Celebs Are Posting Pics of Their Ass to Get You to Vote

Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. [View in Browser]( [Subscribe]( [Image] with Kevin Fallon Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. This Week: - Chris Evans’ penis wants you to vote. - The honorary Tucci gay pass. - A very, very bad show. - The stuff of Pandemmy nightmares. - Take the No. 2 Express line. Celebrities Really Want Our Attention The celebrities, bless their hearts, are doing their best. They are armed with a powerful artillery of good intentions, paving, if not the road to hell, then to my last damn nerve with them. And so it’s not exactly fair to be mad as much as just exhausted, because we get it. We really do. Who doesn’t survey the world around them, retreat to their crying corner for an hour or so of weeping in the fetal position, and then shriek out into the void, “I wish I could do something!” These adorable celebs, with their massive social media followings and an insatiable media ready to amplify their every move, have had some kind of epiphany. Maybe they actually could do something. And then they do. They wear a t-shirt that says “Vote” on it. So brave. A scroll through our Instagram feeds is like a fashion show modeling the latest trend in empty gestures. It’s so performative and superficial. What, exactly, is it going to accomplish? I mean, sure, if you’re going to post a photo of yourself in these times, why not post one that has four innocuous letters tagged on it and call it activism. At best, it’s a harmless, ego-stroking effort. At worst, it’s Mrs. Kushner herself, Karlie Kloss, in those godforsaken over-the-knee “VOTE” boots by Stuart Weitzman that Jill Biden popularized and which cost a cool $700, [captioning the ghastly display](, “These boots were made for voting.” They could hear my wail of disgust all the way at [dinner with the Kushners](. [Alternate text] As [my colleague Alaina Demopoulos wrote earlier this week]( while examining the “VOTE” t-shirt phenomenon, “Who is VOTE merchandise for? What does it accomplish, other than make the person who buys it feel like an activist? Perhaps the point is to brand our civic duty as something fashionable, an attempt to reel in those who have grown skeptical about our deeply flawed electoral process...But if someone is so disenfranchised to consider sitting out this election, I doubt they are that jazzed about capitalism to be swayed by a cashmere sweater, even if it is quite cute. Sorry, Michael Kors.” But even this trend doesn’t hold a candle to the one that causes my most severe daily conniption fits. It’s the “now that I have your attention…” trolling posts, in which celebs bait-and-switch you into clicking on something scandalous only to reroute you to voter registration information. Now that I have your attention, stop this trend! That is maybe the corniest sentence I’ve ever typed, but it is just about as clever as this style of activism. Am I happy that [Sterling K. Brown]( posted a thirst trap of himself shirtless, his perfect abs a road map to his exposed underwear line? Sure! Was I in any way duped into thinking that when I clicked on the link in his caption, “Like what you see? There’s more where this came from…” I would suddenly open a Pandora’s box of nudes and not the homepage for vote.org? No! Was I annoyed? Have you not read a word of this article thus far? [Alternate text] After Chris Evans triggered the need for an international cold shower when he accidentally leaked a photo of his actual penis, he pulled the “[now that I have your attention](” on us. I’m not even sure what George Takei was going for [when he tweeted](, “Well, @ChrisEvans had the right idea after all. So here's another dick pic!” before his own plea to vote. Other celebs are baiting us with purposely bad takes, like [Kumail Nanjiani]( who tweeted that “ice cream cake is overrated!” before “now that I have your attention”-ing us. You’re celebrities. You already had my attention! That’s what celebrities are! The proliferation of this structure has gotten so bad that I no longer enjoy when the Instagram influencers I follow post photos of themselves in speedos, because I know what’s coming. (This trend is the natural evolution of the abhorrent “[voting-sticker thirst trap](” popularized in the 2018 election.) To that end, give credit to Diplo where it’s due. The DJ simply [posted a photo of his bare ass]( along with the caption, “Don’t forget to vote.” Points were made! Much of this action was centered around National Voter Registration Day, which Chelsea Handler marked [with her own nude photo]( and information about registering, while Kerry Washington went the bait-and-switch route of [teasing a Scandal movie]( on her Instagram while promising more details about it in her bio. (You would be shocked to learn that, if you clicked, the info was about voting instead.) It’s not that I’m dunking on celebrities for wanting to do what they can. And so many are also involved on the ground in political organizations and efforts aimed to make change and get out the vote. There are stakes in this country like I’ve never known, in a year when a wallowing sigh of “just when things couldn’t get worse” seems to be a dare that the worst of the world is equipped and eager to take on. We need to take it seriously, and it requires every tool at our disposal. At the top of my list wasn’t necessarily Diplo’s butt, but here we are. For my entire lifetime, I’ve watched celebs Rock the Vote and threaten to Vote or Die and any number of voter registration drives, all of which, looking at young voter turnout after each election, seem to largely fail. This trend is a retrofitting of those pushes for the social media age, which is fine and expected. But it also, especially now, just seems so hollow. Yes, voting is important. No, simply saying “vote”—whether it’s in a dated PSA, on your fancy boots, or tattooed on your ass—is not enough, or maybe even worthwhile. It’s not even close to the kind of burn-it-all-down effort to really, truly get people to care about ending this nightmare that we need. It’s the bare minimum (almost literally, in these cases). Many