Welcome to the O.C., baby!
Rachel Bilson and boyfriend Hayden Christensen welcomed a daughter on Oct. 29, the Associated Press confirms. The couple named the baby Briar Rose Christensen.
Bilson, who broke out on The O.C. and now stars in Hart of Dixie, met Christensen on the set of the 2008 film Jumper. Christensen is best know for his role as Anakin Skywalker (a.k.a. Darth Vader) in Star Wars Episodes II and III.
[AP]
On Wednesday, actress Gabrielle Union published an essay on Cosmopolitan.com about how it felt to have her personal photos hacked while she was on her honeymoon. Union was one of the victims of the massive photo hack in August that targeted stars like Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton.
Here’s what she said:
It felt like The Hunger Games: You’re waiting to be attacked. Friends are assuring you that this will pass and people will move on to the next thing. But in this case, the next thing means the next victim — the next woman to have her naked body exposed to strangers against her will. And the crowd in the arena is going wild. People are critiquing and judging, cheering for more. They’re shouting, “Next! Next!”
She also notes that she felt especially helpless because so many of the photos that surfaced had been deleted years ago. Unfortunately, it seems that the “delete” button is practically meaningless:
I felt extreme anxiety, a complete loss of control. I suddenly understood that deleting things means nothing. You think it’s gone? It’s not. What is the point of even including a delete function on a phone if it doesn’t really delete? I had deleted the photos from my phone, but apparently they had remained on some server somewhere, unbeknownst to me, where hackers could find them.
Union calls the hack a “new form of sexual abuse,” and declares that the “violation” is about control over her own body. “People sometimes argue: but you wear skimpy bikinis — what’s the difference? The difference is that you are the one who chooses whether to show your body,” she writes. “When billions of people on the Internet can see you naked without your consent, it’s a crime.”
MORE: How Nudity Became the New Normal
The actress also compared speaking publicly about the hacking incident to when she was raped as a college student, noting that she stood up for herself then by helping the rapist get prosecuted, and she will stand up for herself now. “I was raised to speak up,” she writes.
The Bring It On star also said she was surprised at the outpouring of support, sometimes from places she least expected. “In LA, the photographers were waiting, but not to attack: They actually high-fived me. ‘We’re on Team Gab,'” she writes. “When the paparazzi tell you something is bad, you know it’s really bad.”
He’s not a businessman. He’s a business, man.
Oh wait, actually he’s also a businessman.
Jay-Z has bought the Armand de Brignac champagne business for an undisclosed amount. The champagne is known as “Ace of Spades,” and is produced by eight people in the French town of Chigny-les-Roses, the BBC reports. It was featured in at least one Jay-Z music video and sells for $300 per bottle.
The 44-year-old rap mogul (and businessman) is known for his love of champagne. Jay-Z raps about the Ace of Spades brand in his song “On To The Next One:” “I used to drink Cristal, the muhf***ers racist, so I switched gold bottles on to that Spade sh**” Jay-Z raps. In the music video for the song, you can see the Ace of Spades champagne flash onscreen about one minute and 57 seconds in.
At a fundraiser Jay-Z held for President Barack Obama in 2012, he and his wife Beyonce Knowles reportedly displayed 350 bottles of the drink.
Jay-Z has an estimated net worth of $520 million, according to Forbes magazine, making him the third richest hip-hop star in the world. He has a clothing line, restaurants and a recording label.
There was a great wail on Twitter Wednesday morning, and it wasn’t about the midterm elections. It was because Benedict Cumberbatch, the hunky British star of Sherlock, got engaged to director and actress Sophie Hunter instead of you.
The same thing happened when George Clooney popped the question to human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin (although the shock was amplified due to element of surprise because the divorced bachelor had said he wouldn’t marry again). In both cases, there was a immediate gasp — and Twitter despair — followed by fawning over each woman’s considerable accomplishments.
And Sophie Hunter and Amal Alamuddin both have plenty to fawn over. Hunter is an actress (she and Cumberbatch met on the set of the 2009 film Burlesque Fairytales) but she’s better known as a theater director and playwright — she won the Samuel Beckett award for her play The Terrific Electric, and directed operas like The Magic Flute and The Rape of Lucretia. Amal Alamuddin is a well-respected international lawyer who has represented clients like Julian Assange, and specializes in human rights law. In other words, neither is a slouch.
