Duffy sweeps BRITs

 

Kewpie doll/Welsh singing star Duffy took home a single Grammy the other night for her pop confection "Rockferry," but she romped at today's BRITs in London.

Meanwhile, recent Grammy lords Coldplay left empty-handed.

Duffy, who was seemingly everywhere promoting her record last year and its soulful, licensing-ready single, "Mercy," won best album, British female and British breakthrough artist trophies. She's sold 5 million copies of that CD so far. She went 3-for-4. 

Coldplay, on the other hand, went 0-for-4. (They're in good company, with Grammy champ Robert Plant not even registering a nod at the annual music awards.)

Other winners included Kings of Leon, Kanye West, Katy Perry, Paul Weller and Iron Maiden. Iron Maiden?

More details here.

No Oscar mashup for Peter Gabriel

Peter Gabriel lost the Golden Globe to Bruce Springsteen but picked up two Grammy Awards last week for the music of "WALL-E." Next stop: Oscars.

Well, yes and no.

Gabriel will attend the Oscars, where his song "Down to Earth," co-written with Thomas Newman, is nominated for best original song, but he decided to "withdraw from the ceremony." He says in a video posted on his Web site that he and his collaborators worked "bloody hard" on the music for the lovable trash-compactor flick and don't think it should be reduced to 60-65 seconds.

Oscar producers, trying to keep the show within three hours this year, have been nipping and tucking. Gabriel's fine with that and all, but he's decided to stage a mini protest because he doesn't think a mashup of the nominated songs is fair. There are only three, after all. (The other two are from, you guessed it, "Slumdog Millionaire").

The Soweto Gospel Choir, which sings on the animated Oscar nominee's soundtrack, may step in in Gabriel's place.

Catching up on other awards news today...

It was a busy below-the-line weekend, and a busy one for "Slumdog Millionaire" yet again. Its cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, walked away a winner against some formidable competition a the 23rd annual American Society of Cinematographers.

Mantle already has the BAFTA under his belt and won the ASC trophy in a field that included work on "Revolutionary Road," "The Reader," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and "The Dark Knight." More details here.

The Little Movie That Could also swept the Cinema Audio Society's awards Saturday, won for best edited feature film drama at the ACE Eddie Awards ("WALL-E" was the first-ever animated film to win the Eddie musical/comedy) and took the Art Directors Guild Award for production design on a contemporary movie ("Button" won for period flick and "The Dark Knight" for fantasy).

Can there be anybody left out there who doesn't think it'll be a "Slumdog" kind of day Feb. 22?

Awards sour grapes from Colbert

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Best actress nominee Kate Winslet has already said she's sick and tired of putting on the Game Face and piling up Oscar losses, five in all. How about a win, already? But nobody does awards outrage better than Stephen Colbert.

Not only was he railing Wednesday night about being passed over for the WGA Award for best comedy/variety series (the trophy went to the resurgent Tina Fey-fueled "Saturday Night Live") and the Grammy for spoken-word album ("An Inconvenient Truth" beat his "I Am America and So Can You").

But the world wasn't finished kicking him in the Golden Globes, he said.

His dander is really up about losing the Westminster Dog Show to a 10-year-old Sussex Spaniel named Stump. Oh, the indignity.

At least he still has his Peabody and his Emmys to keep him warm.

Chris Brown's 'Image' problem

There's a whole passel of luminaries -- Magic Johnson, Maya Angelou, Muhammad Ali, Russell Simmons, Will Smith and Queen Latifah among them -- in the mix for trophies at "The 40th NAACP Image Awards."

There's also Chris Brown, the embattled hip-hop artist who's being investigated by the L.A.P.D. for allegedly beating his girlfriend, pop superstar Rihanna. As new details come out today about the couple's possibly violent relationship and the potential charges against him, a question popped up: What if he wins?

Awkward!

Both he and Rihanna have canceled concerts and other public appearances this week, and the two were no-shows at Sunday night's Grammys, where both were scheduled to perform.

Technically, Brown fits the bill of the NAACP kudofest's mandate to "celebrate outstanding achievement and performances of people of color in the arts." But giving him something called the Image Award? Um, that would just seem wrong.

