New Zealand-born actor Russell Crowe has earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.
The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce has revealed its honorees for 2010 and Crowe's name was on a list of 28 entertainers.
A date for the Oscar winner's ceremony, where a star will be placed on Hollywood Boulevard, is yet to be scheduled, but it will occur during 2010.
Other celebrities set to cement a place in Hollywood history in 2010 are director James Cameron, actors John Cusack, Colin Firth, Adam Sandler, Emma Thompson and Mark Wahlberg, and musicians Bryan Adams, The Funk Brothers, Chaka Khan, Van Morrison, Ringo Starr, the band ZZ Top and posthumously Roy Orbison.
The Chamber of Commerce selected just 28 names from more than 200 nominations.
"Hollywood's class of 2010 has been selected," said Hollywood Walk of Fame Committee chairman Earl Lestz.
"After much consideration, the Walk of Fame committee has selected 28 of our most talented from more than 200 nominations.
"Fans and tourists worldwide will enjoy seeing their favourite celebrities receive this rare accolade.
"What is even more exciting is that these particular recipients will have the distinctive honour of being selected during the year that celebrates the Walk of Fame's 50th Anniversary."
by AAP
Cameron Diaz was all smiles as she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Diaz, one of Hollywood's biggest female stars thanks to movies like There's Something About Mary and Mask, was the 2386th actor to earn a star on the Walk of Fame.
Diaz said she was looking forward to being walked on.
"It will be cool to be under people's feet," she said.
"It really is the place where people can understand exactly that actors are not really stars - they don't exist in the sky, they exist on the ground just like everybody else."
The Walk of Fame is a stretch of sidewalk lining either side of Hollywood Boulevard on which celebrities in music, movies, television and other entertainment arenas have their names emblazoned in brass set into large, pink terrazzo stars.
For celebrities, a star can be a memorial that lasts for decades, and millions of tourists who visit downtown Hollywood annually get to see the names, talk about their favourite actors and actresses and take pictures near the stars.
A committee of the Chamber of Commerce chooses the stars from among hundreds of nominations.
Others soon to receive the honour include singer Shakira, actor Robert Downey Jr, cartoon character Tinkerbell, director Tim Burton, and actors Sir Ben Kingsley, William H. Macy and Hugh Jackman. Among the television stars are Macy's wife, Felicity Huffman, producer Mark Burnett and music stars include Kenny "Baby Face" Edmonds and disco-era band The Village People.
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt marked World Refugee Day by donating $1 million to a U.N. agency helping displaced Pakistanis and making media appearances to discuss the plight of refugees. by Yahoo
On Father's Day weekend, while dads were playing catch with their sons and preparing the backyard barbecue, women rushed to theaters to see a romantic comedy with a female star. The Proposal, with Sandra Bullock as a Canadian publishing exec who must marry her harried male assistant in order to stay in the U.S, whacked the opposition and topped the North American box office. In doing so, it outran the industry swamis' predictions, confounded the movie critics (like this one) who thought it was simply more Bullock mediocrity and showed that teenage guys don't determine every bit hit; 73% of The Proposal's early audience was female.
After several weekends with two or three movies bunched near the top, here was a winner that won't be overturned in the recount. It earned $34.1 million, according to early studio estimates, and beat out the second-place finisher, The Hangover, by more than $7 million, and the weekend's other new movie, the Jack Black-Michael Cera prehistoric comedy Year One, by about $14 million. Bullock's first No. 1 movie in a decade (since Forces of Nature), it nearly doubled her previous personal-best opening (the 2007 Premonition at $17.6 million).
Audiences still haven't shaken The Hangover, which had been the box-office champ for the previous two weeks. The drugged-and-toothless-in-Vegas farce saw its weekend take drop by 18%, but having earned $152.9 million at the domestic wickets, this guy movie has already passed the global theatrical gross of the last huge R-rated comedy, Sex and the City. (Girl movie.)
Studio CEOs, and especially CFOs, will note that the past three winning movies were made for peanuts, with weekend grosses that were greater or nearly as much as their respective budgets; The Hangover cost $35 million to produce, The Proposal $40 million. By next weekend the Bullock film should outearn the Denzel Washington-John Travolta thriller, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, whose budget was about $100 million. By then Bullock's film will also exceed the theatrical earnings of Duplicity, the comeback film of Julia Roberts, Sandra's main rival over the past 15 years as Hollywood's (token) star actress.
If The Proposal has demonstrated that a movie doesn't need two stars to be a hit, The Hangover proved it doesn't need any. Same with the starless Up (sorry, all you Ed Asner fans), which in its fourth weekend amassed another $21.3 miliion, for a domestic total so far of $224.1 million. In no time Pixar's alterkocker comedy will pass Star Trek, yet another no-star wonder, as the year's top-grossing film — until, that is, the Transformers or Harry Potter sequels overtake it. See a trend, folks? Stars don't sell movies; brands, genres and word-of-mouth sell movies.
Unless the star is — and here's where industry analysts do spit-takes with their Evian — Sandra Bullock. Every once in a while, every blue moon, audiences want to be reminded why they made someone a star in the first place. They like Bullock, they really like her; they just haven't seen any reason to go to her movies. The advertising for The Proposal gave them that excuse: it played on both cutting a successful woman down to her co-star's size and allowing Bullock to flash her trademark poop-eating grimace, the signal of a working-class gal who must protect some guilty secret.
The Proposal also hit it big by mixing a cocktail of familiar ingredients from earlier Bullock hits. In While You Were Sleeping she had to pretend she was in love with a handsome guy (Peter Gallagher) while his family pushed them together. In Two Weeks Notice she was the underling who couldn't stand her boss, then falls in love with him; here she's the boss and generic hunk Ryan Reynolds is the aggrieved assistant. And in her one solo hit, Miss Congeniality, she was a gruff FBI agent who went undercover as a perky contestant in a beauty pageant; this time she's a bitch on heels who has to impersonate a human being at the home of Reynolds's aggressively friendly family. (The Proposal also plays like the flip side of another weekend-with-the-family comedy, the Steve Carell Dan in Real Life. The few romantic comedies, like the zillions of guy-bonding comedies, tend to repeat their tropes.)
The success of The Proposal is a victory both for women filmmakers (director Anne Fletcher, who also did the Katherine Heigl hit 27 Dresses) and for actresses of a certain age, say, over 30. Bullock, who still looks great, gets started on her biggest hit a month before her 45th birthday. That's not girl power — it's almost grandma gold.
Here are Box Office Mojo's official weekend estimates of the top 10 movies:
1. The Proposal: $34.1 million, first weekend
2. The Hangover: $26.9 million; $152.9 million, third week
3. Up: $21.3 million; $224.1 million, fourth week
4. Year One: $20.2 million, first weekend
5. The Talking of Pelham 1 2 3: $11.3 million; $43.3 million, second week
6. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian: $7.3 million; $156 million, fifth week
7. Star Trek: $4.7 million; $239.4 million, seventh week
8. Land of the Lost: $4 million; $43.7 million, third week
9. Imagine That: $3.1 million; $11.4 million, second week
10. Terminator Salvation: $3.1 million; $119.5 million, second week By Richard Corliss
Jennifer Aniston stole the spotlight at the 2009 Women in Film Awards when she hit the red carpet in this custom-made crushed metallic mini, courtesy of Prada. Brad Pitt, eat your heart out!
