Mel Gibson, Michael Richards, Anna Nicole Smith. Ugh.
Consider 2006 the year of celebrities behaving badly.
Here’s my top 10 — or should I say bottom 10? — in no particular order:
1. Britney Spears had a bad year. Divorce, a new baby, accusations of bad mothering. And then she goes out for a night on the town with no underwear. Sharon Stone, where are you to class up this poor woman?
2. Mel Gibson got arrested for drunken driving, which is bad enough, but then he went on an odd anti-Semitic rant about how the Jews started all the wars in the world. Huh? But the public seems to be in a forgiving mood. His blood-and-guts-drenched “Apocalypto” is cleaning up at the box office.
3. Maybe Mel hired Michael Richards to go off on a racist tirade at a comedy club and taped it so we could watch him spew the N word over and over. He makes Mel look warm and fuzzy. But frankly, I want both of these men to go off and have their own Klan meeting and leave us alone.
4. Anna Nicole Smith managed to find a new low on the tacky scale, which is hard to do when you’re Anna Nicole Smith! The genuinely tragic death of her son, just a few days after the birth of her daughter, turned totally tabloid when she sold photos of his last hours, fought paternity battles, sold video of her C-section, endlessly cried on “Entertainment Tonight” and rolled around seductively in her wedding gown for the camera while her son was still in the morgue. Geeze!
5. The nice Beatle, Paul McCartney, got into a down-and-dirty divorce with Heather Mills that involves accusations that Paul was mentally and physically abusive and that Heather once worked as a prostitute. I guess that answers the immortal question: Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64? Apparently not.
6. Even when someone is trying to do something nice, it gets ugly. Madonna wanted to adopt a little boy from Malawi. Problem was, he wasn’t an orphan. It turned into a media circus and, what’s apparently worse, Madonna was accused of copying Angelina Jolie, who adopted a little girl from Ethiopia earlier this year. You know, Mia Farrow did this much more quietly years ago.
7. The big movie hit of the year was “Borat,” an alleged documentary about a journalist from Kazakhstan discovering America, but really a chance for Sacha Baron Cohen to embarrass and ridicule as many people as possible. Critics said it was wildly funny but not very nice. No wonder it was a big hit in 2006.
8. Speaking of “Borat,” Pamela Anderson’s marriage to Kid Rock apparently fell apart because Kid was jealous of the reporter from Kazakhstan. Alas, their marriage only lasted four months.
9. “The View” has become the place where lame and pointless controversies thrive, thanks to Rosie O’Donnell. She accused Kelly Ripa of being homophobic because she didn’t like Clay Aiken putting his hand over her mouth. And then Danny DeVito shows up drunk on the show and makes a fool of himself. And then Rosie makes a joke about the “ching-chong” Chinese language and manages to offend, oh, about 1.3 billion people.
10. And finally, we lost a lot of good souls this year. The folks who had class and talent and would never end up on this list.
Goodbye to Robert Altman, who made the movies better, William Styron, who was a beautiful writer, and Ed Bradley, who was simply the best.
Goodbye also to Don Knotts, Dennis Weaver, Darren McGavin, Ahmet Ertegun, Aaron Spelling, Al Lewis (who played Grandpa on the “Munsters”), Shelly Winters and Peter Boyle, who was the best bad dad in the world.
CONTACT US: jholahan@LNPnews.com or 481-6016. The Footlights column appears every other Wednesday.
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