TEEN CHOICE 2009 will celebrate the hottest teen icons in film, television, music, sports and fashion in the choicest, star-studded two-hour event airing Monday, Aug. 10 (8:00-10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX.

Related nominations:

- Choice Movie Drama (Benjamin Button)
- Choice Movie Actor: Drama: Brad Pitt (Benjamin Button)
- Choice Celebrity Activist: Brad Pitt

Go cast your vote @ Teen Choice Awards. And I’ve a feeling he will be presenting an award, hopefully, maybe. Read more.

It’s a big deal that’s about to get better for families in the Ozarks. On Saturday, St. John’s Hospital announced its children’s hospital will become a St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital affiliate.

For families in the Ozarks, this means:
- As an affiliate, many treatments that are administered at St. Jude will be administered at St. John’s, meaning families won’t have to be away from home for weeks, months or years.
- For St. Jude patients treated at St. John’s, their family will not pay for any treatments not covered by insurance, and families without insurance will not have to pay.

For other pediatric cancer patients who are not St. Jude patients, the hospital will work with their family concerning payments, said Mike Peters, president of St. John’s Foundation for Community Health. “We provide a lot of charity care based on a family’s ability to pay,” Peters said.

Other major announcements Saturday:
- St. John’s Auxiliary has pledged $1 million, over the next four years, to help fund the children’s hospital and other projects.
- St. John’s is expanding its children’s hospital services and hiring the region’s first pediatric hematology/oncology physician.

To make this possible, the Brad Pitt family, Doug and Lisa Pitt and Rob and Julie Neal donated $1 million to establish an endowment fund from which cancer specialists will be paid. In honor of their mother, the center will be renamed St. John’s Jane Pitt Pediatric Cancer Center.

When Mike Peters announced the new name Saturday at a dinner, Jane Pitt wiped away tears. Doug Pitt patted his mother on the arm before getting up to make a speech on his family’s behalf. Pitt referred to his mom as the “pretty one” in the back. “My mom is everything good,” Pitt said. Read more/video. Thanks Gabriella.

Actor Brad Pitt briefly sent camera phones on fire earlier today at the Art Basel art fair in Basel, Switzerland, when he lingered before Neo Rauch’s rainbow-colored racetrack painting, “Etappe,” at the booth of New York dealer David Zwirner.

The 1998 painting depicts a swirling view of a driver behind a red, Formula One-style racecar, with workers nearby carrying candy-colored hoses.

After eyeing the 9-foot-wide work for several minutes, Pitt rubbed his goatee, fiddled with his tweed driving cap, and walked away. Zwirner, looking slightly anxious, said, “He’s on the fence. Nothing wrong with that, I guess.”

Pitt returned minutes later with Eli and Edy the Broad, the major Los Angeles collectors. Pitt and Broad conferred and then the group left.

Broad, hours later, says he gave the actor a friendly nudge. “I told him we had four Rauchs and if he didn’t buy it, we probably would.”

The peer pressure worked: Pitt soon after agreed to buy the oil on linen Rauch for just under $1 million, the gallery confirmed. Source. Thanks Gabriella.

When Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie left Namibia with their newborn baby three years ago, they left behind a legacy.

Today, in Ondangwa, their generosity will see 73 bicycles specially designed for rough terrain donated to school children.

After Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt was born to much media attention on May 27 2006 in Swakopmund, her famous parents donated N500000 (R500000) to the Michelle McLean Children’s Trust.

The charity, run by the Namibian-born beauty since she won Miss Universe in 1992, managed 10 projects with the Jolie- Pitt donation. “The money was a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the first picture of Shiloh with her parents,” said McLean.

The bicycle handover is the second consignment of two- wheelers.

The Jolie-Pitt donation was also used to train pre-primary teachers to prepare children for grade 1, equipping children with financial skills, running a basic first-aid development programme for teachers and care- givers at pre-primary schools, and donating food and clothes to the San people in the Tsumeb region. Source. Thanks Gabriella.

