Sumner Redstone, chairman of Paramount, went on the record today claiming that Paramount was ending its contract with Tom Cruise as a result of his recent behavior. I’m calling B.S. on Redstone and Paramount: he was bitter about the prospect of losing his moneymaker and was playing dirty pool by trying to tarnish Cruise’s public image.

The truth is that Tom Cruise and his business partner, Paula Wagner, were setting up a private financing group that will allow Cruise to make movies without Paramount - most likely at far more favorable financial terms than Paramount was offering him under his current contract. So he was getting ready to leave Paramount anyway…

So how does Redstone react? Like a child throwing a temper tantrum by trying to tarnish Cruise’s image so that he would be so untouchable that the only way Cruise could make further films is to come crawling back to Paramount (under far less favorable terms to be sure)…That’s just nasty below-the-belt business…

The truth is that Tom Cruise is a bona fide box office draw, and there’s no way that a studio would let him go no matter how bizarre his antics. To put it plainly, Sumner Redstone is a liar and even his subordinates are trying to distance themselves from his remarks…Shame on Redstone and shame on Paramount for not disowning his comments..

August 2006 is going to be a month for Brooke Burke to mark on her calendar as a big one. First, Tommy Lee broke the news to the world on an L.A. radio show last week that she is expecting her third child. Then, she received a surprise proposal Saturday night from former Baywatch star David Charvet.

She says that she and Charvet have known each other for years but only started dating last year during the filming of last year’s “Rock Star: INXS” which she hosts. From the tenor of the article, it seems like this marriage may have some legs other than the soon-to-be baby. Unlike many Hollywood marriages, the couple have known each other for a long time and neither of the two is currently in the harsh spotlight of A-list living.

Given the timing of the pregnancy, I’d expect to see the two tie the knot in the next couple of months before the birth of the baby. Good luck to them both on their engagement and the pregnancy.

The New York Times reviews Christina Aguilera’s latest release, the double-CD Back to Basics, but it’s difficult to tell if the critic liked the CD or not. Much of the review is a lament over the shrinking celebrity of pop singers and today’s tabloid culture.

From the critic’s comments, the CD set is full of autobiographical lyrics including a couple of odes to her new husband, Jordan Bratman. From where I’m sitting, if it is his influence that has redirected the focus of her career than he has earned whatever accolades she gives him.

While the X-tina persona she put on for some time was kind of sex-personified, she was always a better talent than that. Her voice is far better than that of her contemporaries, and if she wanted to be more than a flash-in-the-pan it was always going to need to be her focus. By toning down the sexuality and turning up her talent, she has returned to discussion to her “freakishly huge voice” rather than her latest outrageous adventure.

The turnabout seemed to come around the same time as her relationship with Bratman, so which came first? I would assume that one of the reasons she is so devoted to him is that he gave her a direction which she was quite obviously lacking at the height of her X-tina phase.

She has the potential to move beyond the limits of the pop genre and become a true vocal superstar if that remains her focus, so I’m glad to see she has refocused herself on becoming more than just your typical pop tart…

According to an upcoming cover story for Us Weekly, that very well may be the case.

If you parse the statements carefully, it appears that the chronology probably went something like this: Kate Hudson was having marital problems while on the set of You, Me & Dupree, and she turned to Owen Wilson to talk about them. He was attentive and showed concern for her feelings, something she most likely was not getting at home. At some point, the light bulb went off in her head that it was time to leave her marriage because of deficiencies in her relationship with Chris Robinson. Once she had made up her mind that her marriage was over, things developed between she and Wilson.

So, in a technical sense, did Owen Wilson break up Kate Hudson’s marriage? No. But he may well have shown her what was lacking in it. In my experience, no one ever broke up another person’s marriage. Only a marriage already on its way to divorce is vulnerable to outside influences, and at first glance, that appears to have been the case for Hudson.

To my eyes, she and Wilson are a much likely couple than she and Robinson ever made. But whether or not they’re “built to last” remains to be seen, especially in the whirlwind world of Hollywood marriages and divorces…

If you want the truth, don’t look to Jennifer Aniston or her people. Even so, Jennifer Aniston made a call to People magazine to ’set the record straight’ and deny reports by Us Weekly that she and Vince Vaughn are now engaged.

Given the media storm around her marriage to and break-up with Brad Pitt, one can certainly understand her desire to keep any engagement/marriage to her new beau under wraps. However, her track record of denying obvious truths only to have them revealed days or weeks later isn’t exactly the greatest, so what to make of her latest denial?