But the initial “gasp” is more interesting. Why is everyone so shocked when movie stars marry non-movie stars? Especially when super-hot, eligible male celebrities marry non-famous women instead of fellow Hollywood royalty?
Because for that first moment, it feels like a modern Cinderella story, especially when the entire Internet is asking “Who’s That Girl?” like gossipy stepsisters at the ball. It’s part of the “beautiful princess plucked from obscurity” thing, an old-fashioned fantasy that manages to co-exist and survive even in a society that’s increasingly skeptical of all things pink and princess-y. The media called the Alamuddin-Clooney wedding a “fairytale,” and the very recent Hunter-Cumberbatch engagement has already taken on its own gauzy romantic aura. And in the 21st century, fame is royalty, so when a movie star pops the question to someone who’s not a red carpet fixture, it’s as shocking as a Prince going around touching people’s feet.
Really, we shouldn’t be surprised at all. All the data suggests that there’s nothing “magical” about either match, and that both actually have a fairly good chance of surviving. Marriages between mature, childless adults with equal status and similar educational backgrounds have the best chances of survival, as my colleague Belinda Luscombe recently pointed out in a piece about Clooney’s marriage. And it seems like the Cumberbatch-Hunter nuptials fit that very same bill.
Still, there’s an embarrassing amount of shock and awe when something like this happens. And if they had had Twitter in those fictional kingdoms once upon a time, there probably would have been a lot of tweets like these:
True, Benedict is dreamy, tall, and looks good in tweed, but this response seems a little extreme. That’s why I think there’s something else going on here: the jealousy isn’t because Cumberbatch is so British and hot, it’s rooted in the fact that Sophie Hunter is a mere mortal, a “civilian.” The same thing happened when George proposed to Amal and when Prince William proposed to Kate Middleton. As Fay Schopen wrote in an essay in The Guardian after Clooney’s engagement, “I, along with legions of others I am sure, have never been able to shake the idea that if Clooney and I happened to meet each other I’d be in with a chance.”
People are jealous because each of these super-eligible bachelors found someone who was “just like us” — but who was not, in fact, any of us. And the fact that we react this way when famous men marry regular women suggests we’re still enthralled by the old fairy-tale of a Prince picking a girl from the crowd and making her a Princess.
It’s also worth noting that there’s not often the same reaction when news breaks that a famous actor is simply dating someone who isn’t famous, like when Clooney dated former cocktail waitress Sarah Larson. It’s the engagement that causes a frenzy. That also ties into Prince Charming narrative — it’s not the love that matters, it’s the “happily ever after.”
So as much as we might think that the Prince Charming fantasy has been injured by feminism and killed by Tinder, he’s not really dead. He’s just back in the movies, which is probably where he belongs.
Lorde released the music video for Yellow Flicker Beat, a song that will appear in the latest installment of The Hunger Games series, on Thursday.
The 17-year-old singer, one of TIME‘s most influential teens of 2014, was selected to curate the soundtrack for Mockingjay: Part I, which hits theaters on Nov. 21. The soundtrack will also feature Tove Lo, CHVRCHES, the Chemical Brothers and even a Lorde remix by Kanye West.
Brad Paisley says that Carrie Underwood is having a baby boy.
Underwood, who is expecting her first child with husband Mike Fisher, appeared to reveal her baby’s sex in what was either a planned gag with CMAs co-host Paisley during their opening skit on Wednesday night or, well, Brad’s bad.
“We’re pregnant,” said Paisley, jovially cajoling Underwood to “please just tell me what we’re having,” reports People.
Underwood whispered something to Paisley, who delightedly boasted to the audience that he was in the know. Soon afterward, so too was the audience: “We could name him Garth,” Paisley suggested, referencing CMA presenter Garth Brooks.
“What are you doing?” said Underwood, “You kept that secret for a whole two minutes.”
Paisley later tweeted a selfie with grown-up Garth taken “just before I let the cat out of the bag” on “Lil’ Garth Fisher,” he said.
