Entertainment

Cosby has been accused of sexual abuse or assault by over 20 women

Bill Cosby’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was vandalized Thursday night, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce said Friday.

The word “rapist” was written multiple times on the star, according to a photo posted Thursday by a Houston TV station.

“When people are unhappy with one of our honorees, we would hope that they would project their anger in more positive ways then to vandalize a California State landmark,” said a spokeswoman from the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which awards the stars, in a statement.

Cosby has been accused of sexual abuse or assault by over 20 women, many who spoke out for the first time in the last few months…

Read the rest of the story from our partners at NBC News

She broke a tie with Dolly Parton today

Sorry, Dolly.

Beyoncé had been in a tie with Dolly Parton for the most-nominated female artist of all time; with the “Drunk in Love” singer’s nomination for best urban contemporary album this morning, she now has 47 to Parton’s 46, making her the sole record-holder. And because the nominations are being slowly rolled out over the course of the day, Beyoncé is widely expected to add more to her tally.

Parton has won seven Grammys, most recently in 2001; Beyoncé’s 17 trophies (ranging from 2000 for Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name” to 2012 for solo hit “Love on Top”) place her behind only Aretha Franklin (18 prizes) and Alison Krauss (a staggering 27) in the all-time tally for female artists. And after she won six Grammys in 2010, the year of “Single Ladies,” Beyoncé held the record for most trophies won by a female artist in a single ceremony, until she was later tied by Adele.

Interestingly, though Beyoncé shared the song of the year prize, honoring writers, for “Single Ladies,” the top prizes for performers have thus far eluded her. Four nominations for record of the year (“Say My Name,” “Crazy in Love,” “Irreplaceable,” and “Halo”) and one for album of the year (for I Am… Sasha Fierce) weren’t converted into trophies, though her most recent, self-titled album is eligible for Album of the Year at the upcoming ceremony.

"We could have been a vodka brand!"

It’s been a long time since Jon Stewart worked with Angelina Jolie on a 1998 film called Playing by Heart, but the Oscar winner left a lasting impression on him.

“Ever since I met you about 20 years ago on set, I thought, ‘This person has talent coming out of everywhere,’ ” Stewart told the actress and director, who stopped by The Daily Show on Thursday. “You meet certain people and you go, ‘This person embodies something different, special.’ I’ve always thought that about you.”

In fact, he even came up with a Brangelina-like name for himself and Jolie, 39.

“If you’d ended up with me instead of Brad Pitt, our portmanteau – Stewart and Jolie – would have been ‘Stolie,’ ” he told the newlywed. “We could have been a vodka brand!”

Stewart, 52, was also full of praise for Jolie’s new film, Unbroken (out Dec. 25), which marks her second outing as a director. He described the big-budget film about Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner and World War II prisoner of war who survived 47 days lost at sea, as “epic” and asked his former rom-com costar if she felt daunted by undertaking a film of such scope.

“It took me off-guard,” Jolie admitted. “I remember waking up in the middle of the night thinking, ‘I don’t know how to film a shark attack.’ “

“You convince the studio, you say, ‘You should give me this job, I know exactly what I’m doing. I’m so sure of it.’ And then you get the job and you go, ‘Oh my, I’m not sure that I do.’ So every day was a challenge,” she added.

Jolie, who directed In the Land of Blood and Honey in 2011, a film she also wrote, told Stewart that she enjoyed the “huge responsibility” of helming a film.

“I love directing,” Jolie said. “You’re there from the beginning until the end, shepherding every tiny detail.”

When Stewart asked if her interest in directing came from acting in films where she felt that maybe the director could have gone a different way with a scene, Jolie admitted that there were a few of her movies that she hadn’t seen “because I couldn’t sit through them.”

That prompted an adoring Stewart to lean forward, and as they batted eyes at each other he said, “Do you want to talk to me about them, because I’ve seen them all.”

But when Jolie returned the compliment and told the host that she and her husband watched The Daily Show at home, Stewart’s interest in her quickly evaporated.

What does the former PEOPLE Sexiest Man Alive wear when he watches the show, Stewart wanted to know. Just pajama pants and no top?

“Sometimes,” Jolie said with a smile.

“That feels right,” Stewart responded.

This article originally appeared on People.com

Taylor Swift got nominated for best vocals over Beyoncé?

