I have nothing against, Katharine McPhee. She is pretty, talented, and very charming. Here is the thing, she is also very dull on screen.

She simply doesn’t pop, there’s no fire, no passion, no thing. She is just as pretty and talented as that sweet girl who goes to your church, or lives in your neighborhood that a really sweet voice.

For a show that advertises in the commercial , Debra Messing saying “she just glows”, it just doesn’t seem like any of the face time Katharine is given adds up to anything more than ‘average’ to ‘okay’. Where is this supposed glow? Does Katharine McPhee make you feel like you can soar when you hear her sing like Christina Aguilera, or Jennifer Hudson? Are her dance moves so astounding that you simply cannot take your eyes off her?

No, that is not gonna happen, sorry guys, but they should have casted someone with more punch, who had that factor “X”, that undeniable thing that easily shows the audience watching there is no question your a star and stand apart from all others.

Maybe once the show premieres I will change my mind, and if I do I will own up to it. But I predict a painfully short run of Smash, unless they immediately switch lead actresses. Just my opinion, but something about her just isn’t gonna sell.  The tag line “Stars aren’t born, their made ” would be a pretty honest way to describe this mess.

Watch the full pilot episode for Smash and tell me what you think?

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I am not too sure if this should become a trend. Especiall when your only 11 years old. But Willow has some major guts to take this move and in my opinion, she is killing it! You go girl !  Here is the fully story from Huff Post.

Willow Smith may be known for whipping her hair back and forth, but it looks like she’s going to have to find a new signature catch phrase.

The singer, daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, debuted a new, short look on her WhoSay page via Twitter Thursday. In fact, it looks like Smith ditched her hair altogether and is now sporting a shaved head, similar to her dad and brother Jaden’s new looks.

Smith gave no explanation or reason as to why she decided to switch up her look, but she’s certainly in good company.

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So who is he planning to bring in to replace them? If rumours are to be believed, he is eyeing up Beyonce and Mariah Carey to be on the judging panel for season two. He’ll do anything to encourage people to look away from Cheeky Bingo or their Android, long enough to boost the ratings, I suppose.

The Chicago Sun-Times have claimed that Simon is convinced big name stars are the key to gaining the much hyped X Factor some momentum. It seemed to work for American Idol. Steven Tyler and Jennifer Lopez have made the show entertaining again after all, and the show did out perform his latest project.

You can’t deny his logic though. Miss Knowles does have huge appeal and influence. Not to mention both she and Jay Z have expressed interest in the UK version of X Factor in the past. Beyonce performed with one of the finalists, Alexandra Burke (who later became the winner) in 2008. You could easily argue that she helped tip the votes in her favour.

Considering she has not long given birth, will she want to spend her time as a mentor on the X Factor, when she could be spending it with her new born Blue Ivy Carter? Then again she is a workaholic and I don’t believe for a moment that she will become a full-time stay at home Mom.

I guess we’ll see how this one plays out, but my guess is, she won’t do it.

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Once upon a time, Black actresses and singers had to straighten their hair to even get a foot in the door. But after Cicely Tyson rocked cornrows on the 1960′s TV show “East Side West Side,” and Pam Grier and Chaka Khan sported proud ‘fros in the ’70s, perceptions slowly (verrry slowly) began to change.

These days, a slew of celebs have decided to embrace the beauty of their natural tresses — to gorgeous, inspirational results. From YaYa DaCosta to Esperanza Spalding, here are our favorite natural-haired stars of 2011.

 

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While Keys talked about being pregnant and empathic when filming her documentary about AIDS in Africa, the U2 singer chimed in and said: “She’s scary, isn’t she? She’s scary.”

 

Bono went on to say that Keys has “lioness energy” and that her role as a new mother won’t allow her to “let other mothers suffer.”

He made the comments at the premiere of “Keep a Child Alive with Alicia Keys,” a documentary which followed a visit to South Africa during last year’s World Cup with a pregnant Keys and five Americans. It airs on Showtime on Dec. 1, which is World AIDS Day.

