Chris Rock not hosting 2006 Academy Awards - apparently pissed off Jude Law

Chris Rock not hosting Oscars

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Chris Rock won't be back cracking wise as the host of next year's Oscars telecast.

"He is not hosting the Academy Awards," the comedian's publicist, Matt Labov, said Friday in a brief statement e-mailed to The Associated Press. He did not elaborate.

Labov told The New York Times that Rock didn't want to do the show "in perpetuity" but would "like to do it again down the road."

The 2005 telecast was Rock's first as host. He drew younger viewers, but his barbs skewering stars like Jude Law, Tobey Maguire and others alienated some members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In one bit, Rock suggested filmmakers should wait for better talent instead of rushing bad movies into theaters.

"You want Tom Cruise and all you can get is Jude Law. Wait," Rock joked. "You want Russell Crowe and all you can get is Colin Farrell? Wait. 'Alexander' is not 'Gladiator.' "

He also poked fun at himself.

"You want Denzel (Washington) and all you can get is me? Wait," he joked.

Rock's comments prompted Sean Penn, when he took the stage later, to defend Law as "one of our finest actors."

Rock is currently producing and narrating "Everybody Hates Chris," a sitcom on UPN based on his life.

A spokesman for the Academy declined to comment about the hosting duties. Longtime Academy Awards producer Gil Cates is expected to announce his selection in the next few weeks.

Frequently mentioned candidates include four-time host Whoopi Goldberg, two-time host Steve Martin and late-night hosts Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien.

The 78th annual Academy Awards will air March 5 on ABC from Hollywood.

Some of Rock's quotes:

"It's a great night tonight. We have four black nominees. tonight. It's kinda like Def Oscar Jam tonight."

"Black movies don't have real names, they have names like Barbershop. That's not a name, that's just a location."

"Our next presenter is the first woman to ever breast-feed an Apple - Gwyneth Paltrow."

"The only acting you ever see at the Oscars is when people act like they're not mad they lost. Nicole Kidman was smiling so wide (the year Halle Berry beat her to best actress), she should have won an Emmy at the Oscars for her great performance. I was like, 'If you'd done that in the movie, you'd have won an Oscar, girl!'"

"You want Denzel and all you can get is me...wait. Denzel's a fine actor. He woulda never made Pootie Tang. Clint Eastwood's a star, OK? Tobey Maguire's just a boy in tights. You want Tom Cruise and all you can get is Jude Law? Wait! You want Russell Crowe and all you can get is Colin Farrell, wait! Alexander is not Gladiator."

Apartments unaffordable for many - Is the US headed for a depression?

It makes you wonder, considering this news.

Cost of rental housing increased faster than wages

Tuesday, December 13, 2005; Posted: 7:12 p.m. EST (00:12 GMT)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The cost of rental housing has increased faster than wages, making it increasingly difficult for low-income families to afford even modest apartments, an advocacy group said Tuesday.

"The picture is similar to past years, but it's getting worse," said Danilo Pelletiere, research director of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The coalition, which advocates for more affordable housing, issues a report each year tracking rental costs in every state, county and metropolitan area in the country.

It says families should spend no more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing and utilities, a standard recognized by many housing experts. Under that standard, the coalition said it could not find a single county in the United States where a full-time worker making minimum wage could afford a one-bedroom apartment.

In reality, the report found, many low-income families spend a far larger share of their incomes on housing.

Plus, more and more jobs are being lost to the movement of production offshore, or simply eliminated due to technology. Meanwhile, some Americans allow themselves to be tricked into thinking that the problem is related to illegal immigrants, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Dreamworks Business Model Fails - Studio Purchased By Paramount for $1 billion

Dreamworks SKG -- the studio that produced the great movie "American Beauty" -- was purchased by Viacom / Paramount for just north of $1 billion.

"When Steven, Jeffrey and I started the company and had to put an entire infrastructure together from day one, we had hoped to be able to make enough films to rationalize the cost of being our own distributor," David Geffen -- the "G" in SKG said Sunday."

I wonder if this would not have been the case, had Dreamworks concentrated on producing very low budget movies of up to $1 milllion, each.

Time writer says she may have given tip to Rove's lawyer

It seems that Rove may have been unintentionally warned before his testimory. Check this story out

Richard B. Schmitt, Los Angeles Times
Monday, December 12, 2005

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Washington -- A Time magazine correspondent acknowledged Sunday that she may have unwittingly aided the defense of Karl Rove in the CIA leak investigation by telling the White House aide's lawyer about a conversation Rove had with one of her colleagues about CIA officer Valerie Wilson.