He hashtagged it “bradblewit.” Read more at People
AC/DC drummer Phil Rudd is set to appear before a New Zealand court on Thursday to face charges for attempting to procure a murder after being arrested earlier in the day by police, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.
During the raid on his home in New Zealand’s Tauranga city, the drummer was also found to be in possession of methamphetamine and cannabis.
Rudd’s arrest caps what has been a somber year for the iconic Australian hard rock outfit. In September, the family of Malcolm Young, who founded the band alongside his brother Angus, announced that he would be retiring from the group due to an ongoing battle with dementia.
AC/DC burst onto the international music scene in the mid-1970s with fist-pumping anthems like Highway to Hell and It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll). Ironically, the band scored one of their earliest hits with the title track from their third album Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap — an ode to vigilante justice.
The band is set to release a new album Rock or Bust in December.
Let’s go back to the infamous moment decades ago when Jayne Mansfield, in all of her womanly glory, sat next to then-rising Italian star Sophia Loren. The now 80-year-old Loren recently said she was afraid something was about to blow. That something was Mansfield’s low-cut dress.
Though the image has widely been accepted as photographic proof that shade has no start date, Loren says in recent interview with Entertainment Weekly that the look on her face is fear. Pure, unadulterated fear.
“Listen. Look at the picture,” Loren told EW. “Where are my eyes? I’m staring at her nipples because I am afraid they are about to come onto my plate. In my face you can see the fear. I’m so frightened that everything in her dress is going to blow—BOOM!—and spill all over the table.”
Read more at Entertainment Weekly.
Keira Knightley recently posed topless in Interview Magazine as her own personal protest against photoshopping. Knightley told The Times she demanded the (not safe for work) photos be unedited so people could see what she really looked like.
“I’ve had my body manipulated so many different times for so many different reasons, whether it’s paparazzi photographers or for film posters,” Knightley said. “That [shoot] was one of the ones where I said: ‘OK, I’m fine doing the topless shot so long as you don’t make them any bigger or retouch.’ Because it does feel important to say it really doesn’t matter what shape you are.”
READ: This Is What the Same Woman Looks Like Photoshopped in Different Countries
Knightley’s figure was controversially distorted on the poster for King Arthur in 2004: Her breasts were edited to look bigger than they are in real life. Though the studio bore the brunt of that scandal, the actress herself came under fire in 2006 when she and Scarlett Johansson posed nude with a fully clothed Tom Ford on the cover of Vanity Fair, in a picture that emphasized the gap the demands made of famous women and men in terms of playing up their sexuality. (Rachel McAdams reportedly skipped the shoot after realizing the women would be asked to pose in the buff.)
But Knightley is taking a stand now. The Interview shoot captures Knightley’s real figure—including her true breast size. “I think women’s bodies are a battleground and photography is partly to blame,” the Imitation Game actress told The Times. “Our society is so photographic now, it becomes more difficult to see all of those different varieties of shape.”
READ: Not-So-Flawless: Lorde Protests Photoshopping
That’s just one of many candid truths 29-year-old Knightley has been preaching on her current press tour. This month, she also told Net-a-Porter that she’s annoyed as a feminist that most movies reflect only what middle-aged white men want and identify with. She has turned down many a role because she thought she was being asked to do things male actors are never asked to do—specifically gratuitous sex and violence. “It’s actually a difficult question: how much flesh are you meant to bare?” she said. “We’re saying that we should be sexually liberated but then again not that sexually liberated. It’s confusing.”
She added that she long ago left fairy tales behind: “Why should you wait for some f–king dude to rescue you?”
Amen.
Read next: Keira Knightley: Love Actually Is the Greatest Movie Ever Made
Benedict Cumberbatch announced that he was engaged to a woman named Sophie Hunter in the Times of London this morning. The Sherlock actor had never even confirmed he was seeing anyone, so who is this mystery woman?
Hunter is a graduate from Oxford and best known in the theater world for directing plays and operas. She’s also had a few small film roles, including 2009’s Burlesque Fairytales, where she met Cumberbatch himself. Take a look at the woman who tied down England’s most popular bachelor.
