No pictures = no news. Although it was really big news yesterday (at 2.30 p.m. I counted seven separate Brangelina items on people.com) the frenzy has died down faster than I would have predicted. The reason for this, presumably, is that there are no available pictures of the event and no video. Although reporters like Lama Hasan at ABC have been sent to France and are reporting from outside the gates of the castle, there's not much to report on that wasn't covered yesterday.
How's Jennifer taking it? For better or for worse, the former Mrs. Brad Pitt is forever locked into a pop culture triangle with the new Mrs. Brad Pitt and her husband. Although it's almost certainly a coincidence, the big wedding news broke the day after not only the premiere of Aniston's new movie (Life of Crime, which opens today) but also the very funny Friends reunion segment on Jimmy Kimmel Wednesday night. And yes, Jennifer's moment in the spotlight did get swallowed up in the tsunami of wedding coverage.
Why five days? So why did the Pitts pick this particular week-end, then wait five days to announce the news? No one knows for sure but Soraya Nadia McDonald at the Washington Post has an intriguing theory: it's because of the NFL.
First off, the Hollywood press was fully occupied by the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday and the Emmys on Monday, two glitzy, star-studded events where the couple wouldn’t be missed...
Normally, the Emmys are in September, and they air on Sunday. This year, they were bumped up a month and to a Monday because of one thing: professional football. The big networks (NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox) air the Emmys by rotation, and this year, the duty fell to NBC, which is also the home of Sunday Night Football. There was no way NBC was going to dump perfectly good football money for the Emmys, nor bother putting it up against Monday Night Football later in the fall.
So that’s how we ended up with back-to-back award shows, the Emmys airing on a Monday for the first time in 38 years, and no one paying attention to Hollywood’s biggest couple.
Waiting until Thursday also screwed the tabloids and McDonald says this was not a coincidence. New issues are published on Wednesday and start to appear on newstands on Thursday. By the time next week's editions are published the wedding will be old news, especially if no pictures are released. Really. Read the entire article here.
Who benefited most from this whole thing? Josh Shaw gets my vote. Who's Josh Shaw? He's the USC football player who jumped off a second-story balcony to save his nephew who was drowning in a pool. He sprained both ankles in the process and was hailed as a hero. Except he didn't and wasn't. Questions about what really happened started to bubble up on Tuesday and by Wednesday afternoon Shaw had confessed. He made the whole up. He also hired a big-deal criminal defense attorney, which of course made it look as though there had to be more to the story. This was covered in detail on the Thursday morning news shows, but by the time they went off the air the wedding news had broken and the mainstream media quickly pivoted. People in the sports world, and bloggers (including me,) are still curious about how Josh Shaw really hurt himself, but I'd guess he's very grateful to Brad and Angelina for getting married and blasting him out of the spotlight, at least temporarily.
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