It’s been a while since we posted about Natalie Portman. She’s been in Australia for a while now working on Thor: Love and Thunder. When she’s not shooting, she’s spent time with her family at the beach and at the park, which is where these shots were taken. Thor: Love and Thunder is currently sched…

Some sites are running this story with the headline “Pete Davidson to play Jimmy Stewart’s role in It’s A Wonderful Life,” hoping to inspire rage and sadness. And while it’s technically true that Pete Davidson will be playing George Bailey, it’s not going to be some ill-advised remake or anything. It’s a damn virtual table-read for charity. Now, did they still stunt-cast Pete Davidson? For sure. Does Pete Davidson have no place even pretending to be George Bailey for charity? For sure. But here we are.

Pete Davidson is taking on an iconic film character, James Stewart’s George Bailey. The Saturday Night Live actor and Maude Apatow (Euphoria), who recently starred together in The King of Staten Island, are reuniting for Ed Asner’s one-night-only live virtual celebrity table read of the 1946 holiday classic It’s A Wonderful Life, in which Aparow will portray Violet Bick. They join an all-star cast that includes Mia Farrow, Ellie Kemper, Carol Kane, Ed Begley Jr., Diedrich Bader, Bill Pullman, Richard Kind, B.D. Wong, and Michael Shannon for the holiday event, slated for Sunday, December 13, 2020, 5:00 PM PT. Proceeds will benefit The Ed Asner Family Center, dedicated to promoting mental health and enrichment programs to special needs children and their families.

“We are so thrilled to have Pete reenact the role of George in It’s a Wonderful Life with his talented wit and clever vocalizations. And we look forward to having Maude join the cast as Violet with her creative flair. Please join us for this once in a lifetime opportunity to snuggle up on your couch and experience this all-star cast virtual table read from the comfort of your own home, while helping to raise money for The Ed Asner Family Center. It will be a very meaningful night!” said Matthew Asner, Co-Founder/President/CEO of The Ed Asner Family Center.

[From Deadline]

A great way to benefit a worthy foundation, absolutely. I think a virtual table-read is a great way to raise money in this pandemic year. It’s a Wonderful Life is a great script too – people always talk about how “sappy” it is, but it’s really not. Like, that sh-t is DARK, especially in the parallel universe without George Bailey. Now, should they still have asked someone other than Pete? Yeah. But I don’t hate that he said yes and he’s donating his time for a good cause. I talked myself out of being mad at him.

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

Photos courtesy of Getty.

There’s been some NBA news over the past week, as various players were getting drafted and other players were signing contracts with new teams. Khloe Kardashian’s baby-daddy Tristan Thompson has been with the Cleveland Cavaliers for nine seasons, and he was one of the guys looking for a contract with a new team. He got one: he signed a $19 million deal for two years with the Boston Celtics. The Kardashians tweeted their congratulations to Tristan, which is a sure sign that despite all of the denials from Khloe, she and Tristan have been back together for more than a year. So will his move to Boston change that? Hm.

Tristan Thompson signing with the Boston Celtics isn’t a game-changer for him and Khloe Kardashian … other than the historic Boston-L.A. rivalry hitting closer to home. Sources close to the couple tell TMZ … Khloe and True will not be uprooting themselves from Los Angeles by moving to the East Coast with Tristan.

We’re told Khloe plans on making extended visits to Boston with her 2-year-old tot to see her daddy when schedules allow for it … but L.A. will remain home. Our sources say True has her routine, her family and especially all of her beloved cousins in L.A. … and both Khloe and Tristan don’t want to take that away from her. Instead, they’re set on making long-distance work.

As you know … Khloe spent a lot of time in Cleveland with Tristan when he was on the Cavaliers — including when she gave birth — but returned to L.A. amid the fallout of him cheating on her, and has remained there ever since. The 2 managed to reconcile over the pandemic months in L.A. after Tristan’s NBA season ended — signaling they were a couple again by doing things like taking hikes together. Nevertheless, we’re told Khloe’s steadfast on staying put with True.

BTW — Tristan reached an agreement with the Celtics on a 2-year, $19 million contract … so he’ll be able to spoil his ladies when they’re in town to see him.

