Rapper-actor 50 Cent Becomes More "Actor"
50 Cent continues to earn the "actor" part of his "rapper-actor" moniker. The Hurt Locker wins a bunch of non-Oscar awards. Shutter Island wins the weekend. Betty White might host SNL. The Roundup cares about hockey. Do you?
•Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson is pretty much retired from the rap "game". Now he is an actor. His next project is Things Fall Apart, a film about "a star football running back, played by Jackson, who faces a personal tragedy as well as his own mortality while in his senior year in college." Fiddy wrote the screenplay with Brian Miller and is financing the project via his Cheetah Vision Films. Next up: adapting Vitamin Water into a five-part HBO miniseries. [Variety]
•The Hurt Locker got some awards loving from two acronymical film organizations. At the WGA awards on Saturday, Locker writer Mark Boal won best original screenplay. (Up in the Air won best adapted screenplay.) At the British Academy of Film and Telvision Arts (BAFTA) awards, Hurt Locker won big: Kathryn Bigelow won best director, and the film won best film, best original screenplay, best cinematography, best sound and best editing. Avatar won just special effects and production design. But of course Brits are so much more sophisticated than us, so they would go with The Hurt Locker. (Not that James Cameron even cares about silly old awards.) [THR][THR]
•Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese have still, collectively, got it. Shutter Island opened to a $40.2M weekend. As Deadline explains, this strong opening makes moving the film from a late 2009 to a 2010 release look smart. Meanwhile, Valentine's Day Percy Jackson and the Olympicans and The Wolfman all experienced declines greater than 50%. [Deadline]
•Betty White is having a moment, and it might be cemented with an SNL appearance. What started as a joke Facebook group to get the Golden Girl star on SNL has turned into a serious thing! According to Entertainment Weekly SNL is trying to put together a "women of comedy" epsisode that would feature White as well as, possibly, Molly Shannon, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. With enough members, Facebook groups can do anything. That's why gay marriage is legal in California. [EW]
•Good news: Will Arnett is working on a new pilot for Fox! According to Variety, the pilot "stars Arnett as a wealthy Beverly Hills man who winds up falling for a woman who can't stand his obnoxious ways." Arnett of course was on Arrested Development and he's working on the pilot with two Arrested. writers Make this a reality, television gods, and you may be forgiven for cancelling Arrested in the first place. [Variety]
•Olympics coverage continues to get good ratings, no matter how much people think NBC is screwing it up. On Thursday, the antics of men's figure skating drew 25.3 million viewers. [Variety]