a cavernous sound stage to rake over the coals a man known as America’s most horrific open wound with the Comedy Central Roast of Charlie Sheen, the latest installment of the network’s salute to the nation’s greatest train wrecks.

The spectacle descends from the Friars Club Roasts of old in the same way Jersey Shore descends from On the Waterfront; the setting may be similar, but all that’s missing from the original is every bit of its humanity. And therein lies the story of much of our culture during the past decades.

Read the rest at The Daily Beast

Looking back on the Matt Damon who stampeded onto the scene in 1997, there was little evidence to suggest the material of greatness. First appearing as half of a buddy act with fellow Bostonian Ben Affleck, the testosterone-fueled duo personified Hollywood’s cigar-lounge era. The image was capped by the pair’s fist-pumping Oscar-acceptance speech after winning the screenplay award for Good Will Hunting when Damon was the appalling age of 27.

But since that night, Damon has traveled almost in the exact opposite direction from the frat-boy trail, settling down to a series of non-showy, journeymen performances onscreen, and a reticence toward the spotlight offscreen that has, years later, transformed him into something no one could have foreseen: our most admirable of young actors.

Read the rest at The Daily Beast.

On and off for the past three decades, whatever the nation’s trials, we have been watched over from our multiplexes by a long line of caped champions, and in exchange, America consistently rewarded these crusaders with our allegiance in the form of untold box-office riches.

Since Christopher Reeve arrived as Superman in 1978, superhero films have become the nation’s onscreen superego, reflecting its changing zeitgeist, as they strode like a spandex-clad Goliath atop our blockbuster culture. This summer was to be the year when the genre swallowed the box office whole, with a new superhero mega-adaptation rolled out every third week.

But it’s not working out that way.

Six weeks and three men in tights into Blockbuster Season ‘11, America has met this year’s crop with, at best, muted enthusiasm and, more often, shrugs of indifference. Where the release of a new superhero film not long ago was the grandest (not to mention most grandiose) event on our cultural calendar, the successive releases suddenly feel routine, predictable, and oddly out of tune with the times.

Read the rest at The Daily Beast.

Throughout his career, America’s foremost filmmaker has allowed his native soil to be conquered — and reconquered — so many times that you’d think word would’ve gotten out across deep space that it’s not worth the trip.

But yet they keep coming.

This Sunday, the latest horde of marauding spacemen touches down in “Falling Skies,” an eight-part series executive-produced by Spielberg for TNT. Not all aliens have been equal in the Spielberg canon, however. His visitors have ranged from the cuddly (“ET,” “Gremlins”) to the serene (“Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Indiana Jones”), and from the robotic (“Transformers”) to the comical (“Men in Black”) to the slithering (“War of the Worlds”).

Read the rest right here.