[From TMZ]

Yeah, I mean… I don’t blame Khloe for not moving to Boston. I hope that she’s mature enough to understand that this thing with Tristan will always end in infidelity and disaster, so it’s best not to uproot your life for a man with commitment issues. And this whole idea that she’s not moving, but plans to visit occasionally is just an invitation for Tristan to gather up like twenty side-chicks in Boston. Oh well?

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, social media.

This story shouldn’t bug me, but it does. Paris Hilton lives in a world of her own creation and that world is rarely rooted in reality. However, reality is not something that bothers Paris too much, ironic given her place in reality show history. So you’d think I’d be used to her randomly taking credit for things she didn’t do or create, like her persistent claim that she and Britney Spears invented the selfie. Paris made the statement in 2017 when she posted this throwback from 2006 of her and Britney:

11 years ago today, Me & Britney invented the selfie! pic.twitter.com/1byOU5Gp8J

— Paris Hilton (@ParisHilton) November 19, 2017

Many, including yours truly, debunked the claim and went about our days. It was all a bit of harmless fun, it seemed. So why, then, is Paris posting this crap three years later?

14 years ago, @britneyspears and I invented the selfie ?? #LegendsOnly pic.twitter.com/R6M4lOqNRH

— Paris Hilton (@ParisHilton) November 20, 2020

DListed wrote a clever post dutifully taking Paris to task – again – listing all those who came before Paris and her sad little club selfies. Maybe the point Paris is trying to make is that hers is the first selfie that mattered ergo, she ‘invented’ the selfie. Maybe she forgot she said this three years ago or maybe, gawd forbid, she honestly believes she did invent the stupid thing. Whatever is going on here, I wish she’d stop dragging poor Britney into this ridiculous game, she has other things to worry about and is too nice to tell Paris to drop it already. But, at this point, Paris kind of needs Britney’s pull to stay relevant in this way. Leave Britney out of this #ActualLegendsOnly

Photo credit: Twitter and Instagram

Emma Stone is currently promoting The Croods. She’s also pregnant. And she was on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last night, so instead of talking about her pregnancy, which is her right to avoid, she gave us a good nugget about the time she took her mother to the Golden Globes and they were…

You know how the royal courtiers and British media had a complete fit about the Duchess of Sussex encouraging Americans to vote? They claimed Meghan was being “political,” and Harry was political too, for encouraging people to reject hate speech. All of those complaints about “political” royals were pretty funny, especially given that the Queen has long been used as a political prop for decades, especially when there’s Tory leadership. Last year, she signed off on Boris Johnson’s fascist “prorogue Parliament” debacle which was so bad, “abolish the monarchy” trended on Twitter for days. She also let it be known that she was pro-Brexit in 2016, and in 2014, David Cameron urged her to say something about the Scottish independence vote. Which she did. And now, surprising no one, it turns out that Prince Andrew bragged about how his mother was persuaded to say something by Cameron.

Prince Andrew let slip the Queen was going to be part of a campaign to discourage Scots from voting for independence. He told how she was planning to intervene one week before the 2014 referendum. Her Majesty, 94, told her subjects North of the Border to “think very carefully about the future”. Many think her intervention could have shaped the vote.

Now it has been revealed Andrew made others aware of what the Queen was going to do. The claim was made by former Financial Times newspaper editor Lionel Barber, 65. He alleged Andrew, 60, told him over lunch at Buckingham Palace the Queen was preparing to intervene. It was September 11, four days after an opinion poll putting the Yes campaign ahead for the first time. Former prime minister David Cameron 54, asked royal officials to discuss how the monarch could comment while staying neutral.

On September 14, the Queen told a member of the public outside Crathie Kirk – the church near her Balmoral estate – that she hoped Scots would “think very carefully about the future”. Scots ended up voting 55-45 per cent in favour of remaining in the union. At the time, Buckingham Palace denied the Queen was seeking to influence the vote.

But Mr Barber says in his diaries Andrew gave him “a nod and a wink, wink” about the Queen preparing to step into the debate. Barber called the comments “pretty bloody amazing”.

He told the Sunday Times: “That was interesting. They had clearly planned it. It was very artfully done… Andrew knew about it.”

He believes the Queen’s intervention “may have tipped the balance” .

A Buckingham Palace spokesman said: “We never comment on people’s recollections of what were private conversations.”