I have to admit that when Michael DeLuca called me earlier this year, saying he was finally going to get “Moneyball” made into a movie, I figured he must’ve been smoking the proverbial Hollywood crack pipe.

Anyone who loves baseball has read Michael Lewis’ bestseller about how Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane almost single-handedly upended the traditional way baseball evaluates athletic talent. Beane was a prized young baseball player who ended up being picked by the New York Mets in the 1980 major league draft. To the old scouts, Beane was considered a phenom because, well, he looked like a phenom. With his slim, muscular athletic physique, he ran, threw the ball and swung the bat the way great baseball players were supposed to.

But Beane was a bust. He ended up playing only 148 games in the majors, hitting a pathetic .219. So when Beane became a talent evaluator, eventually emerging as the general manager of the Oakland A’s, he spent far more time studying arcane statistics like on-base percentage than he did worrying about whether a prospect was tall or lean or chiseled. Beane’s shrewd wheeling and dealing and his embrace of the stats-driven science of sabermetrics helped the under-financed A’s become a perennial contender in the American League West. Read more. Thanks Intothegrinder. Moneyball is set to start shooting June 11th.

The movie will have its Los Angeles premiere @ the Graumann Chinese Theatre come August 10, 2009! Thanks Raiderfan! Info has also been added to the side calendar.

Possible Additional Scene for ‘Inglourious Basterds’ Unraveled. Words are, the added scene for “Inglourious Basterds” will come from a scene director Quentin Tarantino shot but did not assemble for the 62nd Cannes Film Festival’s version. Having reported earlier that the helmer is returning to the editing room, Anne Thompson of Variety gave more details on the particular scene.

In her recent report, the blogger claimed that the scene will be added in front of the La Louisiane sequence. She wrote, “…it comes right before the La Louisiane sequence featuring Michael Fassbender and Diane Kruger as a British soldier under cover and a German movie star who wants to help him bring down the Third Reich.” Read more.

Scenes for the upcoming “Moneyball” movie will be shot at Oakland Coliseum sometime in July, though details are still being hammered out.

The movie, based on Michael Lewis’ book of the same name, will star Brad Pitt as General Manager Billy Beane, who was the focus of Lewis’ book chronicling the A’s unique methods for running a major league team.

Whether Pitt will be in Oakland for the filming is unknown. A’s officials haven’t received details on what scenes will be shot at the Coliseum. Several former A’s — including Scott Hatteberg, David Justice and Art Howe — will play themselves in the Columbia Pictures movie, scheduled to be released in 2011.

“They’ve done some pre-work already,” said David Rinetti, the A’s vice president of stadium operations. “They’ve taken photos so they can re-create sets of the clubhouse and Billy’s office area in the studio.”

The 1994 movie “Angels in the Outfield” had some scenes shot in the Coliseum. Parts of the stadium were painted blue to make it look like the home park of the Angels.

There won’t be many cosmetic changes needed for “Moneyball,” which covered the A’s 2002 season. The Coliseum basically looks the same as it did then. Source.

Quentin Tarantino’s film, ‘Inglourious Basterds, which stars Brad Pitt and is due in theaters on August 21, took the award for Best Actor, for Christoph Waltz’s performance. Cannes’ top prize, the Palme d’Or, went to German director Michael Haneke’s ‘The White Ribbon.’ Source.

As the sea along the Cote D’Azur shimmered in the sunshine, Brad Pitt arrived to add some further sparkle to his familiar springtime haunt, the Cannes Film Festival.

Pitt, 45, was spotted Saturday at the Hotel du Cap, having lunch on a balcony after flying in from the U.S. It is said he is staying in a chalet on the grounds of the highly exclusive hotel, just along the coast in Antibes, on the Riviera.

The star is in the South of France for his fourth Cannes Film Festival in five years. And, if Angelina Jolie, 33, joins him in the next few days as is expected, this will mark the third time they have strolled the palm-lined Croisette waterfront together in as many years.