The show's nominations in music, movies, TV and literature came about through industry recommendations that were then churned through specially-created NAACP committees and subcommittees. Any NAACP member could vote online when the nods were whittled to the final five. It looks like the group, kicking off celebrations for its 100th anniversary, retains most of the control over the process.

Brown's fellow nominees -- Common, Jamie Foxx, John Legend and will.i.am -- should probably buff their acceptance speeches, you know, just in case.

Go here for a full list of nominees -- "Seven Pounds"? Really? The show, with hosts Halle Berry and Tyler Perry, airs live on Fox at 8 p.m. 

'Waltz,' 'Man on Wire' lead foreign, docs

Neither the foreign language race nor the documentary category gives us many surprises today. As far as the foreign derby goes, all the hubbub happened long before we got to this point (omissions, omissions, omissions, mostly of the edgiest fare like Italian mob tale "Gomorrah").

Now, all that's left is to hand over the trophy to recent Golden Globe and Critics' Choice winner Ari Folman for his Israeli animated memoir.

Here are the foreign language finalists:

"The Class," France

"The Baader Meinhof Complex," Germany

"Departures," Japan

"Revanche," Austria

"Waltz with Bashir," Israel

In the documentary race, we feel a make-good here for Werner Herzog, who was snubbed in '05 for "Grizzly Man" but makes it in this go-around for his spellbinding Antarctica tale. We're still expecting James Marsh to walk away with this prize, for the mesmerizing Phillippe Petit walk across the then-newly built Twin Towers, no matter how compelling the Katrina tale "Trouble the Water" turned out to be.

The contenders:

"The Betrayal"

"Encounters at the End of the World"

"The Garden"

"Man on Wire"

"Trouble the Water"

Day of reckoning for Boy George, O.J.

Aren't we all a little fatigued by those do-you-really-want-to-hurt-me jokes by now? Surely. But they're getting bandied about again today as word comes from a London court that Boy George has been convicted of imprisoning and beating a male escort. 

Never mind the "tumble 4 ya" asides. Sheesh.

The whole sordid tale, which took place in '07, involves handcuffs, nudie photos, paranoia, a metal chain and a disturbing lack of humanity. And it's not done yet -- sentencing is set for Jan. 16 and the Grammy-winning performer, formerly one of the most flamboyant and melodic drag queens around (pictured here in much better Culture Club days), is likely to go to jail.

Another day of reckoning for a famous face: O.J. Simpson has just been sentenced to at least 15 years in jail in Vegas for "taking his shiznit back," legally known as armed robbery.

He could be eligible for parole after six years in the slammer. Not nearly long enough.

Grammy appetizer

A TV show that's dedicated to the alleged best in popular music should focus on what's hot and now and urgent, with that catchy and innocuous "American Boy" playing on a loop, bubble gum stars chomping bubble gum, and tons and tons of Autotune, right?

But that's not what we got with last night's first-ever attempt to air the Grammy nominations. Instead, we were "treated" to Celine Dion's version of Janis Ian's "At 17," Mariah Carey doing "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" and the usually flawless Foo Fighters butchering "You're So Vain." Nothing performed was written after 1976, except, inexplicably, some new Taylor Swift tune.

What was that mess?

There are several answers for that.

1) A promo for the February airing of the actual Grammy awards, which haven't exactly been tearing up the Nielsens, even last year' when it celebrated its 50th anniversary and was one of the few original programs in a rerun-heavy writers strike environment.

2) An ad for the Grammy museum, opening this weekend at L.A. Live, which city fathers and corporate developers hope will be downtown's entertainment mecca.

3) A feeble attempt to get people to buy records.

The CBS show, ostentatiously dubbed "Grammy Nominations Concert Live: Countdown to Music's Biggest Night," drew enough eyeballs (7.1 million) to beat a couple of lame duck shows, but not much else that aired on network TV last night. What does that mean for the telecast a few months away? Who knows.

On to the nominees!

Lil Wayne, the hardest working man in rap, led the way with eight nods, followed by Coldplay with seven, Kanye West, Ne-Yo and Jay-Z with six each. No Sugarland (boo!) but there's Radiohead, M.I.A. and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

Perhaps our favorite nominee: Emmy owning "My Life on the D-List" star Kathy Griffin, who shamelessly named her CD "For Your Consideration" and said from Day 1 that it was her Grammy bait project. Good on her!

