The Oscar montage reel is a genre on its own. It’s transparently demonstrative of the overall function of the Academy Awards. These montage reels summarize and make explicit what the annual ceremony attempts to accomplish writ large: to create and solidify a canon of important American films, along with a delimited understanding of their importance. Yes, the Oscars have occasionally given a voice to the indie underdog and rush through their obligatory movies-with-subtitles category, but besides the occasional screenplay nomination for a truly innovative film and the rare foreign language film that broaches through the marginal categories, the Oscars are by and large a celebration of American cinema, specifically Hollywood cinema. During the 2006 ceremony, a moment occurred that has been seared into my memory. I haven’t been able to find a clip of it online since it aired six years ago, so I hope this isn’t wishful or inaccurate. The 2006 ceremony consisted of a spate of overtly political films, as Crash, Brokeback Mountain, Munich, Good Night and Good Luck competed for top honors, and Syriana was in the running for other awards. In likely hopes of gaining cultural capital from celebrating mainstream cinema’s rarely explored but ever-present political function, the Academy aired a self-congratulatory reel of past Oscar-nominated films that have addressed other topical social problems, from In the Heat of the Night to Philadelphia. When the lights came back and the audience applauded with anticipated decorum, host Jon Stewart then graced the stage and stated, in a [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

I’ve found that this list comes up fairly often on the Internet – however every time I read one I’m surprised by how many redundancies they all share. While a few of said redundancies will also appear in the following (because sometimes you just can’t deny a good performance) I’m going to try and mix this up and give a you a few of my personal favorite and slightly less talked about non-funny roles some real funny people took on. Let’s get started with a picture of a pen jabbed into Jon Stewart’s eye.

Last week many questioned what the end of the South Park mid-season finale “You’re Getting Old” meant for the future of the series. Many (including myself) suspected that the ending was Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s way of saying that this was indeed the final season of South Park and the show would come to a close after the fall run at the end of the year. Last night the duo appeared on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart to discuss their win at the Tony Awards for Best Musical with their critically adored musical The Book of Mormon. During the interview with Stewart they said many of their peers approached them after the episode aired, asking “are you okay? Is the show coming back?” To which their response was “yeah, South Park‘s our thing… We had fun doing the episode.”

Every TV season there are a select group of people that really stand out above the rest. People that really push their shows to a place that no one expects. People that take the medium of television and spin it on its head. And that’s why sometimes they need the love that the Emmys just refuse to give. And with that, I bring you The Top 10 TV Big Shots of 2010-2011. Let’s celebrate these creative minds and their teams in no particular order.

Dear Mr. Franco, Before I say anything else, I just want to say, at the risk of sounding like a brown-nosing blogger writing a hypothetical letter to a movie star who most definitely will not read it, that I actually do appreciate what you’re trying to do. Many people would start a post like this heavy on the snark and in total dismissal of a star’s decision to construct their career as performance art. But I don’t. I think it’s kind of interesting. Kind of. We know you’re talented. And we know you like to explore a variety of avenues of expression. It’s not just that you’re actor, but an actor who can play Aron Ralston and Alan Ginsberg, convincingly, in the same year. It’s not just that you’re a filmmaker, but the filmmaker that made Saturday Night, which is more enjoyable than anything SNL has produced in years. It’s not just that you’re pursuing a PhD, but…well, I’m actually not familiar with your scholarship, but I’m sure you’ll publish something someday. Anyway, this is to say I’m writing from the perspective of a reluctant fan. But after Sunday night, you and everybody that respects you deserves a damn break.

Quite a fuss has been made of Sunday night’s Golden Globes ceremony. Not the actual awards mind you – everything was safe and predictable in that arena. Not even the obvious drunkenness or awkward attempts at humor with varying degrees of success by the night’s celebrity award winners and presenters are the primary subject of the conversation (De Niro’s bizarre acceptance speech, Robert Downey Jr’s creepy framing of the Best Actress category). All discourse has been centered on the performance by the show’s host, Ricky Gervais. Gervais’s acerbic monologue was met with audible surprise and even aghast by his elite audience. His introductions to awards presenters ranged from tongue-in-cheek playfulness to blatant comic criticism. He later disappeared for more than an hour, prompting speculation on Twitter (the only place where aside observations can immediately morph into conspiracy theory) that he was taken off the show, only to emerge later, without his jacket and appearing vexed, to give quite the backhanded introduction to Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, which all-in-all does suggest at least a firm backstage talking-to. With strangely perfect timing, Gervais ended the show with the line, “And thank you to God for making me an atheist” before the generic end credits music surged. The Buñuelean echo of these final words was a rather appropriate summation of Gervais’s brilliant absurdity and anarchic irreverence peppered throughout this masturbatory rich-ual (get it?). It was, in short, hilarious and the best thing about the show. Here’s his monologue:

As the only literate Reject, it’s my duty to find the latest, the greatest and the untouched classics that would make great source material for film adaptations. I read so you don’t have to. This week, Print to Projector presents the story of a political theory, a governmental style, and the greatest nation on the planet with the bald eagle as its official bird. This Daily Show guide to everything you could ever possibly want to know about the United States of America packs in the infographics and the Judge Judy references that the people demand. It’s time someone made it into a movie.

I woke up this afternoon to a little bit of a shock. Famed and damned late-nite talk show host Conan O’Brien is headed back to late night television. But he’s not going to be on FOX, he’s going to be on another network — on cable, competing directly with Jon Stewart. Interesting…

The answer is ZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.