Bono said he met Keys when they recorded a cover of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” – with dozens of other musicians – in 2001.

“I was terrified the moment I met her. I was shaking in my boots,” he said. “I was very moved by her singing of course, but what was interesting was the hard questions afterwards, and I think it’s those hard questions that she asks that lead her.”

Keys started her charity, Keep a Child Alive, in 2003. It assists those affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa and India.

She says she hopes the film reaches out to those who want to help, but can’t make it to Africa.

“Even if you never have been able to travel there, or if you never can, that doesn’t mean you can’t travel with us and really see it for yourself,” she said.

Bono says Keys has what it takes to make a difference in Africa, and around the world.

“Everyone’s got heart, but actually you have to have the head for this,” he said. “You have to be tough and strategic, you have to be demanding, (and) the money has to be spent well.” If the money isn’t spent well, he said, people get annoyed, “and so all these things take a certain intellectual rigor.”

Keys has composed music for the Broadway play “Stick Fly,” which debuts next week. When Bono – who along with the Edge wrote the music for “Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark” – was asked what advice he could give Keys, he said: “You know, it’s an amazing American tradition, Broadway, and she can do anything she wants.”

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“Honey,” Blige says, “there are no distractions when you’re onstage, because you are where you live. When I’m on that stage, I’m not worried about my heels, I’m not worried about my hair. My pony­tail could fly off and it wouldn’t even matter to me. Because once you make that connection with those people, nothing else matters.”

Blige, 40, has called herself a singer who thinks like a rapper. She is bluntly honest about what she calls the “drama” in her life: molestation by a family friend at age five; abandonment by her father at eight; childhood in the rough Schlobohm (aka “Slow Bomb”) projects of Yonkers, New York; and the rocky relationships of her twenties. Even now, after 10 albums (her latest, My Life II… The Journey Continues (Act 1), is out this month), 28 Grammy nominations and nine wins; after becoming a happily married, perfume-selling, sunglass-designing mogul living in a bucolic New Jersey manse, she remains for fans a conduit to emotions they often can’t acknowledge, let alone articulate. “I can’t save every man and woman on planet Earth; I’m not God. Let’s be clear on that,” Blige says with a laugh. “What I am is a vessel and a friend. What I’m here for is to walk outside and have someone say ‘Wow, this song got me through this when I was going through this’ and then lay the story on me.”

Now, with two movies in the works, Blige is about to show us just how far her gift for connection extends. Acting, she says, has been a dream since grade school, but she knows there’s work to do: coaches, practice, patience. “I don’t want to be the singer that just got the part,” she says. “I want to earn it.”

In August, she wrapped next summer’s Rock of Ages, based on the audaciously campy, fourth wall–trouncing Broadway musical (picture Hair meets The Rocky Horror Picture Show on L.A.’s Sunset Strip in the ’80s). In addition to Tom Cruise singing Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” it features Alec Baldwin, Russell Brand, Paul Giamatti, and Dancing With the Stars alum Julianne Hough. Blige plays gold-jumpsuited strip club owner Justice Charlier, who delivers a familiar-sounding message—“to encourage [her strippers] to feel good and take their power back from whatever dark place it was taken before they even came to work there”—by way of Pat Benatar’s “Shadows of the Night” and Journey’s “Any Way You Want It.” All of which is to Blige’s apparent delight. “I was a kid in the 1980s,” she says. “I remember the day the ‘Thriller’ video hit television, and we all cut school and ran home to watch it. I remember Hall & Oates, Tears for Fears; ‘Love Is a Battlefield’ being everybody’s favorite song at the moment. I’ve been brought up on music, not just R&B but music.”

The true test of her big-screen skills will come this fall, when Blige begins filming what could be the role of a lifetime, as Nina Simone in a long-gestating biopic written and directed by Cynthia Mort (creator of HBO’s Tell Me You Love Me). Simone, born into the large family of a poor preacher and handyman in Tryon, North Carolina, became a star of the radical ’60s black intelligentsia for channeling Civil Rights–era rage into anthems like “Mississippi Goddam.” Ultimately, though, Simone found a warmer reception in the smoky boîtes of Paris than in her home country. It’s easy to see why Mort, some seven years ago, told Blige, “You are my Nina”: Onstage, Simone could saturate a single word with more feeling than other artists channel into entire albums. But Simone was difficult, erratic; later in her career, she was said to have suffered from schizophrenia.