The record of the year competition? Meghan Trainor is all about that race.

Trainor, the 20-year old star behind this summer’s surprise hit “All About That Bass,” is one of four acts competing in a surprisingly pop-driven field for one of the Grammys’ top prizes, honoring a song’s performance and production. She’s joined by Iggy Azalea (with Charli XCX) for “Fancy,” Sia for “Chandelier,” Taylor Swift for “Shake It Off,” and Sam Smith for “Stay With Me (Darkchild Version).” Nominations in several categories have already been announced, and the album of the year prize is set to be announced tonight.

All five of the record of the year nominees were major chart hits, marking a continuation of last year’s drawing from chart-toppers like “Get Lucky” and “Blurred Lines.” Before last year’s pop buffet, slightly lower-fi and more rock-driven acts including Bon Iver and the Black Keys managed to get into the race. But it’s the least aggressively poppy of the nominees that has to be considered the frontrunner: Sam Smith has been collecting nominations throughout the announcement period, including best new artist (alongside Iggy Azalea, Bastille, HAIM, and Brandy Clark) and best pop solo performance (alongside John Legend for “All of Me,” Sia for “Chandelier,” Swift for “Shake It Off,” and Pharrell Williams for “Happy”).

Smith’s strength across the nomination field portends a big night, not least because he’s in the mold of recent British R&B-inflected vocalists Amy Winehouse and Adele, both of whom dominated the Grammys. He at least can be considered a frontrunner in the most hilarious category announced so far, best pop vocal album. The field was stretched to six to ensure there’d be room for everyone from Ed Sheeran and Coldplay (the Timberlake-alike x and the breakup record Ghost Stories) to Ariana Grande and Katy Perry (the wildly mixed bags My Everything and Prism) to first-time nominee Miley Cyrus (Bangerz).

It’s fairly surprising, given the pop-driven bent of the record of the year nominees, that “Happy” didn’t find its way in — or, given her historical strength with the awards-giving body, that Beyoncé showed vulnerability by not finding her way into the pop solo performance category for “Pretty Hurts,” the song she submitted. (She has been nominated for best urban contemporary album alongside four artists not named Beyoncé.)

But perhaps the biggest surprise, so far, is that all five of the best new artist nominees, people in a category that famously plays by its own rules, are only on their first album.

The biopic attempts to capture the turmoil behind the scenes

In the wake of Lifetime’s universally panned Aaliyah biopic — the critical reaction to which Gawker pretty much captured by calling it “the laughingstock of the Internet” — the network has some redemption to seek. Though expectations may be middling and Houston’s family is unhappy about the project, there is still hope that their upcoming Whitney Houston biopic Whitney might restore favor with viewers and fans alike.

The trailer focuses on Houston’s relationship with Bobby Brown, and Lifetime’s press site confirms that the tumultuous union will be the focal point of the production. First-time director Angela Bassett has some experience with biopics, as she played Tina Turner in the 1993 biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It, which centered on the singer’s abusive relationship with Ike Turner. Between the relationship drama and substance abuse, the biopic looks like an appropriately heavy affair, with only sequins and shoulder pads to lighten things up.

Yaya DaCosta, who started her career as runner-up on America’s Next Top Model but proved her acting chops in The Kids Are All Right, will play Houston, with vocals by Deborah Cox. Arlen Escarpeta, best known for Friday the 13th and a smattering of TV appearances, will play Brown. The special airs on Jan. 17, followed by a documentary that takes a closer look at Houston’s life and death.

Houston was such an incomparable talent that it’s a little disappointing the biopic seems to put her love life above her remarkable accomplishments as an entertainer. But the offstage tensions, it would appear, provide more juice for drama than the onstage triumphs.

Watch the trailer at BuzzFeed.

Including Shawn, Eric and, yes, FEE-HEE-HEENAY

Alright, Boy Meets World fans (we’re looking at you, ’90s kids). If you haven’t watched Girl Meets World because you think it’s kind of weird the Disney Channel actually made that a show, or perhaps because you don’t own a TV, you might finally have a compelling reason to tune in.

That compelling reason is that all your favorite characters from Boy Meets World will appear in the second season! Well, some of your favorite characters. Most notably: Cory Matthews’ bestie Shawn Hunter (Rider Strong), his older brother Eric (Will Friedle) and his beloved teacher/mentor/neighbor/person who always somehow shows up in every single aspect of his life, Mr. Feeny (William Daniels.)

