Wasting our life on pop culture blogs and gossip sites, so you don't have to.
There is a lot of announcing going on at the moment. You can't peek at Twitter or click on www.huffingtonpost.com without finding out about Madonna's world tour, the new England manager, the final series of House, Heidi and Seal's divorce or Scotland Yard's crackdown on criminal gangs. For the reader, it's exhausting stuff, but Courtney Cox figured this was clearly a good week for announcements.
So she told Howard Stern (and the entire world) that she hasn't had sex in a year. "I've not had a man since David," she said. "I have not had sex. It's been about a year." Just as long as we know, Courtney....
Why the hell any celebrity still talks to Howard Stern is source of bafflement to me. Stern is the closest thing a celebrity has to the tyrannical colleague/former schoolmate who forces you to drink shots until you heckle barstaff and blurt out your lover's petname, in a desperate bid to escape being branded "boring". In October 2010, the day after Cox and David Arquette announced their separation, Arquette popped by for a chat with the veteran US radio personality and wound up admitting he'd shagged a waitress "once... maybe twice," mentioned that Cox had ended the marriage with the words: "I don't want to be your mother anymore" and finally revealing "She knows she's not f***ing me, and she's like, 'Listen, I want you to be able to do whatever you have to do."
The next day, Arquette issued a public apology for this Grade A spot of "sexual oversharing", fanning the flames of the vast embarrassment bonfire already burning so brightly into the night. Why haven't celebrities figured out that if you phone Howard Stern at noon, you'll be reading details of your sexlife on TMZ.com over lunch? Step away from that phone. Seal, we mean you.
Must Twi Harder, Hollywood
Whether or not you want to be a snob about the Twilight movie franchise, the gender politics behind the scenes makes for much more highbrow entertainment. This week's issue of Grazia includes a fascinating interview with the documentary-maker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who quizzed Catherine Hardwicke, director of the first Twilight movie, about the depressing stat that women comprised only 5% of directors on the 250 highest-grossest movies last year. "I made the first Twilight movie and the film has made over half a billion so far, but on the next two Twilights they hired guys," Hardwicke reveals in Miss Representation. "I've gone for jobs and been told, "We think a guy should direct this."
Team Hardwicke.
Emoticon Intelligence
And, just in case you missed it, Katy Perry signed her divorce papers with a smiley face.