[From The Sun]

Yeah, it was no secret at the time, especially given that the Queen said that Scots should “think carefully” just days before the vote, and her comments were a huge headline leading into the vote. It was also no secret at the time that David Cameron regularly used the Queen as a political pawn, and she went along willingly. Other prime ministers have as well. It’s interesting that Andrew knew about the scheme though and the Queen was confiding in him about what Cameron and his people wanted her to do. It’s also interesting that Andrew couldn’t wait to gossip about it. Old Boys Club, writ large.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

Almost all of the coverage about season four of The Crown has been focused on the introduction of Princess Diana and Prince Charles and how their marriage was doomed, and the ways in which the British royal family failed their youngest and most popular member at the time. Over the last couple of wee…

I’ve been following the updates about Joe Biden’s transition, and the updates have all been refreshingly boring. Big surprise, Joe Biden has spent the better part of 50 years in Washington. He understands how government works, and he’s hiring a team of competent, qualified, professional adults who will do their jobs well. We might be slowly going back to a time where regular old celebrity gossip blogs like this one don’t *have* to cover politics/fascism with any kind of regularity. That being said, I imagine the final car crash and flame-out of the Trump era will last a few years and we’ll totally cover that, because the schadenfreude is real. Speaking of, the “Trump campaign” and their “legal team” is still being nominally led by sweaty Rudy Giuliani and a crack team of con artists and clowns. The legal team is in disarray, because LMAO.

President Donald Trump is sweating over his campaign lawyers’ dismal and often outlandish efforts to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s projected electoral victory. Trump is worried that his campaign’s legal team, which is being led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, is composed of “fools that are making him look bad,” NBC News reported Monday.

That group, which has unironically called itself an “elite strike force team,” to date has failed to win any legal victories that would invalidate votes for Biden, the former Democratic vice president, even as they tout wildly broad claims of fraud for which they have offered no convincing evidence. On Sunday, one of the team’s members, conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, was effectively fired after suggesting — again without any proof — that the Republican governor and secretary of state of Georgia were part of a plot to rig the election for Biden.

Powell’s ouster came days after she made similarly over-the-top claims at a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington.

Trump has complained to White House aides and outside allies about how Giuliani and Powell conducted themselves at that event, NBC reported. On Sunday before Powell got the axe, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a close Trump ally and former top federal prosecutor, called the president’s legal team a “national embarrassment.”

But when asked why Trump doesn’t fire Giuliani and other attorneys who remain on the team, a person familiar with the president’s thinking gave a profane shoulder shrug of an answer. “Who the f— knows?” that person said to NBC News.

[From CNBC]

Sources point out that Giuliani is still “the president’s point man on the election challenge,” even though Trump was “not happy” with Rudy’s sweaty, hair-dye-running performance last week. Because Trump is obsessed with how sh-t LOOKS and nothing else. Trump saw a sweaty, dye-running madman quoting My Cousin Vinny and even Trump thought something looked off.

Also: the Trump legal team still included Jenna Ellis, who referred to Republican pollster Frank Luntz as someone with, I sh-t you not, “MicroPenis Syndrome.”

Again, I’m not laughing off the past three nightmarish weeks. They were awful and people had every right to be concerned. But I also just felt like… we could f–king handle it. We spent four years dealing with this MAGA bullsh-t and we waited and we voted and we were prepared for the skullduggery and ratf–king and we were okay. It wasn’t f–king pretty but we got there.

There was a serious, sustained attempt by an entire political party to overthrow the results of a free and fair election. That effort is still ongoing! We’re just going to laugh that off and go back to business as usual?

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) November 24, 2020

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

Charles, the Earl Spencer, was the first one to really demand an investigation into Martin Bashir’s tactics for Princess Diana’s 1995 BBC interview. It’s been well-known for years that Bashir falsified documents in an effort to convince Diana to speak to him, and some of those documents were about her younger brother, the Earl Spencer. The Earl Spencer’s relationship with Diana is another thing which gets the revisionist history treatment, especially after the Earl’s stunning rebuke to the Windsors at Diana’s funeral. But the Earl and Diana’s relationship ran hot and cold when she was alive – sometimes they were super-close, and sometimes they were barely speaking to each other. I also think that the Earl has happily turned his sister’s memory into a cottage industry to promote the Spencer clan’s estate, Althorp, where Diana is buried. My point? Charles, the Earl Spencer, has a vested interest in only remembering Diana a certain way. While he wants some things investigated, he also doesn’t want people looking too closely at other parts of Diana’s life.

