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?

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.