Five days and counting.

Showbiz hacks the world over will be sharpening their pencils (and fingernails), pouring over screening schedules, brushing up on blogging banter and taking plenty of deep breaths before heading for the Riviera resort of Cannes to cover the film festival which kicks off on Wednesday. Someone’s got to do it, I guess.

The first scheduling crunch comes on the first morning, no doubt a sign of things to come. “Kung Fu Panda”, a martial arts animation movie from DreamWorks, plans a stunt outside the swanky Carlton hotel on Wednesday morning at exactly the same time that the festival screens the opening competition film “Blindness”, by Fernando Meirelles of “City of God” fame. One promises to be fun yet silly, the other harrowing yet rewarding, summing up life in Cannes during the 12-day festival perfectly.

Madonna is at it again. At a gig this week in Paris to promote her latest album “Hard Candy”, the 49-year-old lip-kissed an unidentified woman on stage, drawing comparisons with her infamous snog with Britney Spears five years ago at the MTV Video Awards.

Some in the media were less than impressed. Britain’s Sun tabloid, the country’s top-selling daily, called the stunt “a bit old hat”. Rival newspaper the Daily Mirror ran the story under the headline “Desperately seeking attention” and opened its piece with the words: “Move on Madge!” Having said that, it should be pointed out that the publication nonetheless saw it fit to feature a large picture of the embrace on page 3.

Does the “Queen of Reinvention” need to reinvent again, or has she done it so many times that there’s nowhere new to go?

Decisions, decisions. In a bizarre admission, British socialite Jemima Khan has revealed how she decided once and for all to dump a boyfriend only when the watch he bought her stopped. In a recent article in Vogue magazine, the 34-year-old described her indecision as a “chronic affliction” that had got steadily worse over the last decade.

While no names were mentioned, the British press wasted little time in naming the jilted lover in this case as actor Hugh Grant, who the Daily Mail reported bought then-girlfriend Khan a 3,000-pound watch to match his own in 2004. The couple split in 2007.

“I’ve even found myself waiting for ‘a sign’,” Khan said in the article. “The watch given to me by a boyfriend when we first met packed up at the point at which the relationship had clearly run its course. I took it as the clear signal I needed that our time was finally up, though of course I’d known that for months.”

Would Khan and Grant still be an item had the time piece in question kept ticking?

Madonna’s husband Guy Ritchie has given less-than-sympathetic British newspapers more fodder to have a dig. The 39-year-old film director gave a recent interview in which he remarked at how the super-wealthy had priced locals out of the housing market in London and that it was now almost impossible to pick up a pad in the centre of town for less than $20 million.

Now, unless Ritchie was being deliberately ironic, it should not take a genius to work out that the comments might be seen as somewhat hypocritical. News reports say that he and his super-rich wife own a $14 million house in Marylebone, central London, and a $12 million house next door, not to mention at least two non-domestic properties in London and a $20 million country estate. And that’s just in the UK.

“House prices don’t go down, they just go up,” Ritchie is quoted as saying in an interview with Empire magazine. “The natives of England are sort of being left behind because the big money came in and if it wanted something it bought it and made a bigger fortune doing so. And as anyone who has tried to buy a house in central London knows, it’s almost impossible to do so unless you have 10 million quid.”

On the annual Sunday Times Rich List, Madonna and Ritchie were estimated to be worth 300 million pounds, or around $600 million … in other words, enough for 30 more houses in central London.

Visiting the Ian Fleming exhibition at the Imperial War Museum London this week, it was interesting to see how important he and his relatives thought his time as a reporter with Reuters was. His niece, Kate Grimond, suggested his stint with the news agency helped him settle down after leaving school and taught the writing skills that would serve him well when he came to write the hugely successful James Bond series. Fleming himself once said: “Reuters was great fun in those days … above all, I have to thank Reuters for getting my facts right.”

It was a slight shame that the company name in the quote, printed in large letters on one of the exhibition walls, was misspelled as “Reuter’s”. One of the press officers promised to have that put right, so I shall go back and check some time.

Reuters correspondents today would struggle to recognise some aspects of the world of reporting in the 1930s, but a few things appear to have changed little over the 70-odd years between then and now. While many would continue to maintain that life with the company was “great fun”, they may also understand why Fleming switched to the world of finance before taking up writing novels. In the words of Grimond, he “changed career because he wanted to earn more money”.

OK, there are some artists out there who are considered to be pretty special. Michelangelo could carve a mean nude and Picasso was quite good at painting in blue. But visiting a new exhibition this week made me wonder whether the most important factor in an artist’s success or otherwise is none other than Lady Luck?

Mat Collishaw was part of the “Young British Artists” brat pack in the 1990s, and had a relationship with one of its leading lights Tracey Emin. Like his contemporaries, his art had the power to shock and disturb. His ideas, it seems to me, were no less interesting than his peers’, and his technical ability on a par. And yet, while Hirst, and to a lesser extent, Emin rose to superstardom and considerable wealth, others like Collishaw did not.