Ben Savage, who plays Cory, tweeted this photo, giving us a glimpse at the glorious reunion to come:

Excited to welcome back some old friends for Season 2 #GirlMeetsWorld http://t.co/SkETLGNEr2—
Ben Savage (@BenSavage) December 03, 2014

Also appearing in the holiday reunion episode, which airs today, Dec. 5, will be Cory’s parents Amy and Alan (Betsy Randle and William Russ), E! Online reports.

The Girl Meets World writers have been sharing snippets of information on Twitter to build up the hype for this special episode. For example:

Oh boy.

She's foul-mouthed, unfaithful, abrasive and irresponsible — which is what makes her the most unexpectedly great protagonist in years

One of the many quotes that graces the screen during Wild, the film adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling eponymous 2012 memoir, comes from Joni Mitchell’s 1971 song “California.” “Will you take me as I am? Will you?” the lyrics go — Mitchell and Strayed, by proxy, pleading for acceptance from the Golden State. How Strayed was, at least when she set out to hike 1,100 miles on California’s Pacific Crest Trail in the summer of 1995, was this: Still mourning her mother’s death from cancer four years earlier. Newly divorced from a man she loved but hurt anyway, sleeping with almost any guy who wasn’t him. And one day clean from a drug habit that had evolved from relatively harmless experimentation to shooting heroin.

So when Strayed, played by Reese Witherspoon, asks if California will take her as she is, she’s also asking us, the audience. Will we take this foul-mouthed, cheating, destructive woman who refuses to apologize for the ways in which her grief has turned her inside out?

Witherspoon, who spearheaded and produced the adaptation, took on the project in large part because of Strayed’s unbridled honesty. “I’m really proud of how brave Cheryl was to tell the whole truth and even the parts that are maybe hard for people to digest,” she said in an interview. And she promised Strayed she would honor that truth. In an interview with Kathryn Schulz in New York Magazine, Strayed recalls when Witherspoon approached her about making the movie. “She said, ‘I promise you I will get this movie made quickly, and I will protect you, and I will honor you,’” Strayed quotes Witherspoon. “‘I will make this a film that we are all proud of, and I will not turn you into some dumbass chick on the trail complaining about her muffin top.’” And though Witherspoon clearly had a personal stake in taking on Wild — developing a rich and complex role for herself, which has already generated Oscar buzz among critics — the adaptation has broader implications when it comes to the hotly-debated topic of just how likable female characters must be.

The likability of female characters in literature has been discussed almost ad nauseum, at least with regard to fiction. There’s enough material, surely, to fill a college syllabus on the topic (professors, take note). To summarize recent arguments: Last year, novelist Claire Messud called out a Publisher’s Weekly interviewer for labeling one of the characters in The Woman Upstairs “grim,” a poor candidate for friendship. Messud responded emphatically that we don’t expect friendship material of male characters written by male authors. Meg Wolitzer, the critically-acclaimed author of The Interestings, called fiction with characters who are “stand-ins for your best friends” a “disturbing trend.”

Bristling at these remarks, author Jennifer Weiner, whose body of work consists largely of books with sympathetic heroines, wrote a defense of likable characters. Writing about the phenomenon onscreen, Slate’s Willa Paskin suggested that the whole debate had confused the meaning of the word itself. “Likability is often used as a synonym for nice and safe and dull,” she wrote, “but that’s a corruption of the word: Who really likes that?”

For all the quibbling around female characters in fiction, likability is less often discussed in the realm of memoir, where the writer chooses not how plucky or prickly her protagonist gets to be, but only how much of her own unsavory past to disclose. The reader’s experience is similar — in both fiction and nonfiction, they must ask themselves whether they wish to spend 300 pages (or two hours at the movies) with the protagonist (or antagonist, as the case may be). But in memoir, there’s an implicit agreement between writer and reader that the writer isn’t going to gloss over transgressions and sugarcoat shortcomings. And in confessional writing, a classification some might assign to Wild, that soul-baring quality generates a kinship with readers. As Strayed explained to Schulz, memoirs can be solipsistic if they shy away from the truth. “But if you go into that deep truth,” she says, “you aren’t talking about yourself. You are talking about what it is to be human.”

