Ellen Back to Host the Oscars

Ellen Degeneres will be back for the second time as Oscar host next year, having done it once before in 2007. This screams to me they were looking for a "safe" host, after all the controversy Seth MacFarlane brought last time (although he did what they wanted him to do, boost their ratings in that target "young men" demo). But at least she's funny. The 2014 Oscars are set to take place March 2 on ABC.

More Avatar on the Way

According to Deadline, a deal has been struck and three screenwriters hired to start working on not just two, but three sequels to the $2 billion hit, all to be filmed at the same time and released annually. The first sequel is coming out in Dec 2016, the next in 2017, and the last in 2018.  

I can't imagine how much it's going to cost to make three Avatar movies at once, but I guess their faith is justified by the massive success of the first one. Do you think the novelty will have worn off by now, though? James Cameron is still at the helm of all this, of course, set to direct and co-write all of them, so I'll guess we'll be seeing what he's got left in his bag of tricks.

Hollywood's Highest Paid Actresses

I don't know how Angelina Jolie tops the Forbes list when she hasn't had a movie out since The Tourist, but somehow she's number one. The rest of the women are more understandable, but most of them are making a lot of that money off of endorsement deals. And the combined total is still nearly three times less than what the men make. Hard to believe, isn't it?

TOP TEN

  1. Angelina Jolie- $33 million
  2. Jennifer Lawrence- $26 million
  3. Kristen Stewart- $22 million
  4. Jennifer Aniston- $20 million
  5. Emma Stone- $16 million
  6. Charlize Theron- $15 million
  7. Sandra Bullock- $14 million
  8. Natalie Portman- $14 million
  9. Mila Kunis- $11 million
  10. Julia Roberts- $11 million

FIRST LOOK: "American Hustle"

USA Today has the first set pictures from David O'Russell's latest Oscar hopeful, American Hustle, out on Christmas Day. Here he combines the casts from The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook (Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence) to tell the story of an FBI sting operation against Congress in the 1970's. Bale, as usual, is pretty unrecognizable from these pics. 

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