Hirst, in some ways, is the Warhol of his time, with a keen eye on what the media and collectors like Charles Saatchi can do for his profile. He is also seen by some as a genius who developed a new way of making art. Perhaps he deserves more credit than he tends to get for amassing a personal fortune estimated at over $250 million.

But at the same time the question lingers – is Hirst really any better than Collishaw, or, for that matter, any other of his contemporaries who have receded into relative obscurity? If not, then did he just get lucky?

In one of the more bizarre Internet phenomena to sweep the music world, 80s crooner Rick Astley has shot back into the headlines after years in obscurity thanks to millions of Web surfers being “rick-rolled”. For weeks now unsuspecting Internet users have clicked on enticing-looking links related to celebrities and instead been directed to a video of Astley performing his huge hit “Never Gonna Give You Up”.

It appears Youtube decided to get in on the joke, featuring a similar link on its main page on Tuesday, which just happened to be April Fools’ Day. (The image on this blog is a rather arbitrary snap of Youtube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Sorry, but our pictures archive did not feature Mr. Astley, although that may be about to change).

As many as 15 million people, among them me, have seen the flame-haired Briton strut his stuff as a result of the gag. Bloggers have written about being both irritated and impressed by the trick, but either way it has begun to spill over into the real world.

Astley’s record label has brought forward the re-release of his greatest hits by around two weeks to April 28 to try to cash in on the craze. Astley himself is not available to speak about it, although he did tell the LA Times recently how he found it ironic that a pop song which he himself describes as “pretty naff” has become a kind of cultural beacon, rather than a hit with an obvious political or social message.

If I am anything to go by, “rick-rolling” victims old enough to have been around in 1987, when the song was Britain’s biggest selling single, will be struggling to get the kitsch-yet-catchy tune out of their heads.

The New York Times has re-visited the issue of the demise of the “old media” film critic, after a number of U.S. dailies and weeklies laid off staff amid falling advertising revenues, fears of a full-blown recession and competition from free Web sites and blog pages.

Critics have long been defending their corner, many embracing (at least publicly) the rise of the film blogger and stressing the difference between reviewing (personal opinion, reactionary) and criticising (analysis, broad knowledge base) a movie.

But many traditional reviewers must surely be feeling the heat, as are many other members of print and non-print media struggling to come to terms with the digital revolution and availability of free news over the Internet.

Movie makers will have mixed feelings about the prospect of film critics becoming extinct — though reviewers argue that their profession is in ruder health than we are led to believe.

On the one hand, there is often a disconnect between what critics say and what the public decides to do. When “The Da Vinci Code” was panned by reviewers and booed at its press screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, studio bosses wondered how the negative reaction would affect ticket sales for the most anticipated movie of the year. In the end they need not have lost too much sleep — it went on to earn $758 million worldwide, making it the second most successful film of the year.

But there are films for which critical acclaim and debate are important. Today’s New York Times article cites Scott Rudin, a producer of Oscar hits “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood”. “For those of us who are making work that requires a kind of intellectual conversation, we rely on that talk to do the work of getting people interested,” he said.

Animal rights group PETA has come up with a novel way of encouraging a major music star to give up fur. In a letter written last week, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk offered to pay Aretha Franklin’s back taxes and fees on her Detroit mansion in return for going fur-free. The soul legend owes $19,192 on the property and could face foreclosure proceedings, a county official said earlier this month.

Newkirk’s letter says animals trapped in the wild can suffer for days, and die in a number of grisly ways on their way to becoming coats and other fashion acccesories.

“Our offer is a win-win situation: You get to keep your home and animals get to keep their lives,” it says. “We are rooting for you to please give animals the R-E-S-P-E-C-T that they deserve by giving up fur.”

Newkirk said she had yet to hear back from Franklin. “But I think it’s food for thought for her,” she told Reuters.

Checkout approaches and it’s time to wrap things up from the city of dreams, the city of angels and whatever else you like to call this town. Having spent a week in LA I must temper my earlier enthusiasm and say that, of course, there is a downside to Hollywood life — the disgruntled writer who wants to leave for New York because everyone in LA is “stupid”, the wannabe actress whose dream never came true, the mental patients let loose during the day who congregate on the metro where it’s warm and dry — to name but a few.

But the one thing people here have, and which I don’t feel nearly as much in my hometown of London, is this diehard belief that there is at least a reason to dream, and that’s what stays with you longest after you leave.

The Oscars were a blast. Being involved as a reporter in the buildup and on the night makes the show a lot more interesting than watching as an outsider. That seems to be reflected in the viewing figures for Sunday’s ceremony, which came in at around 32 million, according to early estimates, a long way down on last year’s 39.9 million.

The slump was expected — the main nominees this year were not box office hits but dark and, some would say, difficult films. But what else can you do? Nominate “Ratatouille” for best picture?

And one final thing. Just as I was thinking I didn’t want to leave this town, except to see my wife and young boy, that is, I turned on the television last night and saw the following program advertised: “How to grow your kid into a millionaire.” The presenter was carrying a baby girl in his arms as he plugged the show. And all of a sudden, I was longing for England again.