celebrities are doing more. These things seem foolish if that’s true. Nonetheless, as annoying and embarrassing as I find these trolling posts, I truly hope they reach the one deranged human who wasn’t going to vote until they saw Chris Evans’ dick pic. That way they’ll vote and I can maybe return to an existence in which the collapse of democracy as we know it is no longer an ever-looming threat and I can enjoy Sterling K. Brown’s abs in peace. Cry With Straight Men Me: Cast gay actors in gay roles!!! Also me: Unless it is Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth in this movie that will absolutely destroy me!!! [Image] I can’t explain why the rules are such that The Tooch and Sir Firthy forever get a free pass in the debate over whether it matters that straight actors are constantly cast in gay romances while there is still no such thing as an out gay movie star or romantic lead (hint: it matters!). But it is an unimpeachable truth. Tucci and Firth, who previously delivered iconic performances as gay men in Oscar-nominated films The Devil Wears Prada and A Single Man as well as the egregiously Oscar-snubbed masterpiece Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, can play gay all they want and I won’t be mad about it. Gays can be hypocrites, too; it’s called equal rights. In any case, the trailer for a [film called Supernova]( came out this week, in which a couple played by the duo take an RV trip across England to bond as Tucci’s character starts to succumb to dementia, becoming less lucid with each week. “I want to be remembered for who I was, and not who I’m about to become,” Tucci says at some point in the trailer, specifically the point at which I let out an involuntary sharp yelp and spewed tears out of my eyeballs like someone ran a wrecking ball through the wall of the Hoover Dam. (Grab your tissues and [watch it here](.) I Watched the Worst Reality Show on TV and Survived I don’t particularly like to talk about things that are patently terrible, to desecrate something that many people ostensibly worked very hard on yet still ends up being a painfully convoluted and perhaps entirely meritless exercise in televised rancid garbage. And so it gives me no pleasure to talk about the new reality series I Can See Your Voice, which premiered this week on Fox. It is a game show—in that I believe that is the closest thing to how this series can be described—hosted by Ken Jeong in which a contestant attempts to guess which of the singers standing before her are good singers and which are bad singers, without actually hearing them sing. Instead they must rely on context clues and advice chirped from the sidelines by, for some reason, celebrity advisers, including the likes of Nick Lachey, Kelly Osbourne, Arsenio Hall, and Cheryl Hines. [Alternate text]( Jeong, bless his heart, seemed to be confusing even himself as he contorted his brain through the explanation of the rules, which still never made sense. At first, the singers lip sync along to a song that is actually the good singers’ own voices but not the bad singers’ own voices, the goal of which is to trick the contestant into thinking that, either way, they are a good singer. Then the contestant has to decide who was a bad singer from those lip syncs. As the rounds continue, the contestant gets more clues about the singers to gauge who is lying about their abilities, but the bad singers’ agenda is always to trick them. So there is essentially no strategy to invest in as the contestant attempts their way to $100,000, which they win if they happen to end the game having guessed the final good singer—essentially by random. I have a headache from typing that. Don’t get me wrong. I had a lovely time watching the show and screaming out loud about how it makes no sense. And now I am demanding credit for making it through the entire episode by sharing my frustrations with you. The Biggest Pandemmys News Without a doubt, the most unhinged thing about the unprecedented virtual Emmy Awards was the army of interns wearing hazmat suits who showed up at the winners’ homes to hand them their trophy without possibly transmitting the coronavirus. Answering a burning question I had after watching, [Variety reported]( that there were, in fact, hazmat trophy bearers stationed outside every nominee’s home or hotel room, but generally only made their presence known if their assigned target won. It’s a commitment to a bit that, as my friend, [TV critic Caroline Framke]( noted, conjures a hilarious image: “Laughing hard at the idea of a person in a tuxedoed hazmat suit sitting outside, like, Jodie Comer’s London flat, in the middle of the gd night, before having to drag themselves and an Emmy away.” Or, if you’d like an actual visual, cub entertainment reporter Ramy Youssef [came through with an exclusive](: [Alternate text] Why I’m Leaving New York [Alternate text] Banned from [taking a shit]( on the 2 train? This [city really is dead](. [Alternate text] - The Great British Baking Show: It finally returns, a miracle for real soggy bottom times. (Friday on Netflix) - Fargo: Fargo was doing the big-deal limited series thing before it was cool, a real first for North Dakota-adjacent pop culture. (Sunday on FX) - The Boys in the Band: The rare gathering of white gays that actually has something important to say. (Wednesday on Netflix) [Alternate text] - The Comey Rule: I truly do not know who this is for, except for maybe James Comey. (Sunday on Showtime) - Connecting…: I wish I had more information about this one, but I ran screaming out of the room when I read the description: “Covid-era, Zoom-style sitcom.” (Thursday on NBC) Advertisement [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( © Copyright 2020 The Daily Beast Company LLC 555 W. 18th Street, New York NY 10011 [Privacy Policy]( If you are on a mobile device or cannot view the images in this message, [click here]( to view this email in your browser. To ensure delivery of these emails, please add emails@thedailybeast.com to your address book. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, or think you have received this message in error, you can [safely unsubscribe](.