Celebrity Mound

Eminem says last weekend’s MTV Movie Awards stunt was Sacha Baron Cohen’s idea.

“Sacha called me when we were in Europe and he had an idea to do something outrageous at the movie awards,” he tells RapRadar.com. “I’m a big fan of his work so I agreed to get involved with the gag.”

During Sunday night’s show, the rapper ended up with Cohen — dressed up as his flamboyant character, Bruno — landing face-down in his lap. After the showdown, viewers questioned whether it was staged. (A show writer admitted it was on Tuesday.)

“I’m thrilled we pulled this off better than we rehearsed it,” Eminem says. “It had so many people going ‘nuts’ so to speak. Everyone was blowing me up about it.

“After the ceremony I went back to my hotel and laughed uncontrollably for about three hours,” he goes on. “Especially after I saw it on air.”

Eminem also denied reports that a thief broke into his hotel room during the Sunday awards ceremony and swiped $60,000 and a laptop.

“The only thing was that I lost a Nike watch that we were looking for,
he says. “The rest it is made up — like half the other stuff out there.”

(source)

Eminem is not having a good week.

The Michigan-born rapper had thousands of dollars worth of items stolen from his L.A. hotel room on Sunday night, including a $60K diamond necklace and his personal laptop.

Thankfully, Em’s new album, “Relapse,” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart – selling a whopping 608,000 copies in its first week – so he’ll have the funds to recover what he lost.

But he couldn’t have been happy about the live concert launch of “DJ Hero” on Monday night in L.A., either. There, the hip-hopper met with tepid reactions following a performance with Jay-Z.

“When Eminem rapped with Jay, the crowd loved it,” said one eyewitness. “But when he continued on his own and did songs off his new album, the energy just died. People were pumped to see him, but he wasn’t interacting with his fans. His performance was mechanical, without a lot of personality, and people were pretty disappointed.”

Said a second partygoer, “After Eminem finished his set, he left the stage and was waiting on the sidelines, hoping that the crowd would cheer so that he’d have to do an encore. Unfortunately for him, that didn’t happen – people started to file out before his set was even done, and didn’t seem to really care if he came back or not. So he didn’t.”

Added our insider, “There was no mention of Saturday’s MTV Movie Awards [when Sacha Baron Cohen rubbed his crotch in Eminem's face] at all.”

And while the rapper didn’t seem to be in the best spirits, his fellow celebrity partygoers had a blast. Leonardo DiCaprio, Usher, Tobey Maguire and Ryan Phillippe rocked out in the front row pretending to rap, and pop starlet Rihanna waved her hands in the air and sang along to mentor Jay-Z’s entire set.

The A-listers were too busy having a good time to catch the snafu between Vanessa Minnillo and Ashlee Simpson. An eyewitness caught the two ladies chatting about Nick Lachey, Ashlee’s former brother-in-law and Vanessa’s current boyfriend. Says a snitch: “As soon as they finished talking, Ashlee turned to leave the room and whispered to her bodyguard, ‘Awwwwwkward!’”

Yup, that about sums it up.

(source)

DJ AM

Travis Barker

Eminem and Jay-Z

Kim Kardashian and Brittny Gastineau

Ryan Phillippe and Abbie Cornish

Sacha Baron Cohen has angered another celeb.

At Sunday’s 2009 MTV Movie Awards, Cohen dressed up as his latest character, the flamboyantly gay Austrian Bruno, to present Best Male Performance.

Dressed in white wings and feathers and suspended by cables, he flew around the Gibson Amphitheatre in Universal City, Calif., while making his introduction.

“Let me down!” he then commanded.

He happened to land on Eminem, with his bare buttocks in the rapper’s face.

“Are you serious?” a visibly upset Eminem yelped. “Get the ****** off me!”

“Nice to meet you,” Cohen replied.

Eminem’s bodyguards then proceeded to pull Cohen off the rapper.