Princess Diana’s brother worries that viewers of The Crown will “forget that it is fiction.” Netflix’s royal drama introduces Princess Diana in their newly debuted fourth season, but Charles Spencer said on Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh, airing this Sunday, that the show features “a lot of conjecture and a lot of invention.”

“You can hang it on fact, but the bits in between are not fact,” said the 9th Earl Spencer, a historian and author whose latest book, The White Ship, chronicles one of England’s greatest disasters.

Asked by Titchmarsh if there is an unease on his part watching it, Diana’s younger brother said: “There is a bit. Actually, The Crown asked if they could film at Althorp [the Spencer family’s ancestral home], and I said obviously not. The worry for me is that people see a program like that and they forget that it is fiction. They assume, especially foreigners, I find Americans tell me they have watched The Crown as if they have taken a history lesson. Well, they haven’t.”

Spencer said he feels “very passionately” that he has an obligation to “honor her memory.”

“I feel it is my duty to stand up for her when I can,” he said about correcting inaccuracies about her life. “She left me, for instance, as guardian of her sons, so I feel there was a trust passed on. And we grew up together. If you grow up with somebody they are still that person — it doesn’t matter what happens to them later.”

Spencer recently accused the BBC of sending him a “piecemeal apology” for the use of fake documents that were utilized to help secure Princess Diana’s famous BBC interview on Panorama with Martin Bashir 25 years ago. “[The BBC] have yet to apologize for what truly matters here: the incredibly serious falsification of bank statements suggesting that Diana’s closest confidantes were spying on her for her enemies,” Spencer told PEOPLE.

“This was what led me to talk to Diana about such things. This in turn led to the meeting where I introduced Diana to Bashir, on 19 September 1995. This then led to the interview,” he continued. “The BBC have so far refused to acknowledge the above. They claim Diana wasn’t misled. They have ignored my inquiry as to whether the apology over their false bank statements extends to the ones that actually persuaded Diana to meet Bashir.”

[From People]

“The Crown asked if they could film at Althorp…and I said obviously not.” I’m a little bit shocked he said no – the price probably wasn’t right. As soon as he became the Earl Spencer, Charles turned Althorp into what is basically a rental property – business conferences are held there and rich tourists can rent it out for shooting parties and the like. Plus, he opens up the property to tourists every summer so people can make the pilgrimage to Diana’s grave. Even in death, people still want to gawk at her.

Again, the Earl has a vested interest in people not looking too closely at certain aspects of Diana’s life. That’s his right – I certainly understand why he is not interested in endlessly fact-checking this or that of late sister’s life. But part of me wonders if he’s just nervous about what Season 5 will bring, especially when it comes to his “character.”

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

We are joyfully entering Melania Trump’s most hated time of the year! Christmas SZN is upon us, and Melania is probably fuming about it, because “who gives a f–k about Christmas stuff and decorations,” her words. She liked to pretend that she was working so hard on all of her dreadful Christmas decorations in the White House, but most of the work is done by staff and volunteers, with the First Lady basically signing off on whatever the color scheme or theme will be that particular year. We’ve already had the stark white branches of Christmas, and we’ve already seen the Blood Trees of Doom Christmas. What will this Christmas’s theme be for her last year in the White House? Goth Christmas? Black satin stockings and skull ornaments branded “Be Best”? We’ll see soon enough!

Yesterday, Melania came out of hiding to do the annual photo-op outside of the White House for the delivery of the White House Christmas tree. I mean, there’s more than one tree. But this is the big tree which gets put in the Blue Room. All of the photos I saw of Mel greeting the tree were maskless, but some people said she did wear a mask at some point. She chose a herringbone coat which I honestly like, and I hate myself for liking it. Mel really forced herself to look cheerful. She’s dreaming of a white Christmas divorce. Notably, her loser husband usually greets the tree with Melania, but that bugf-cking coward is still hiding in his baby bunker, trying to pull the world’s dumbest f–king coup.

Each year the arrival of the #WHChristmas tree brings a spirit of holiday warmth & tradition to the @WhiteHouse. This year’s tree will continue to bring joy to those who will pass through the halls of the White House during this most wonderful time of the year. pic.twitter.com/RVHkWtoaWo

— Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) November 23, 2020

Melania’s excited: It’s Christmas time at the White House again. pic.twitter.com/CDIALxyo83

— The Recount (@therecount) November 23, 2020

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.