Even though he’s best known as a sportswriter, Bill Simmons is so ridiculously whip-smart about so many things that I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to discover that he probably has the savviest take on NBC’s Leno-Conan late-night debacle. After…

You gotta’ love Mark Cuban, the famously contrarian, shoot-from-the-hip owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who’s best known in Hollywood as the indy film patron behind 2929 Entertainment and the Landmark Theater chain. Whatever happens in the NBA, Cuban is usually…

I’ve been following the NBC late-night meltdown just like everyone else, watching all the jokes about it on TV–Jimmy Kimmel’s sharp-elbowed appearance on Jay Leno being the highlight–along with the kibitzing from network elders, ranging from Fred Silverman–who heaped blame…

My colleague Denise Martin has a nice scoop today about how MTV — you know, the network that used to be the red-hot center of pop culture cool way, way back in 1993 — is trying to staunch its years-long…

It seems as if the more money “Avatar ” makes at the box office (it’s now officially the second-biggest-grossing film of all time), the more incensed its critics on the right become. The best example? Die-hard right-wing blogger/columnist/anti-Islam crusader Debbie…

It’s no secret that when Peter Bart was running Variety he was especially unpopular with some of his own critics, since he had so little respect for their craft. Now that Bart is a Variety blogger, well, not much has…

Peter Biskind’s new biography of Warren Beatty, “Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America,” hasn’t even hit bookstore shelves yet. But it’s already caused an uproar after the New York Post started running some juicy excerpts from the book focusing on…

I’ve flown the coop and headed down to Miami, my ancestral home, for a week of sunny tropical escapery. I have fond memories, as a kid in the ’70s, of seeing guys posing as shopping center Santa Clauses who looked…

When it comes to incendiary film criticism, no one does it better than Manohla Dargis, the New York Times’ film critic whose reviews have the same tart-tongued zing as Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday.” Dargis has led something of…

When a big story breaks, turning a much-admired celebrity into fodder for the rapacious tabloid media, it’s fascinating to watch how all sorts of eye-popping peripheral scoops surface, propelled by the momentum of the original explosion. It’s happened again with…