Down to the final top 10 dancers, it was gearing up to be a tough decision-making week for fans of TV talent show “So You Think You Can Dance,” but someone — or some two — had to go.

In the end, it was Kherington Payne and Gev Manoukian who were the first to say goodbye.  Joining them in the bottom (but safe for another week) were Mark Kanemura and Comfort Fedoke, who rejoined the group after original top 10 contestant Jessica King had to bow out. (Doctors told her the pain in her side was due to broken and fractured ribs, but there were no explanations on how she got those injuries. A previous dance number?)

Based on Kherington’s past popularity with partner Twitch (aka Stephen Boss) and Comfort’s perpetual lineup at the bottom, it seemed Comfort was set to go home for a second time. Things didn’t quite work out that way, though. Given a second chance and nothing to lose, Comfort put in one of her strongest showings and was praised by judge Nigel Lythgoe as finally living up to her potential in a hip hop number with Twitch. It may have been good enough to make voters forgive their painful waltz earlier.

Meanwhile, Kherington’s country two-step with new partner Mark was riddled with so many glaring mistakes it made viewers forget some of her best performances with Twitch. Her attitude in backstage clips this week may have surprised some fans as well. They prompted judge and choreographer Lil C to tell her, ”Your ride has been turbulence free. You can’t get upset just because we turned the heat up in the kitchen just a tad.”

For Gev, he lost the great chemistry he shared with former partner Courtney Galiano. He put in a respectable contemporary dance with new partner Chelsie, but was outshone by her ballroom skills during their jive.

This was the first week dancers were switched up with new partners. The weekly change will offer some fun-to-watch new pairings (like Will Wingfield and Katee Shean this week) and may expose the weaknesses of others left without the superior skills of their partners. This coming week, fans will see who continues to dance, and who must leave the stage.

 (Reporting and Writing by Solarina Ho)

Jennifer Garner, who last appeared on screen as an adoptive mother in the teenage-pregnancy comedy “Juno,” is said to be expecting her second real-life baby with husband and onetime co-star Ben Affleck.

There’s no official word from either star’s publicists on recent online gossip about a Garner pregnancy, which has been fueled by recent photos of the actress in loose-fitting tops. But Usmagazine.com reports that her close friend and former “Alias” co-star, Victor Garber, confirmed that Garner is with child. And the magazine quotes an unnamed source as saying, “She is five months pregnant. They are very happy.”

Garner, 36, and Affleck, 35, who battled each other on screen in the 2003 superhero action film “Daredevil,” are parents of a 2-year-old daughter, Violet.  The Hollywood couple announced her first pregnancy and their marriage simultaneously in June 2005. Her pregnancy ultimately was written into the story line of the character she played on the ABC espionage thriller “Alias.”

Garner, who recently appeared on Broadway in a production of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” was quoted last fall in the British magazine Marie Claire as saying she looked forward to having a second child. “We definitely wonder what it would be like to have another — hopefully, knock on wood, someday,” she said then. “My job is great to have as a mom. I get to take breaks and then work in a really concentrated way. During that concentrated time, it sucks, but whatever.”

Actress Nicole Kidman and husband, country music star Keith Urban, are “in heaven” with the arrival of daughter Sunday Rose, according to an email Kidman sent New York Post columnist Liz Smith.

“Can’t stop staring at her in complete awe. Feeling incredibly blessed to have been given this precious little angel. Can’t wait for you to meet her!” Kidman wrote in the email that Smith published in her column.

Smith added that she hears Kidman and Urban won’t be selling photos of their nearly three-week-old daughter.

The hype around Friday’s release of the “The Dark Knight” has reached a fever pitch, with Heath Ledger’s dark turn as the Joker generating an avalanche of posthumous Oscar buzz.

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone has called Ledger’s performance “mad-crazy-blazing brilliant,” while the sequel’s director Christopher Nolan has raved in the New York Times that Ledger’s portrayal of the sadistic makeup-caked villain is “stunning” and “iconic”.

The big-ticket Academy Award categories have typically been bereft of summer blockbuster nominees.

But is Ledger’s performance so bone-chillingly remarkable that it can survive the hype and the action-movie stigma?

As the 2006 best-picture shunning of “Dreamgirls” demonstrated, presumptive hype can lead to a snub when the Academy Award nominations are announced.

The Internet Oscar buzz alone for the Australian actor - lead by a gallery of fans likely still reeling from the shock of his untimely death in January - has eclipsed the praise of traditional critics, elevating the risk that Ledger will become a target for backlash.