When the idea arose, Blige had little idea who Nina Simone was—she’d heard the name, but thought the dusky voice behind “I Put a Spell on You” and “My Baby Just Cares for Me” was a man’s. Since then, though, “I learned that she was a woman on the search for love, as well. You know, looking for love, standing up for her rights, and not being understood.” For Blige, a high school dropout who earned her GED at the age of 39—and who has admitted that, early on, she found record execs’ jargony talk intimidating—Simone’s flinty intellect struck a sensitive chord. “No one could ever belittle her in a conversation. She was not a mess,” says Blige. “Spirituality? My God, this woman makes the hair stand up on my legs just talking about her.”

Simone might appreciate the title of Blige’s new album, My Life II… The Journey Continues (Act 1). Her iconic 1994 effort, My Life, was recorded at a time “when we didn’t know if we were going to live or die,” she says. “It spoke from such a place of ‘I need help, we all need help.’” Today, she and her fans have sustained each other. “Now we can say we’re beautiful, we’re strong, we’re confident.” Not that it’s all sunshine and champagne. “To sit back and lie and say everything is wonderful in anybody’s life?” She chuckles. “My fans would be like, ‘Come on, man.’”

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Following brief stints on the popular kids shows “The Great Space Coaster” and “Captain Kangaroo,” Clash made his “Sesame Street” debut in 1984, as the voice of Baby Natasha and Hoots the Owl. Clash said that Henson told him to “just be as silly as you want. Muppets are rebellious and that’s the way they should be. Don’t take it too seriously.”

“What I loved about Jim was that he was the boss, but he really felt as though everybody was an ensemble,” Clash told Huffington Post BlackVoices. “He wanted everybody to chime in.”

But when Clash started at Sesame Street, he wasn’t in charge of voicing the character that would make him famous.

“It’s always been troubleshooting on ‘Sesame Street,’” Clash said. “If you watched the shows in the beginning, as far as what Big Bird or the Muppets looked like, they were a lot more primitive … and they evolved as the show evolved and became more and more works of art.”

Several Sesame Street vets had taken turns trying to give Elmo, an overlooked red puppet created by the team, some kind of distinct personality. “It started with Brian Muehl, who performed on a couple of shows. Then Richard Hunt, who was one of the more seasoned puppeteers who had worked with Jim Henson, took him on and didn’t want him and threw him to me. And it stuck with me once I got it.”

Clash decided to revamp Elmo’s original persona — which included a deep caveman voice — into something more lovable. He made Elmo a curious, energetic three-year old. Clash said that of all his characters, Elmo is the one that audiences gravitated toward to. “And by them latching on, Elmo’s on a lot. And the more that he’s on, the more I can do a lot of things with him. The more I get to know the character.”

Clash’s reinvention of Elmo was so successful that it resulted in a global merchandising campaign.

“Sesame Street knew about branding, and I just so happened to be a part of it,” he explained. “Sesame Street knew that the demographic of the kids were younger, and so that’s where the origins of Elmo came from. And then the next step was taking him out with research and seeing if the kids were actually not only laughing and enjoying him, but also learning from him, and they found that out. And then of course the next step was putting him out and merchandising him.”

The award-winning puppeteer-actor chronicled his evolution as the voice of Elmo in his 2006 autobiography “My Life as a Furry Red Monster: What Elmo Has Taught Me About Life, Love, and Laughing Out Loud,” from which the new documentary “Being Elmo” has taken its inspiration. The film, which took almost six years to make, has already won the Audience Award and a Special Jury Award for Most Life-Affirming Documentary at the Traverse City Film Festival.

“It was something that [the producer and director] Constance Marks approached me about doing: a doc on the phenomena of Elmo and me working with the Muppets,” he said. “I had to definitely find what I had, as far as pictures and video. And plus telling them things that I have gone through over the years that they might want to try to find and use. So I was definitely hands-on helping.”

