The 83rd Academy Awards took place in Hollywood Sunday night, but twelve hours and a few crazy TV appearances later, and Charlie Sheen is once again at the center of the entertainment world. The Oscars were completely predictable and stolid as ever, and Sheen was, well, the complete opposite.
Did Charlie Sheen Totally Upstage The Academy Awards?
It makes sense, you know? Anne Hathaway would have had to get naked (again) and James Franco would have had to be hitting a bong on stage for the Oscars to compete with the likes of Sheen. For sheer entertainment value, you simply cannot beat crazy.
“You borrow my brain for five seconds,” Charlie told ABC this weekend, “and just be like ‘Dude! Can’t handle it, unplug this bastard!’ Because it fires in a way that is, I don’t know, maybe not from this terrestrial realm.” If we were to describe him using athletes, there’s no one guy that’s crazy enough to fit. Charlie Sheen is like Wilt Chamberlain meets Mike Tyson meets Miguel Cabrera.
And he keeps upping the ante!
“I am on a drug,” he continued, “It’s called Charlie Sheen. It’s not available because if you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off, and your children will weep over your exploded body.” Then he looked at the (clearly horrified) interviewer and asked, “Too much?”
Excuse me, but... SHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN.
He went on to explain that he once did a 7-gram rock of cocaine in one night, but that he won't ever die from any of this, because "I got Tiger blood, man" and "dying's for fools." And here you were last night thinking James Franco was all edgy for being blatantly high hosting the Oscars. Pfft... CHARLIE SHEEN'S GOT TIGER BLOOD AND THOMAS JEFFERSON WAS A P---Y.
He went on to explain that he once did a 7-gram rock of cocaine in one night, but that he won't ever die from any of this, because "I got Tiger blood, man" and "dying's for fools." And here you were last night thinking James Franco was all edgy for being And as the Sheen insanity train rolls further and further off the tracks with no end in sight, at least for a day, we should all be grateful. If not for Charlie Sheen we’d spend the day listening to people whine about The King’s Speech winning Best Picture or Tom Hooper beating David Fincher for Best Director, both of which were ridiculous, but neither of which really matter outside Hollywood. We’ll remember the movies, but not the Oscars.
But a famous guy claiming he’s got tiger blood running through his veins, pointing at the scoreborad and quoting Allen Iverson, then belly laughing at mortality... That is something worth talking about. So, in that spirit, here’s a profile of Sheen in GQ that provides a look at the man behind all the madness, and traces his story to present day, when he’s just trying to “ride the winds of the universe.” Or something like that.
Watch his ABC appearance here, or his NBC appearance here. and yes, both networks are pretty pissed off at Charlie for committing to both shows without telling either network.
Which, well... SHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN.
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Okay, so... Sports! Cam Newton took to the NFL Combine this past weekend, and after turning in a pretty impressive 4.58 40-yard dash and an eye-popping 10’6 broad jump, he took to the field for passing drills, where he looked a little more mortal. And... Wait, he’s NOT perfect?
So the plot thickens... Yahoo! Sports has a nice look at Cam’s workout:
You can definitely tell that he's learning to transition in a physical sense from the Auburn spread offense to something more standardized, and the Cam Newton I saw inside Lucas Oil Stadium today was a bit of a hybrid between the athlete we've seen and the quarterback he knows he needs to be.
Newton throws with a slightly overhead but very compact delivery - if anything keeps him out of the NFL success loop, it won't be the way the ball comes out of his hand. He doesn't look like a spread offense guy from that perspective - there's no huge delivery flaw to be fixed as there is with Tim Tebow.
The thing with Cam Newton is that he’s such a good athlete, it’s hard to bet against him learning the footwork and muscle memory it takes to be a successful NFL quarterback. There may be some bumps along the way, but from the sound of things in Indianapolis, he’s further along than most people expected.
The biggest question mark with Cam is mental, and that’s not going to be answered for at least another year or two, long after some team mortgages their future on him in this year’s draft. But for what it’s worth, if teams are skeptical, they should go back and watch the second half of that Auburn-Alabama game from earlier this year. Or the SEC Title Game. Or Auburn-Georgia. Or that one season in college where he was at the center of the biggest NCAA controversy in years, and kept playing without missing a beat, dominated everyone he faced, and won the National Championship and Heisman Trophy in one year.
See, he’s not perfect, but as far as guessing at a guy’s intangibles are concerned, it’s hard to find a prospect with more proof than Cam Newton.
-- Speaking of the combine and Cam Newton, here’s why the NFL’s Wonderlic Test isn’t that important. It’s a good look at the way NFL teams decide, and it all makes sense. Except when it’s totally disturbing:
“You have to watch out for the smart ones,” a former NFL GM once told me. “If things aren’t going well, they have other careers to fall back on. The ones who are good at football and only football, they’ll do whatever it takes to stay in the league.”
-- Back to the Oscars though... Like Ufford at Warming Glow, I loved James Franco last night. And speaking of the Oscars, Jason Kirk tweeted this earlier, and Young Jeezy’s Movie Posters are totally awesome. Trap To The Future was great, but this one was my favorite:
And finally--I promise we’ll get back to sports for the rest of the day, but keeping with the Sheen-inspired stream-of-consciousness theme today, and in honor of the Oscars and Young Jeezy’s movie career, here’s my favorite Kanye West freestyle ever.
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