For Wild to work as a movie, and for confessional memoir to pack the same punch onscreen as it does on the page, honesty must trump likability. Empathy, if the audience ends up having it for Strayed, is a result of the character’s wholeness, not her wholesomeness. Witherspoon needed to play Strayed as raw and shattered by grief as she is in the book. She had to refrain from smoothing over the rough edges in an effort to make this the kind of film families head to the theater to watch after Christmas dinner. She says she eschews the notion that she’s “America’s sweetheart,” and this role, perhaps more than any other, required her to distance herself from that title.

And she did. Witherspoon’s Strayed is, at times, even more abrasive and defiant than the Strayed in the book. In a flashback to a pre-hike session with a therapist, Witherspoon’s Strayed spews vitriol at the therapist that, in the book, is contained to internal monologue. In the movie, a scene in which she finds out she’s pregnant results in a screaming fight with an exasperated friend, whereas Strayed on the page responds to the news with tears of desperation. In keeping with the source material, she doesn’t hold back with the expletives. Even her spiritual doctrine is that “God is a ruthless bitch.”

That Witherspoon’s Strayed is sometimes more caustic than the real Strayed may be attributed, in part, to the movie’s need to dramatize flashbacks and memories recalled in reflective prose. But it’s also a deliberate choice that favors the unedited mess over the bright-eyed Pollyanna. Whether, as a character, Strayed is likable is less important than whether she is real: complicated and fallible, sexual and empowered, unrepentant for the past and uncertain of the future. This movie doesn’t work without the brokenness, because it’s all about the hike to healing.

At the same time, although she is distancing herself from it, there is one way in which Witherspoon’s sweetheart credibility makes the story successful onscreen. The memoir is narrated by the early-40s Strayed looking back on her 26-year-old self. She has the benefits of hindsight and maturity to make her more palatable as a narrator than the younger Strayed is as a character. In the movie, we don’t have this older, wiser narrator. There is some voiceover, but the narrator and character in the book are essentially blended into one in the form of Witherspoon. Lacking the guidance of Strayed version 2.0, it helps to have an actress who is generally liked by the public to soften — if only slightly — the image of the younger Strayed.

But what makes Wild the movie more remarkable, in some ways, than Wild the book, is the fact that it got made at all. Confessional memoirs written by women are always susceptible to criticism (see: Lena Dunham, Katha Pollitt, Elizabeth Wurtzel). But there’s nevertheless a sizable market for them (see, again: Lena Dunham, Katha Pollitt, Elizabeth Wurtzel). It’s a much bigger risk, financially speaking, to turn these women into characters on the big screen. Whereas Strayed received a modest advance for her memoir, the movie had a budget of $5 million — not exactly the $250 million The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies had to play with, but not a paltry sum, either. It’s a large wager to gamble on the possibility that would-be moviegoers might be put off by a heroine who is, in the words of one Amazon reviewer who likely won’t be purchasing a ticket, “self-indulgent, whiny, promiscuous,” and “lacking a moral compass of any kind.”

We’ve certainly seen thorny female characters driving successful movies in recent years: Gravity’s Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), Zero Dark Thirty’s Maya (Jessica Chastain) and The Hunger Games trilogy’s Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), to name a few. But these movies all had other draws: Gravity’s stunning computer generated images of space, Zero Dark Thirty’s patriotic appeal, the heart-stopping action of The Hunger Games. In Wild, aside from some beautiful shots of the trail and a stellar supporting performance by Laura Dern as Strayed’s mother, Witherspoon’s Strayed, likable or not, is pretty much the whole show.

The never fully realized Bridesmaids effect — the hope that that movie’s box office success would lead to a trove of female-driven comedies — suggests that it’s not safe to assume that a box office windfall for Wild will singlehandedly turn the tide for female-driven dramas. Of course, there are other issues at play — most notably the dismal statistic that only 16 percent of those behind the camera in Hollywood (including writers, directors and producers) are women. Even Wild was written and directed by men (Nick Hornby and Jean-Marc Vallée, respectively). But perhaps a repeat of Bridesmaids’ success will compound the message it only partially succeeded in transmitting: that female-driven movies sell tickets.

In the end, the movie itself is not about whether California will take Strayed as she is, but whether she will take herself as she is, healing her wounds through self-acceptance. And if audiences hope to see more fully formed female characters onscreen, it is we who must take her as she is — all the way to the box office, and in droves.