WORST TV AND BEST BRIEFS

As I age, it gets increasingly difficult to say certain things are the worst ever, especially for a jaded fucker like myself. So when the word "worst" pops in my head, it's pretty fucking bad. The converse, of course, is when something seems "best," it's gotta be pretty fucking good. So here goes, worst first:

WORST: There and Back, MTV
Former O-Towner Ashley Parker Angel's reality show. Let's take a step back for a moment. Ashley Parker Angel. With a name like that, how can you not root for a sex change?

As for There and Back, I've literally never seen a worse show. It makes me wish I had Gone and Left. Between the "my life is so hard" monologues every episode to the "freeze, Ashley steps out of the shot in the same clothes" to interpret latest fight with pregnant girlfriend or mother and tell us what's obvious already, which is that if these people actually paid attention to school, they might not be in such a "bind," I find it hard to believe any reasonably intelligent talent agent ever thought a reality show like this would increase Ms. Angel's street cred. Poor Ashley baby. He wants to make a living and prove that he's not just a boy in a boy band anymore. And his girlfriends knocked up and he's 96% brokeback and he's making a solo record that sounds like, well, a Daniel Cabrera knockoff, which I guess makes him a boy in a boy band since DC used to date Ashlee Simpson. Then he's got this great reality show that's eager to break him out of the mold of being a washed-up boy bander by firmly targeting the 14 year-old suburban white female demographic with after-school-special production values. Worst of all, it's directly after a show that I like to watch, the latest version of the battle of the scantily clad network stars of reality TV, The Gauntlet, which means men like me are subjected to soundbites of Ashley's gayriffic "I used to have money, Mom, and like now I have to work again" whine.

Fire your agent, Ms. Angel. And go get that sex change. I'm willing to pay higher taxes to get you off my television.

BEST: Academy Award Winners - Three 6 Mafia
I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought it was Guilty Lefty Whites night at the Oscars. First the Three 6 Mafia perform live with expletives blanked out, then Queen Latifah presents the award for Best Song in a Motion Picture (then they cut over to the other nominees including the white woman who sang the brutally boring new-age song from Crash - you could practically read her mind - "The fix is in. It's Hollyblack tonight." ), then Latifah says, "How did I not get in that number?" and then I realized that no one white was walking away with the best song award. Only later did it become evident that Three 6 Mafia foreshadowed the climax of the Guilty Lefty Whites awards show: Crash somehow winning best picture, followed by tremendous surprise from everyone, even Paul Haggis and Co. I think even they knew what a self-congratulatory fraud their movie was. Bring all our friends like Keanu and Sandra and Matt Dillon and do a movie together about how tolerant us Hollywhite filmmakers can be. A film about race in LA and all the filmmakers are white, all the music is tepid adult contemporary, all the characters are a screenplay's hard return away from dropping a racial epithet. Call it realistic, gritty drama.

So what about the best, you ask? It has to be Three 6 Mafia getting up there and cussing and slurring their way through their acceptance speech. How do they rap so clear, yet talk so imcomprehensibly with all that bling in their mouth? If anyone needed further confirmation that rap is an art or at the very least, an Olympic sport, the new level of difficulty introduced by the grill has to clear the bar.