The film is likely to surge above the $100-million mark during its opening weekend, placing the film in the same mega-earning category as “Iron Man” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”.

Writing Ledger’s name on a ballot will perhaps become more palatable for Academy voters given the length of time between opening weekend and when Oscar nomination polls close on Jan.12, 2009.

This may be one time when fading memories are deemed an advantage amongst the fickle Hollywood elite - cementing Ledger’s legacy as an Oscar-worthy talent.

For full coverage of “The Dark Knight”, click here.

Actress Sarah Jessica Parker, star of the hit television show and movie “Sex and the City,” has departed the ranks of Cindy Crawford and Eva Mendes by having a signature mole – that’s a beauty mark to Cindy and Eva – on her face removed.

(The mole is barely visible on Sarah Jessica’s chin in the picture on the left, but missing in the one on the right).
    
A source close to the actress on Thursday confirmed that Parker, 43, had the mole removed but this source could not say why.
    
Parker was first noticed without her mole this week at an event tied to the Major League Baseball All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium in New York.
    
The actress, a native of Ohio, began her career as a teenager and gained major starpower portraying a single woman, Carrie Bradshaw, who is looking for love in New York on HBO comedy “Sex and the City,” which is no longer on air. 
    
A movie version of the show opened on May 30, and has proven to be a box office hit with a total haul of $370 million, so far, around the world. Throngs of mostly female fans have turned out in droves to see the latest adventures of Bradshaw and her coterie of friends. If they look during her close-ups, they’ll likely recognize her mole. It will be the last time.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis)

Fashion Design TV show “Project Runway” got off to a cracking start for its new season Wednesday night, swiftly sorting out the good, the bad and the just plain ugly among clothing designs that featured way too many tablecloths and shower curtains in its Season 5 premiere.

Even oh so polite Tim Gunn, the show’s star along with Heidi Klum, could barely restrain his horror at the number of contestants who opted for the easy way out in the grocery store challenge by choosing to make outfits out of tablecloths, shower curtains and garbage bags.

 ”I think the judges are going to  say you guys are a bunch of slackers,” Gunn said, dismayed.

And indeed, Gunn was right. Stella, who threw her outfit together in the last few minutes after complaining all day about the ”ugly, cheap-ass garbage bags’ she had selected, only narrowly avoided getting “Auf’d” by Heidi.

It it was Jerry’s white plastic shower curtain horror raincoat topped off with yellow plastic gloves that really freaked out the judges.  Judge Michael Kors said the dress underneath the coat looked like “a handiwipe gone wrong”. But when Nina Garcia termed it “what you wear when you’re killing someone” you just knew it was curtains for Jerry.

Harmonix threw the hottest and most exclusive party of the E3 conference on Wednesday night at L.A.'s Orpheum Theater. The "Rock Band Bash" concert celebrated Harmonix's upcoming "Rock Band 2" game and featured a private concert by one of the band's included in the game's updated tracklist -- The Who. 

When we went to pick up our tickets at the MTV Games E3 showroom late Wednesday afternoon, a line of hopeful concertgoers snaked around the entrance. But their dreams were dashed moments later as their names weren't on on the exclusive "invite-only" guest list that included "24" star Kiefer Sutherland and AC/DC drummer Chris Slade.

It was clear we had one of the most coveted tickets in town.

Concertgoers had a chance to try out the new "Rock Band 2" game before showtime.  About twenty minutes before the concert started, there was a mad sprint to grab the perfect seat. But the Orpheum wasn't packed by any means, which made it almost like a private concert with the Who. 

Bragging rights aside, the experience was priceless.  Red party cups (yes, the same ones that can be found at any college kegger party) in hand, the audience filled with both young and old Who fans got to enjoy a two hour set. Band members Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend rocked out to some of their biggest hits, including "My Generation" and "Pinball Wizard," which the audience granted a standing ovation. 

Townshend, like always, shredded it on the guitar, but also showed off his humorous side. He admitted to disliking the colors of the buttons on the guitar controller (green, red, yellow, blue and orange) and called out the Harmonix employee who designed it. Apparently pink, green and orange would work better, he said. Townshend even poked fun at Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler and the recent launch of Aerosmith's "Guitar Hero" edition, referring to it as "that other game." 