“Hey, don’t touch me! I’ve already got a boyfriend!” he yelled.

It is not yet known if the rapper was in on the joke. But once Cohen was off Eminem, the rapper jumped up and stormed out of the theater with his bodyguards, as Zac Efron was named the winner of the category.

That was really weird,” a confused Efron said of the incident. “That’s the coolest way I’ve ever been invited up to accept one of these.”

(source)

Eminem has given hundreds of hometown fans in Detroit extra reason to celebrate his first new album in almost five years – a free show.

The rapper put on a free concert at MotorCity Casino’s 1,500-seat Sound Board theater Tuesday – the same day his album “Relapse” was released.

Spokesman Dennis Dennehy says Eminem performed eight songs. The set was largely new, except for “Lose Yourself” from the film “8 Mile.”

The show comes after Eminem and Jimmy Kimmel flew about 200 laid-off auto workers to Los Angeles for the rapper’s Friday appearance on Kimmel’s TV show. “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” also plans to feature Eminem on Tuesday and Friday.

Eminem doesn’t want to fight anymore — at least not with Nick Cannon.

After Cannon slammed the rapper for dishing about his wife, Mariah Carey on his new song, “Bagpipes From Baghdad,” Eminem said it’s all one big misunderstanding.

“With the song, I kind of spazzed out on that record, but I guess I spazzed out on every record,” Eminem said in an interview with BBC Radio on Saturday. “There’s a line on there that was a little harsh. It’s a harsh line… But it’s like this, the way I look at it. I had no idea he was going to take it like he took it. I had no idea Nick Cannon was going to start wildin’ out on me.”

The song includes lyrics like “I want another crack at ya,” “Nick Cannon better back…up. I’m not playing, I want her back, you punk” and “Nick Cannon, you pr—, I wish you luck with that f—in’ whore.”

In response, Cannon posted a blog that called the song “an act of racist bigotry.”

“I felt sorry for him because he must really be stuck in the past,” Cannon wrote of Eminem, who has said he dated Carey for six months in 2001. “Not only has his music not evolved, but also homeboy is still obsessed with my wife, the same female that wouldn’t let him get to second base from eight years ago.

Eminem admitted that he hadn’t read Cannon’s blog post.

“I heard about some of the things he was saying,” Eminem said. “I didn’t read his blog or anything. But it is what it is. He’s supposed to defend his wife, and I expected him to do that. But at the end of the day, it’s a line I said. It’s a song. What I actually meant to say is, I wish them the best. That’s what I meant to say. That’s the whole message of the record.”

Does he think he could beat Cannon — who celebrated his one-year anniversary of marriage to Carey in Las Vegas earlier this month — in a rap battle?

“I didn’t plan on taking it to that level,” Eminem said. “Hopefully, it doesn’t. But it is what it is.”

(source)

Eminem says he and Jimmy Kimmel will fly about 200 laid-off autoworkers to Los Angeles for Friday’s taping of his appearance on Kimmel’s show.

The Michigan rapper says he and Kimmel want to remind everyone that real people are being affected by what’s going on in Detroit.

He tells the Detroit Free Press, through his publicist, that news reports ignore people who have lost their jobs without getting big payouts after dedicating themselves to the auto industry.

Eminem says he and Kimmel also want to show some of the autoworkers “a good time while we’re at it.”

He’s promoting the upcoming release of “Relapse,” his first studio album in four years.

Eminem will also appear on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on May 19 and May 22.

In the June/July issue of Vibe, Eminem opens up about the drug addiction that nearly killed him.

“It’s no secret I had a drug problem,” he writes in the first-person story. “If I was to give you a number of Vicodin I would actually take in a day? Anywhere between 10 to 20. Valium, Ambien, the numbers got so high I don’t even know what I was taking.”

After a 2005 stint in rehab, he says he relapsed and nearly died from an overdose after ingesting unidentified blue pills an acquaintance had given him.

