1. The Help was the big winner at last night’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, nabbing Best Cast, Best Actress (Viola Davis), and Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer), but the biggest surprise of the evening was Jean Dujardin’s victory over George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role category. [via The Wrap]

2. Thanks to a $6-a-ticket Groupon deal, Katherine Heigl’s poorly reviewed new film One for the Money came in third place at the weekend box office, earning a respectable $11.8 million. Topping it was Liam Neeson’s harrowing survival drama, The Grey, which took in $20 million, and Underworld Awakening, which made $12.5 million. [via I Watch Stuff]

3. The Sundance Film Festival handed out its 2012 awards over the weekend, with top honors going to buzzed-about titles like Beasts of The Southern Wild and The Surrogate; check out the full list of winners here.

4. The first teaser for Season 5 of True Blood is online, and while it doesn’t reveal any new footage, the tagline — “In Bon Temps, Nothing Stays Buried Forever” — suggests that a Russell Edgington-dominated storyline lies ahead. [via TVLine]

5. “You have to take a drink every time, and I mean every time, you hear the word ‘Scorsese.’ You’d be surprised how much that comes up in just casual conversation because people like to throw that thing around.” — Melissa McCarthy explains the drinking game that she and her Bridesmaids co-stars Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph came up with at last night’s SAG Awards.

Bonus Buzz: The Zombie Presidents Of The United States

One of our most anticipated titles at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (oh, yeah, did we mention we’ll be at the Sundance Film Festival? Because we totes will) is Room 237, a new documentary by Rodney Ascher about the obsessive fans of The Shining. According to Entertainment Weekly, one of them posits an intriguing two-part conspiracy theory. First, he holds that Kubrick “directed” the faked Apollo moon landings while shooting 2001 — itself a mere cover for his bigger job. (This one’s been floating around for years — hell, it inspired its own “mockumentary,” Dark Side of the Moon.) But here’s the kicker: the fan also contends that, since Kubrick would have faced dire consequences if he ever revealed his involvement in the moon landing, he instead smuggled clues into The Shining, using his Stephen King adaptation as a giant coded message to tell the world about the ruse.

“It’s a film-nerd love-fest,” according to Sundance programmer Trevor Groth. “These obsessive people dissect The Shining, and they’ve watched it thousands of times, all finding their own coded meaning and language in it.” Reading about Room 237, and salivating for it, got us thinking about some of our other favorite “film-nerd love-fests”; after the jump, we’ve compiled ten of our favorite documentaries about famous films.

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For all the remakes and reboots and 3-D blockbusters, 2011 was a great year for film actors, with a wealth of terrific performances for us to choose from. What’s more, in sharp contrast to most years in recent memory, there was a bumper crop of terrific roles for great actresses — a trend that we’d like to see stick around for a while. After the jump, we’ll tell you about some of the best performances we saw this year, and why we’re still talking about them. Read More »

1. TIME magazine’s Person of the Year 2011: The Protestor (as portrayed here by cover artist Shepard Fairey). “There’s this contagion of protest,” explains managing editor Rick Stengel. “These are folks who are changing history already and they will change history in the future.” More on the reasoning behind the editors’ choice here.

2. “I am not surprised that women don’t want to see an ultra-violent David Fincher movie about women being tortured and raped. I think women see these trailers and are being scared shitless away from it.” — A marketing insider “explains” why only 36 percent of women are planning to see Sony’s “$125 million gamble,” The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

3. George Clooney has signed on to appear in a Rob Reiner-directed benefit reading of 8, the latest play from Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. The work, which examines the legality of Prop. 8, made its debut at a staged reading in September at New York’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre. [via LAT]

4. It sounds like Louis CK’s new $5 comedy special is working out nicely; so far he’s made an estimated profit of $200,000. “I really hope people keep buying it a lot, so I can have shitloads of money, but at this point I think we can safely say that the experiment really worked,” he writes. “If anybody stole it, it wasn’t many of you. Pretty much everybody bought it.” [via Vulture]

5. Here’s your first look at the new graphic novel adaptation of George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones series by novelist Daniel Abraham and illustrator Tommy Patterson.

Bonus Buzz: Why Dubstep Should Never Be Played In Public

Editor’s note: Welcome to The Fug Report! Each week our fashion blogger friends Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, the sartorial geniuses behind Go Fug Yourself, will feature some of the most memorable looks of the week in this space. We hope you enjoy it!