-- Reporting by Jennifer Martinez

The folks who decide the Emmys this year expanded to six the nominees for best dramatic series, but they still gave a final thumbs down to HBO cops and thugs drama “The Wire”. Once again, they failed to recognize what many fans and critics hail as one of the best television shows ever, and Emmy watchers are calling the lack of a nomination a major snub. So one wonders, can the show’s devoted fans be that wrong?

What was it about “The Wire” that turned off Emmy voters during its five-season run that wrapped this year on HBO – the network that Emmy voters have so often lauded in the past when nominating “The Sopranos” or “Sex and the City?”

Was “The Wire” too real in graphically showing that many U.S. institutions are broken, and likely beyond repair? Reality shows are in vogue. What about a dramatic series that gets real about failing cops, courts, newspapers, politicians and schools? Even the drug dealers central to each episode are taken to task for dysfunction.

Was it because “The Wire” was based in Baltimore and not in a city darling to T.V. viewers like New York or Miami or Las Vegas?

Was it that “The Wire” faced competition early on in its run from HBO’s own stable of high-quality drama series like “The Sopranos” and “Deadwood” so that, by the time “The Wire” became a first-string player on the network this season, too many episodes had passed for viewers — and Emmy voters — to catch up the events on DVD?

What about the acting? After all, the lead actor nailed the unique Baltimore accent even though he’s British. But no major acting nominations were issued either for “The Wire.”  

Before the nominations were announced, Entertainment Weekly assistant managing editor Kristen Baldwin said Emmy voters would be remiss to pass over the show again this year. But she added, “It’s a very dense, dark, complicated show” that viewers may not appreciate without watching more than the single episode submitted for Emmy consideration. So, was “The Wire” too depressing in a year when news headlines were pretty depressing and people wanted escapist entertainment?

Finding answers, of course, would require polling voters at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences which gives out the Emmys, and that’s not practical.

One would think those questions might be gnawing at “The Wire” creator David Simon, but in the past he has disparaged the Emmys. Besides, he’s moved on and is now focused on armies of another sort — the U.S. Marines who fight without the attention he thinks they deserve in Iraq in the current run of his new HBO drama  ”Generation Kill.”

But that show, which also has earned some good reviews, begs this question for next year’s Emmys: Will voters embrace Baghdad after ignoring the streets of Baltimore?

(Writing by Bernie Woodall)

They did great things for “American Idol” by thrilling fans in one of the closest contests on that TV talent show in years, but can David Cook and David Archuleta turn the tide for “Idol” at the Emmy awards this year?

“Idol” might be the most watched show on U.S. television but it has struggled to get some love from Emmy voters over the last six years. The show with a huge fan base has won only one of the U.S. television industry’s top honors –  for technical direction for the 2007 charity special “Idol Gives Back.” But it has lost out for five years to “Amazing Race” in the contest for the top honor in its genre, best competitive reality show.

“Idol” got five Emmy nominations on Thursday for its most recent season that ended in May, including one for host Ryan Seacrest but nothing for judges Simon, Randy and Paula – there doesn’t appear to be a category for best put-downs!

After what was considered a better show in terms of talent this year, a record 97.5  million votes cast in the May finale, an average 28 million viewers per episode in 2008, and a sell-out Idol national tour now underway, can the show now get some respect from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences? 

Watch this space when the Emmys awards are handed out on September 21.

Actress Pamela Anderson stars in a new show on the cable channel E! that takes viewers inside her busy life. Anderson, 41, takes part in a photo shoot, flies off in a private jet to see Elton John perform and sells her bikini in a yard sale, all the while cooking and cleaning at home for her children. That Pam, she’s a busy gal.
    
E! Entertainment Television calls “Pam: Girl on the Loose” an “observational documentary,” as opposed to a reality-style TV show. It is shot primarily on film and features Anderson as both the show’s star and its co-director and co-editor. Like we said, she’s a busy gal. 
    
Anderson, a former Playboy model and the star of the television shows “Baywatch” and “V.I.P.” hails from the Canadian province of British Columbia, but the proud Canuck has made an image for herself as a Malibu beach babe. But she’s also a successful Hollywood businesswoman and supporter of causes such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The show promises to explore the contradictions in her life.
    
The show also features Anderson’s comments, in the form of her thoughts scrawled in pink marker on the screen during each episode.
    
Anderson in recent weeks has been living with her ex-husband Tommy Lee, drummer for the band Motley Crue, Lee told Rolling Stone magazine. 
    
The show premieres at 10 p.m. on Sunday, August 3, on E!
    
(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis)