Star Gazing: 9 to Watch in '09

Shop Boyz, Heroes , Resident Evil excite most P2P users

(NEWSER) - Forget box office numbers and Billboard charts: Wired reveals what people were really into last year by probing the action on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. The year's most-traded files: Songs:

1. Shop Boyz, "Party Like A Rock Star"
2. Akon, "I Wanna Luv U"
3. Sean Kingston, "Beautiful Girls"

1. Resident Evil: Extinction
2. Pirates of The Caribbean: At World's End
3. I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry

Billy Crystal brings the same old stuff

(NEWSER) - Last night's Oscars, like its Best Picture, was a throwback to a different time in film history. And though the show may have topped last year's Anne Hathaway-James Franco fiasco, it was boring and tired throughout:

• "The whole night looked like an AARP pep rally," writes Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times . "For a town that prides itself on tinsel and titillation, the night was pretty tame." "It all looked very familiar," but that "is perhaps necessary when so few of the nominated films are."

Binging, smoking crack, playing twins, and more

(NEWSER) - James Franco's self-amputation (using a blunt pen knife, no less) in 127 Hours is apparently so realistic that audiences are fainting and vomiting at the sight of it. How'd Hollywood pull that off? At first, by using makeup to create a decaying arm, explains one of the film's makeup artists. But when the arm actually gets severed, prosthetic arms and tons of movie blood came into play. The Daily Beast spills the beans on a dozen other cinematic secrets: More»

'The Dark Knight Rises' is lame ... but far from the worst

(NEWSER) - Drum roll, please: The sequel to The Dark Knight will be named ... The Dark Knight Rises. "How thoroughly underwhelming," complains Katie Calautti for Newsweek —while acknowledging it could be much, much worse. She runs down the 10 most pathetic attempts at creativity in the last 20 years of cinema:

1. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010): So it ... takes naps? What does this even mean? "Is greed better when it’s been awake for a solid 72 hours?"

Tying him to the bed is not a good idea

(NEWSER) - Everything we need to know about life we can learn from studying the repertoires of Katherine Heigl and Hugh Grant, right? Maybe not. Cracked points out six romantic acts that are a staple of cinema—and can saddle get real-life imitators jail time.

1. Tearing through the airport: It worked in Love Actually, but bust past security to go after your one true love could get you 18 months in the slammer. Crazy enough, this happened in January.