On this visit Pitt is showcasing his movie from director Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, which premieres at the festival Wednesday. The filmmaker has described Pitt’s character in the WWII drama as “a hillbilly straight from the mountains of Tennessee.” Source.

Drury University broke ground Friday on the O’Reilly Family Event Center and revealed that Springfield’s Pitt family has donated $600,000 to pay for the center’s Leadership in Environmental Energy and Design Gold certification.

The 65,000-square-foot center will be the first Gold LEED-certified arena in the country, according to a Drury news release. The Pitt family – which includes actor Brad Pitt and local businessman Doug Pitt – made the donation in honor of their father, William A. Pitt. The playing surface of the 3,100-seat arena will be named the William A. Pitt Court.

The original arena design called for a minimum of Silver LEED certification. Features will include low-flow water fixtures, a dedicated recycling area and a solar-reflective roof and pavement materials, the release said. Read more. Thanks Gabriella.

Quentin Tarantino is so high on the Cannes experience that he worked at a breakneck pace to shoot and edit the 165-page epic-sized WWII drama “Inglourious Basterds” in eight months. And when the writer-director bows his film on Wednesday, he says, “I’m expecting this to be one of the high moments of my career.”
Reflecting on the pic over a hamburger at the Carlton Hotel, Tarantino said it was worth the struggle to debut his third film in competition. (Tarantino won the 1994 Palme D’Or for “Pulp Fiction” and also brought “Death Proof”).

“This is the cinematic Olympics,” Tarantino said. “What an exciting year for auteurs this year, with four Palme d’Or winners. If you’ve done a movie you’re proud of, that you might be defined by, then to me the dream is not necessarily to be there at Oscar time. That’s wonderful. But my dream is to always go to present the film at Cannes.

“There is nothing like it in cinema,” he said. “Nobody has seen your film. It’s a wet print, fresh out of the lab. The entire world film press is here, and they all see it, at one time. The greatest film critics in the world, who are still critics, and they’re all fighting and debating it. When you think back on your career, it comes down to these high moments. That level of excitement is unparalleled.”

Getting to the Croisette took discipline. The film had the same 10-week production schedule as “Pulp Fiction,” fast for a period war movie shot in Europe. Read more.

Architects from eight firms, ranging from a young New Orleans collective to world-renowned Gehry Partners, currently are racing to finish schematic designs for Make It Right.

In mid-March the organization, founded by actor Brad Pitt to rebuild 150 houses in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina, tapped the firms to contribute additional designs to the effort. Their visions will be released June 20.

In addition to Gehry Partners, the firms include William McDonough + Partners, Atelier Hitoshi Abe, Los Angeles-based Kappe Architects/Planners, the Chilean studio Elemental, and three New Orleans firms-Bild Design, buildingstudio, and Waggoner & Ball Architects. There was no official competition; rather, the architects were selected through informal recommendations from Pitt and longtime Make It Right consultants McDonough and the Los Angeles-based firm Graft.

In 2007 Pitt commissioned 13 architects, including the local firm Billes Architects and international star Shigeru Ban, to design houses for his highly publicized Make It Right project. In its composition of local, American, and overseas firms, the latest roster of architects bears similarity to the first-round selections. “Local architects know the region, they know the climate and culture of the city, they’re a step ahead,” says Make It Right executive director Tom Darden. “It’s important to mix that experience with the innovative national and international firms that may apply new design perspective to the Lower Ninth Ward.” Read more. Credit to Kenya and Hotspiral, thanks Gabriella.

The official website was updated with lots of goodies! Quotes, pictures, soundtrack and others. Be sure to check it out.

From an interview with director Steven Soderbergh on Moneyball.

CS: So I’d guess that “Moneyball” is more serious?
Soderbergh: No, it’s gonna be funny. I think it’s gonna be dramatic, but I think it’s gonna be funnier than people expect. That’s another situation where I’m injecting a lot of real people playing the roles. Source.