HEADLINES AND HOTTEST GOSSIPS OF THE YEAR From the Desk of Fabiola Rossi, Valerie Constand, Erica Schell, Meg
Washington, Lou Ross, Cy Bradley, Elaine Gerard and Nic Nye.
Naomi Watts finally tasting
success. Actress appears in
four upcoming films
.
SAN FRANCISCO
(AP) -- Naomi Watts is making up for lost time -- and on her terms. The
33-year-old Australian actress has made nine movies in the past two years and
has four films in the can, including 21 Grams opposite Sean Penn and Benicio
Del Toro, David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabee's and The Assassination of
Richard Nixon. The pace is a far cry from when she struggled in her 20s making
small films of varying quality while Nicole Kidman, her best friend, ascended
the ranks. Then came Mulholland Drive and last year's hit thriller The Ring.
"I think I have better taste now than I did then," Watts told the San
Francisco Chronicle on Sunday. "I've done movies almost back to back for the
past year and a half, and I'm not getting talked into anything for anyone --
it has to be my decision. "That's one of the lucky things about getting the
success later on. I know how I want to dress, I know what kind of house I want
to live in, I just know more about myself, and that's true about the roles I
want to play and what parts of myself I want to express. You're just more in
touch with yourself."-Canadian Press. Photo Credit: AP/Kevork Djansezian.
Carly Simon Gives Away Who
Is 'So Vain'
Carly
Simon will finally reveal who's so vain to a man with major connections in the
media world -- should he ever decide to break his vow of secrecy. But Dick
Ebersol, chairman of NBC sports and NBC Olympics, said he'll never tell once
Simon divulges to him the subject of her 1972 song "You're So Vain" after a
private performance in about two weeks. Ebersol won the information with a
$50,000 bid in a charity auction; he also gets a lunch of peanut butter and
jelly sandwiches. "It won't be hard to keep a secret," he said on NBC's
"Today" show Tuesday morning. Ebersol said Simon gave him one clue about the
man's identity that she said he could reveal: He has the letter "e" in his
name. That could be any of the chief suspects: actor Warren Beatty, whom Simon
dated; Mick Jagger, who sang backup on the song; and her ex-husband, James
Taylor. Ebersol said he was happy to put up the cash for a secret he can't
tell. "It's a great cause and I wanted to make sure Carly didn't have to tell
a total stranger," Ebersol said. The auction Monday raised $500,000 to benefit
Martha's Vineyard Community Services, which provides child care, counseling,
substance abuse treatment services and visiting nurses to the community. Other
celebrities offered dinner, lunch or golf, including actors Ted Danson and
Mary Steenburgen; newswoman Diane Sawyer and her husband, director Mike
Nichols; and veteran newsman Walter Cronkite. The annual event has raised
nearly $4 million for Community Services since it began in 1979.
Sarai
wants to be the female Eminem
: White girls have traditionally had no impact in rap
NEW YORK- Eminem has disproved the notion
that white boys can't rap. White girls, on the other hand, have had almost
zero impact on the genre in its 30-year history. Remember Tairrie B? Probably
not. Wait, there's . . . hmmmm. Actually, the most influential white woman in
rap history may be punk princess Deborah Harry, whose rhymes in the 1980 hit
Rapture helped take rap mainstream. But now a new face, Sarai, is raising
hopes that there might be someone new -- a Feminem -- to go where none have
gone before. "Eminem has definitely opened people's minds, that there could be
a white artist actually mastering the skill," says Sarai, a 20-year-old,
blue-eyed blonde from Kingston, N.Y., about two hours north of the city where
rap was born. Her debut album, The Original, was released by Epic Records last
week. The first single, the party song Ladies, has been getting airplay on
hip-hop stations and MTV. One of Sarai's producers is Scott Storch, a founding
member of the hip-hop band The Roots who's worked with artists ranging from
Eminem to Christina Aguilera. Storch says when he first heard Sarai, "she was
doing something different than I had ever heard before, sort of hip-hop with a
white female, and actually bringing it off like a real sister. I was a little
surprised and definitely a little intrigued." Unlike
Eminem, whose race is stamped all over his nasal delivery, Sarai's skin tone
won't be readily apparent to listeners - she actually sounds a bit like
one-time Jay-Z protege Amil.Until the superstar producer Dr. Dre ushered
Eminem into the rap game in 1999, white people had a checkered history in rap.
Unless they completely dissed their white heritage -- like the late 1980s
group 3rd Bass -- or delivered comedy -- like the early Beastie Boys -- they
were usually dismissed. And who could forget street poseur Vanilla Ice of Ice
Ice Baby fame, who will go down in history as the Pat Boone of rap? Even
considering Vanilla Ice, rap has been worse for white women. "I never came
across a white female rapper who could rap," says Damon Dash, the Roc-A-Fella
Records co-founder who helped put Jay-Z on the map. A few have made blips.
Eazy-E had protege Tairrie B, described back then as the Madonna of rap (she's
since gone metal). The trio Luscious Jackson has gotten attention, though more
from the rock contingent than the rap community. Currently, the trio Northern
State has gotten good reviews, and the group Fannypack, which had a minor hit
this summer with the novelty song Cameltoe, has a white rapper. But for the
most part, coming up with names of notable white female rappers seems like a
challenging game of Trivial Pursuit.
Dash says that's "probably because there hasn't been anyone good enough. I
mean, Eminem was like the first real good white male rapper." "It's hard
enough for any kind of female rapper to stay in the game and compete with the
male rappers, so being white and being female makes it all that much harder,"
he said. Princess Superstar, a sexually frank white rapper sometimes called
the white Lil' Kim, can attest to that. "We've got a lot of racial issues
here, and sometimes it plays itself out in the music game," says the rapper,
who puts out her music on her own label. "Any white female rapper is going to
fight against being considered a novelty." In addition, since rap is as much
or more so about the street life than black life, white acts are often
rejected for not having street cred. Sarai's official bio makes it clear she
wasn't a child of privilege, noting she's the daughter of a "single mother"
and mentioning she took jobs to help support her family. She says she grew up
in a multi-racial neighborhood with "all different kind of income levels."
"Everybody thinks that I'm from a big white house and this white picket fence
and my parents bought me a Mercedes on my 16th birthday," she says. Sarai says
she grew up listening to Public Enemy, the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur.
She got her break when she met a producer in Atlanta during a vacation with a
friend; she's lived in that music hotspot for the past four years. Sarai
describes her sound as more mainstream than hardcore rap, and her personality
seems to bear that out.
Continues on the next page.