The tip, offered over drinks at a Washington restaurant sometime during the first half of 2004, apparently led Rove to correct testimony he had given to a federal grand jury in the case, according to a first-person account by Time reporter Viveca Novak, posted Sunday on the magazine's Web site.

NY Senator Hillary Clinton's Rein Can't Be Challenged By A Weak Pirro

The bottom line in this Newsday article is the Senator's a certain choice for reelection and may just be the best Presidential candidate the Democrats have, even if she does not run.

Study: Whites automatically React More Negatively to Blacks Than to Whites. (The Cure? Diversity)

This article was from the November 2001 "Monitor on Psychology." The full article can be read with a click on the title of this post.

Social psychologist Russell Fazio, PhD, of Ohio State University, has been examining a related phenomenon he calls "automatically activated attitudes" toward those of different races. He was the first to develop a measure estimating whites' positive or negative associations to and evaluations of blacks, without having to directly ask them for this information.

The technique tests the extent to which briefly flashed pictures of black or white faces influence the speed at which participants identify the meaning of a positive or negative adjective. The research shows that many whites automatically react more negatively to blacks than to whites, even though they claim they don't consciously hold such views.

Understanding hate crimes

In research suggesting why some people may turn their ethnic discomfort into drastic action, psychologist Jack Glaser, PhD, of the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, Yale University political scientist Donald Green, PhD, and journalist Jay Dixit took the novel approach of joining in a white racist Internet chat room to discern attitudes there.

In a study in press in the Journal of Social Issues, the team "chatted" with white racists by describing fabricated threats to their white hegemony, ranging from immediate local threats to more abstract national ones. Included in the chats were scenarios of blacks competing with whites for jobs, moving into the neighborhood or marrying white women. (The team went to great lengths to protect respondents' confidentiality, Glaser notes.)

The closer blacks came to "invading" whites' cultural turf, the more violent the responses, the team found. Job competition didn't pose an enormous threat, for instance, but the possibility of a white-black marriage created major sparks.

"The more extreme responses seemed to be about a threat to their cultural integrity," Glaser notes.

This seems to imply that as American society becomes more economically diverse, and intermarriage rates continue to increase, hate crime rates by those anti-social whites may rise as well. I hope that this is discouraged by stronger law enforcement, education, and treatment of this behavior as a mental illness. The real remedy is greater diversity, so that people "get used to each other" as Star Trek's Doctor McCoy once said.

Study: Blacks Four Times More Likely to Be Hate Crime Victims in LA County When Compared to Their Representation of That County's Population

For the full report, click on the title of this post.

Edward Dunbar Ed.D.
University of California at Los Angeles
and Pacific Psychological Associates

Findings from an ongoing study of hate crime occurrence in Los Angeles County are presented for the years of 1994 and 1995. Content analyses of data from the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission included 1459 hate crimes cases; this encompassed events reported to both law enforcement and community-based organizations. The behavioral analyses of the crime events were considered in terms of victim impact, as was determined via impairment ratings provided by Victim-Witness Assistance staff (a Los Angeles County agency). Key findings are highlighted below.

Severity of Impact

Findings indicated that base rates of victimization varied significantly by race/ethnic groups; most notably African Americans were four times more likely to be the victims of hate crime activity when compared to their demographic representation in Los Angeles County.

When comparing hate crimes motivated by race/ethnic, and religion to sexual orientation, hate crimes against gay men and lesbians were more severe (as measured by the behavioral characteristics of the event, e.g., more perpetrators, more serious attack).

When examining the hate crimes based on race and ethnicity, African Americans were the targets of more severe hate events, (e.g., physical assaults).

The majority of hate crimes were committed in public locations. Those which occurred in the victim's neighborhood were typically more violent.

Law Enforcement Reportage:

The behavioral analysis of the hate crime revealed that more severe hate acts (e.g. aggravated assault, sexual assault) were predictive of the victim not reporting the crime to law enforcement agencies.
It was found that in sexual orientation hate crimes, that significant differences for both gender and membership in a visible race/ethnic minority group were related to lower law enforcement reportage rates.
County Victim Witness Assistance staff also reported that few if any hate crime victims utilize state-funded medical and mental health services subsequent to crime victimization.
Perpetrator Behavior and Characteristics:

Less than five percent of the hate crime perpetrators were identified as members of organized hate gangs or associations.