“It wasn’t about me showing my face or anything,” he adds. “I felt as though we would definitely get into an era where CGI and animation were the forefront, as far as on TV and in film,” he said. “There’s a medium here that is wonderful, that everyone still loves, which is “Sesame Street” and the Muppets. And I wanted to talk about that. We’re still here and that this is a medium that shouldn’t go away.”

Now Clash is not just the voice and soul of an iconic character, but Sesame Street’s senior puppet coordinator and Muppet Captain, as well as Sesame Workshop’s senior creative consultant. Clash feels that it is his duty to help keep the puppetry tradition alive around the world by doing more public appearances.

“Any nationality can do this. The only reason that I’m showing myself is really to just talk about the excitement that I’ve had over so many years of being a puppeteer,” he admitted. “And the love and enjoyment that I’ve had with working with such incredible people.”

Clash said he wasn’t planning on handing over Elmo just yet, and is looking forward to developing his own films and other projects. “[Elmo]‘s going strong, and I’m still looking forward and enjoying performing him. So I’m very happy where I’m at. I’m going to branch out as far as other things that I would like to do, but I’m still going to be there to hang out and perform Elmo.”

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Rapper Rick Ross opened up on BET’s “106 & Park” yesterday, discussing, for the first time, the two seizures he suffered on an October 14th flight to Memphis. “It was a case of me not getting enough rest, enough sleep,” he said.

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, seizures are often triggered by factors such as lack of sleep, alcohol consumption, and stress. For women, hormonal changes associated with the menstrual cycle can also act as a trigger.

While these seizure triggers do not cause epilepsy, they can cause breakthrough seizures in people who otherwise experience good seizure control with their medication. “Sleep deprivation in particular is a universal and powerful trigger of seizures,” NINDS says.

The National Sleep Foundation explains, at greater length, the inherent relationship between sleep and epilepsy:

Sleep activates the electrical charges in the brain that result in seizures and seizures are timed according to the sleep wake cycle. For some people, seizures occur exclusively during sleep. This is especially true for a particular type of epilepsy known as benign focal epilepsy of childhood, also known as Rolandic epilepsy. When seizures occur during sleep, they may cause awakenings that are sometimes confused with insomnia. Epilepsy patients are often unaware of the seizures that occur while they sleep. They may suffer for years from daytime fatigue and concentration problems without ever knowing why.For people with epilepsy, sleep problems are a double-edged sword; epilepsy disturbs sleep and sleep deprivation aggravates epilepsy.

“For this reason, people with epilepsy should make sure to get enough sleep and should try to stay on a regular sleep schedule as much as possible,” NINDS recommends.

Rick Ross says he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in 5 years. And although his doctor has given him a clean bill of health, Ross says he’s making room for naps, according to TMZ.

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One of the hardest-working actors in Hollywood just so happens to also be the highest-grossing actors of all time.

Samuel L. Jackson has grossed an astounding $7.42 billion over the span of his entire film career by the Guinness Book of World Record.

Jackson, 62, received his biggest break in the industry, starring in the 1991 Spike Lee film “Jungle Fever.” Since then, the actor has appeared in over 100 films from his critically acclaimed performance in “Pulp Fiction” to landing a recurring role in the galactic space film series “Star Wars.”

This honor can’t come as much of a surprise to many.

Not only has Jackson filmed such a vast amount of work that his career needs its own separate Wikipedia page, but he also averages three to four films a year. He filmed 6 movies in 2010, 4 in 2011, and is already cast for three movies next year in 2012.

Where does he get his drive?

In an interview with CBS News, Jackson, who’s currently starring as Martin Luther King Jr. in the new Broadway production “The Mountaintop” alongside Angela Bassett, attributed his success and work ethic to his upbringing.

“I grew up in a working class family,” he said. “When I was a kid, all the adults in my house got up and went to work every day. I assumed that’s what grown people do. That’s what I do. I just happen to have a very interesting job that’s kind of cool!”

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