“My doctor told me those mysterious new pills were methadone, which is used to wean heroin addicts off dope,” he says. “Had I known it was methadone, I probably wouldn’t have taken it. But as bad as I was back then, I can’t even say 100 percent for sure. My doctor told me the amount of methadone I’d taken was equivalent to shooting up four bags of heroin. Even when they told me I almost died, it didn’t click.”

After detoxing, he suffered a knee injury that required surgery, but because of his drug abuse, he was not prescribed pain killers.

“I started looking around my house to see if I had a stash box of Vicodin,” he says. “I’m ransacking my house, finally find something in the basement, in a little napkin, seven and a half Vicodin the big extra strength ones and a few Valium.”

After relapsing a second time, he finally came to terms with the fact that he is an addict.

“It never once hit me that drug addiction runs in my family,” he says. “Now that I understand that I’m an addict, I definitely have compassion for my mother. I get it.”

Sober for a year, the rapper – who drops his new album, Relapse, May 19, says, “I wanted to make an overall statement I’m back. It was a slow process. You gotta remember I hadn’t recorded a song sober in seven years. So it took me awhile to even feel like I could record a song sober … I don’t know the last time I shot a video sober, without drinking or taking anything. It’s been years.”

Adds the rapper, “I almost feel like a little kid again with rap. I wanna play around with different flows. If I dont feel like it’s what I’m fully capable of, if there’s one weak line, I wanna change it. Rap was my drug. It used to get me high and then it stopped getting me high. Then I had to resort to other things to make me feel that … now rap’s getting me high again.”

(source)

Eminem, one of music’s most captivating performers, is set to take the stage at the 2009 MTV MOVIE AWARDS. Eminem’s performance comes days after the release of his anticipated album Relapse, available May 19. Hosted by Andy Samberg, the eighteenth annual MTV MOVIE AWARDS will air on Sunday, May 31st at 9PM (Live ET/Tape Delayed PT.) Presenters and additional performers will be announced at a later date.

For the first time in Movie Awards history, MTV is letting the fans participate in the nominee process. Beginning Monday, April 13, voting will open and viewers will be able to select the 2009 MTV MOVIE AWARDS nominees from an eligibility list of over 200 movies on movieawards.mtv.com. MTV Mobile will also enable viewers on the go to text VOTE to 66333 to vote for nominees in the Best Movie category from their mobile phone. Voting for this round will close on April 20.

On May 4, the 2009 MTV MOVIE AWARDS nominees will officially be announced. Viewers will also have the opportunity to vote on the winners online and on their mobile phones. This second round of voting will close on May 18, with the exception of Best Movie which will remain open through the show. For more on MTV’s ongoing movies coverage, check out http://www.mtv.com/movies/.

Eminem’s “We Made You” debuted on MTV.com on April 7, 2009, and currently stands as the biggest music video debut of all time on the site, with more than 758K streams in its first 24 hours, breaking the previous record by 15%.

Eminem has sold more than 75,000,000 albums worldwide. His previous studio album, Encore, reached #1 and dominated the charts in late 2004. Certified quadruple platinum and spinning off four Top 40 Hot 100 hits, the Grammy-nominated disc has sold more than 11,000,000 copies around the globe. The #1, double platinum, 2005 greatest hits collection, Curtain Call: The Hits and #2, platinum, 2006 various artists compilation, Eminem Presents: The Re-Up, followed. In October 2008, Eminem released “Eminem: The Way I Am”, a book compiling thoughts, stories, and memorabilia from various points in his life. The book entered the New York Times Best-Seller list at #11.

Mark Burnett will serve as Executive Producer for the 2009 MTV MOVIE AWARDS. Audrey Morrissey is Co-Executive Producer. Lee Rolontz is Executive Producer for MTV, Garrett English is Executive in charge for MTV and Jane Mun serves as Producer. Robin Reinhardt-Locke is Celebrity Talent Executive.