This week, on Go Fug Yourself, we gave props to Kristen Stewart… twice! We were horrified (horrified, I tell you!) by Rosanna Arquette. We speculated that Lisa Rinna may have assaulted a Muppet, and thought Jackson Rathbone might be turning into one. We were stunned by the fact that a British reality star was able to walk around in this dress without flashing us the efforts of her bikini waxer. We wished Mia Wasikowska would do something with herself, and decided George Clooney needs to date someone closer to his own age — sorry, Stacy Keibler. And, finally, we decided that we will always love Emma Stone, even when she’s wearing an evening gown that looks like it was made out of newspaper.

Editor’s note: Welcome to The Fug Report! Each week our fashion blogger friends Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, the sartorial geniuses behind Go Fug Yourself, will feature some of their favorite looks of the week in this space. We hope you enjoy it!

This week on Go Fug Yourself, we gave props — many of them! We applauded Kate Bosworth for hitting the Outfit Holy Grail, Camilla Belle for making a hairy dress look good, and Michelle Williams for kind of confusing us about how we feel. We worried! Specifically, about Robert Pattinson’s facial hair, whether or not Rumer Willis was pulling off her new retro-look, and about what dating George Clooney is doing to Stacy Keibler. Finally, we took a look at Keira Knightley, who we are starting to hate less; checked in with Freida Pinto, who is pretty no matter what she is wearing; and hung out with J. Lo, who told us a sad story about all the problems she’s been having recently. Although, obviously, not for real.

Margin Call, a fact-based thriller concerning the beginning of the financial crisis, opens tomorrow with a stellar ensemble cast that includes Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, Zachary Quinto, Paul Bettany, Simon Baker, and Mary McDonnell. (And Demi Moore. Hey, can’t win ‘em all.) Throw in last month’s Contagion (featuring Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, Bryan Cranston, Marion Cotillard, and Elliott Gould) and December’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (with Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt, Toby Jones, and Mark Strong), and this is starting to look like the Season of the Ensemble. In celebration of these smart, adult movies flush with Oscar winners and fine character performers, we’ve assembled some of our favorite big-cast ensemble movies after the jump — check it out, and throw in your own in the comments.

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For film fans who are not entirely obsessed with the horror genre, October can be a long and lonely month indeed, since we’re seemingly expected to spend our every spare movie-viewing moment consuming horror movies as a kind of extended Halloween celebration. The trouble is, some of us just aren’t that nuts about horror movies — but there’s all of these “31 Days of Horror” and “October Horror Movie Challenge” threads, and nobody wants to be the killjoy who spoils the party. But remember this, fellow indifferent film fanatics: the nice thing about the horror genre is that it’s adaptable. Elements of the scary movie not only can be easily combined with those forms you’re more at home with, but have been. After the jump, we’ll take a look at a few of our favorite horror hybrid movies.

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1. Apple has set a new company record by selling one million units of its new iPhone 4S in just 24 hours. Evidently, it really doesn’t matter that it’s not called the iPhone 5. [via Gizmodo]

2. Real Steel — the robot boxing movie that stars Hugh Jackman — dominated the weekend box office despite earning less than kind reviews, taking in $27.3 million in ticket sales. Meanwhile, George Clooney’s political film The Ides of March came in second place with $10.4 million. [via ArtsBeat]

3. Do you care if David Foster Wallace made up part of his his famous cruise piece for Harper’s? Perhaps more importantly, what do you make of Jonathan Franzen spilling the beans on his friend? [via Vulture]

4. “Consumers value the simplicity Netflix has always offered and we respect that. There is a difference between moving quickly — which Netflix has done very well for years—and moving too fast, which is what we did in this case.” – Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings now says that there will be no Qwikster

5. Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is accusing Beyoncé and her baby bump of plagiarizing some dance sequences in the new video for “Countdown.” As Jezebel points out, this isn’t the first time that the pop star is facing these kind of accusations.

Bonus Buzz: Harvard Is No Longer the World’s Best School

On this day back in 1947, President Harry S. Truman became the first US president to give an official address on television, asking the American people to cut back on their use of grain in order to help starving Europeans. It was the beginning of a complicated and occasionally contentious relationship between the White House and the moving image.

This week, another image of the American presidency — a fictional one, this time — hits multiplexes in the form of George Clooney, whose new film The Ides of March concerns a handsome governor running for the highest office in the land (with the help of equally dreamy staffer Ryan Gosling). In commemoration of this significant date in presidential mass media history, and with Clooney’s Mike Morris aiming to join the ranks of cinematic commanders-in-chief, let’s rank ten of the most memorable movie presidents from worst to best. (And to clarify: we’re ranking them as presidents, not as enjoyable movie characters). Check out our rankings after the jump, and let us know if you agree in the comments.

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