My guess? Not a lot. Us Weekly is standing by its story for which it claims to have four different sources. Neither she nor Vince will even admit that they’re seriously dating despite loads of evidence to the contrary, so is it any surprise that she would deny something as serious as an engagement?

The smart money says the wedding bells will ring before they even admit to being engaged….

Justin Timberlake has denied Lindsay Lohan the usual backstage access at his L.A. House of Blues album debut because she’s bad for his image. His people are afraid that she’ll get drunk, make a spectacle of herself, and just generally detract attention from Justin and his new album.

It’s the latest in a series of personal and career setbacks for Lohan tied to her refusal to take either herself or her career seriously. It comes right on the heels of the public letter chewing her out for her behavior on a movie set and legal problems with her record label after no-showing for promotion of her single in the UK.

I’m not the first, and I’m sure I won’t be the last, to remind Lindsay that she needs to straighten herself out..and do it fast. She’s quickly going from actress/singer to punchline, and if she doesn’t do something about it and soon, there won’t be any way to recover from it.

Her PR people must be pulling their hair out trying to figure out how to deal with this latest fiasco, but someone needs to sit her down and ask her if she’s done with acting and singing or if she wants to have a career because she’s about to face that choice whether she wants to or not…

Britney Spears recently talked to People magazine about her current pregnancy and told them: “It just kind of happened.“

Umm…hon…pregnancy doesn’t “just kind of happen.” Without getting too graphic about it, you made it happen. With a slew of birth control options, including abstinence, “it just kind of happened,” is a complete cop out. She chose to have a second baby, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I fully support her decision to have a second child: it’s every self-supporting parent’s right to conceive again whenever they choose. But at least take responsibility for your choice.

On another note, she also told People that she and Kevin don’t know the gender of the baby yet despite already being eight months along and ready to give birth (via Caesarian again) within the next month or so. It’s understandably starting to weigh on her, and she plans to take a break from having children and get back to working out at the gym after she gives birth.

To get back into shape, she’s going to have leave behind her current craving:

“Crunching ice and chocolate, oh my God,”she says.”I’ll get up in the middle of the night and I’ll get a Hershey’s bar, the real big ones, and I’ll put it in the microwave and melt it and eat it. It sounds disgusting, but it’s so satisfying.”

Don’t worry Britney, there are plenty of women with the same chocolate craving, and they don’t have the pregnancy excuse…

Drew Barrymore told InStyle magazine that she is starting to feel the urge: the maternal urge.  At 31 years old, even her celebrity hasn’t made her immune to the same urges that strike many women her age: to settle down and start a family.

Drew’s childhood was nowhere near anything approaching normality owing to her child-star status and ultimately resulted in her getting lost in addictions to cocaine and alcohol in her early-teens. She seems to have moved beyond that time in her life into adulthood with a healthier outlook on life and hopefully she can use that experience in her parenting to help her children avoid such a troubled path to adulthood…

For the last quarter-century or so Madonna has made a fortune from generating controversy by tweaking the Catholic Church. This time though, it might very well earn her a trip to the pokey.

A German law prohibits insulting religious beliefs, and it’s hard to see how her “Look at Me, I’m Jesus” stage stunt does anything but that. Would she pretend she was Mohammed?

Her anti-Catholic stunts are tired and get more and more contrived every year. It’s perhaps a measure of how out of gas she is creatively that she has to keep returning to the same old stuff to get attention. It seems these days that her creativity is limited to finding new ways to tweak Catholics. I can almost see her sitting down after cutting an album and trying to decide how to work a brand new anti-Catholic stunt into her promotion. It’s too much of a pattern to be coincidence, and her claims that it’s not anti-Catholic are plainly ridiculous on their face.

The plain truth is that if she was putting out great music she wouldn’t have to rely on generating controversy to get people to buy it. To me, her insistence on this sort of anti-religious stagecraft is an implicit admission that her music needs a gimmick because it won’t sell without it.

We’ll see if she has the courage of her convictions and is prepared to put on her mock crucifixion when she actually has something to lose. It will also be a test to see if the German authorities actually have the backbone to enforce a law which is supposed to apply to everyone to someone of Madonna’s celebrity…

Rapper Lil Wayne has found himself some big trouble in the form of drug possession charges after being arrested in Atlanta.

The police say that he was found with several drugs in his possession. So this isn’t just your run-of-the-mill “celebrity caught with marijuana” situation. There were no details initially available as to exactly which drugs he had on him, but the fact that there were more than one is suggestive of some sort of drug dependence issue going on.

We’ll have to wait and see if he takes the typical celebrity route and announces that he’s entering rehab…Stay tuned…