More from Billboard here and full list of nominees here.

 

Courtney Love collides with Internet

Courtney Love, who in recent months has been photographed looking like a pasty, skeletal shell of her former punk rock Grammy-nominated Hole-fronting self, provides the most head-spinning peek today into a troubled soul this side of an Augusten Burroughs novel.

In some 60 posts on her MySpace blog, the mercurial widow of rock god Kurt Cobain rails against her housekeeper who she says swiped millions of dollars worth of designer duds. Celeb blog D-Listed describes the rant as the unfortunate result of "OCD, meth, CLove and a MacBook" colliding.

Who knew she was a "Twilight" fan? She says she's hitting the premiere tonight (go ahead and insert vampire joke here, heartless readers). We'll try to run down those photos for you tomorrow.

Somewhere in Love's grammatically whack, typo-ridden stream-of-consciousness was this tidbit: "i'm presenting on a major awards show not THE one butthe OTHER one."

Can't wait for that.

Not that long ago, Love (pictured here earlier this year, in slightly better times) was part of some of those awards shows, having earned a good deal of praise for her budding acting career in the '90s and a Golden Globe nomination for "The People vs. Larry Flynt." Her band, Hole, racked up five Grammy nominations and a couple platinum records before imploding in a fireball of drug overdoses and severed relationships.

And now there's this blog entry, which just really makes us sad: "maybe im getting plump, everyones saying how proud they are of me for putting on weight, but i hate it, i know that size 4 isnt fat."

Intervention? Anybody?

'The View' from the top

They continue to get stiffed by the Emmys, but the women of "The View" have apparently given daytime TV viewers what they want -- verbal slapfights, wildly uninformed rants on current events, a slight evisceration of John McCain and, this morning, Elisabeth Hasselbeck chucking a handmade Gloria Estefan potato ball at some unsuspecting audience members.

Mmmm, potato mush.

In return, fans have flocked to the show, making it the top-rated daytime program for the first time in its 12-year history. The hordes, to the tune of 4.67 million people, showed up the week of the presidential election. Yes, Sherri Shepherd let flow the water works, with 6.17 million people tuning in on Nov. 5.

In case you missed today, some other highlights included Shepherd trying unsuccessfully to interview a soap star after a few mojitos (who knew that Grammy-laden Estefan was such a whiz in the kitchen?) and collective shock and outrage -- outrage! -- at Walters' upcoming ABC interview with The Pregnant Man. He's pregnant again!

No one seemed to be bothered, though, about the on-air plug that stretched over two days for the primetime show tonight.

And in other Baba news, Walters is gearing up for her annual see-me-make-fascinating-folks-break-down special on Dec. 4. So far, there's Emmy collector Tina Fey, multiple Oscar nominees Will Smith and Tom Cruise, potential Oscar nominee Frank Langella ("Frost/Nixon"), Miley Cyrus and Rush Limbaugh. There's also Olympic golden boy Michael Phelps, but no one will be able to understand what he's saying, blubbering or not, so his segment will be kind of a wash.

The rest of the 10 are still to be revealed, and if you guess a certain president elect is somewhere in there, if not at the top of the list, we're guessing you're on the money.

Rickrolling at MTV Europe awards

A fawning introduction by none other than Rock God Bono, the night's sweetest honor and a deafening reception from the assembled crowd of 10,000. Why not top it off with a little air guitar?

Paul McCartney, that's Sir Paul to us commoners, was named the Ultimate Legend at last night's "MTV Europe Music Awards." Other winners of the mostly fan-voted U.S.-dominated awards included Formerly Embattled Pop Starlet Britney Spears, Jared Leto-led 30 Seconds to Mars, Katy Perry, Lil Wayne, Kanye West, Pink and Tokio Hotel.

Our newly elected president, Barack Obama, had his fair share of shout-outs during the night, from McCartney thanking everyone who voted for him to Perry sporting his silkscreened likeness on a mini-dress.

By far the best choice of the evening: Rick Astley, beating out U2 and Spears for Best Act Ever and formally enshrining rickrolling (the term and practice) into the annals of awardom.

More from Billboard here.