March 1, 2009 – When Franz Ferdinand broke big, Alex Kapranos seemed older and wiser than many of his buzzy peers. Little surprise, then, that his band is still thriving five years on. "I hope we haven't written our best song," he says. "That's the sign a band is still alive  — they're not satisfied." Either Alex Kapranos is hungry or the traditional English dish of beans on toast has played a pretty memorable role in his life.

February 26, 2009 – Sam Eastgate, frontman for English electro rockers Late of the Pier, recalls when he swore off the synthesizer. "I found one behind the shelves in our living room," says the 21-year-old, whose father played in obscure '80s rock act My Dog Has No Nose. "It was a weird plastic thing covered in dials. I thought, 'I'll never learn to play that.' " Long story short: He did. It was during science class in 2003 that Eastgate and his lab partner, Ross Dawson, decided to form a band. So he, Dawson (on drums), and pals Sam Potter (keys) and Andrew Faley (bass) began ditching school in Castle Donington to write experimental pop songs. "We liked to change the key and the speed in the middle so that it sounded kind of wrong," he says. All those skipped classes resulted in Fantasy Black Channel (Astralwerks), a kinetic debut replete with -- whaddya know?

January 22, 2009 – Today's Academy Award nominations yielded a few surprises: Revolutionary Road was almost entirely ignored (and rightly so), while the little-movie-that-could, Slumdog Millionaire, snagged 10 nods -- not far behind The Curious Case of Brad Pitt... er, Benjamin Button, with a shocking 13. But mostly the list was kind of a snooze. To elaborate: 1) The Reader?!? It's about an illiterate Nazi statutory rapist. And even though each of those Important Issues would merit a movie of their own, it still wasn't well-received by the critics. That this was nominated for Best Picture proves the Academy hates fun. 2) Or at least they hate entertainment. While the fact that The Dark Knightwas the highest grossing movie of 2008 shouldn't qualify it for Best Picture, the fact that it was also unanimously praised should.

January 18, 2009 – Usually when someone says, "Music should be as free as water," it's safe to assume they don't make music for a living (or pay for water). Charles Hamilton is one exception. Since he signed to Interscope nearly a year ago, the Harlem-bred, stylistically scattershot producer/MC/singer/blogger has put more than 70 tracks online gratis. Label honcho Jimmy Iovine even gave him his own imprint, Demevolist, on which to release The Pink Lavalamp, an oddball-soul album that Hamilton made when he was a heroin-abusing teenager. "We have a mutual understanding, which is that I'm not here to do what your conventional artist does," says Hamilton, now a clean-cut 21-year-old who favors Sonic the Hedgehog T-shirts. Clarification: He's expected to release an album this year, it may involve Pharrell, and it will be sold -- for money. When the new album does arrive, it will follow a busy year.

December 15, 2008 – Few people have escaped the stigma of teen stardom -- or of stardom, period -- as entirely as Michelle Williams. Her roles this year in Synecdoche, New York and Wendy and Lucy are enough to make you forget her tabloid existence and even go, Jen who? Jen Lindley, of course. Williams first big-break was "the bad girl from New York" on Dawson's Creek whose sole reason for being there initially was to charm the substantially-foreheaded hero while the audience instead rooted for him to notice Katie Holmes. Over the course of the show's six seasons, though, Williams outgrew the Creek and outshined her stars (including the pre-Cruisified Holmes); towards the series' end she even made some vague murmurings to the effect of wanting it to be over, which resulted in the meting out of the Ultimate Character Punishment: single motherhood, fast-acting illness, death.

December 5, 2008 – A few months ago, nobody knew who Kristen Stewart was. Now, thanks largely to Twilight's huge opening weekend, she's just a blog post away from her very own celebrity nickname. This might not be good news for K-Stew because it probably means she will be answering stupid questions about dating vampires until Breaking Dawn comes out on DVD. (For the uninitiated: that's the fourth and final book in Stephenie Meyer's young adult series; film adaptations of the other two, New Moon and Eclipse, are already a go and the whole enterprise has created mass hysteria --seriously, have you not heard about this?) Generally, though, Twilight's success is great because not only does picturing Stewart as Bella Swan make Meyer's swoon-y heroine more tolerable for some of us, it also helped her land the role of Joan Jett in the upcoming biopic The Runaways.

November 20, 2008 – At last, Twilight is in theaters! But is it any good? Basically, the movie succeeds where the book faltered. Rob Pattinson's Edward and Kristen Stewart's Bella not only look the part, but they massage the kinks out of Stephenie Meyer's characters: He isn't weirdly paternal, she doesn't come across as weak and insecure. And the supporting cast adequately modernizes the Forks High School clique, particularly Anna Kendrick as the aggressively ordinary Jessica. One of the minor characters even uses the word "chillax." Wha!? Meyer's prelapsarian, page-bound kids don't use slang, just like they don't curse or update Facebook pages.

November 13, 2008 – Times may be grim but director Danny Boyle is optimistic -- sort of. His new film, Slumdog Millionaire (out this week), is not the daffy, uplifting affair that Little Miss Sunshine was but much like that 2006 sleeper hit, it's a frontrunner for Heartwarming Indie That Earns an Oscar: An indigent orphan in India relates the story of his childhood and a long-lost sweetheart via his correct answers on the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Those answers result in a journey through the shantytowns and alleyways of Mumbai (M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" scores some of the light-hearted moments) and the romance that persists is unlike anything in previous Boyle films:no heroin, no zombies. Just two cute teenagers. To get you in the mood -- or, in the case of Trainspotting, maybe to ruin it -- we've called out five memorable scenes from previous Boyle enterprises:1.

November 6, 2008 – A few weeks back, I admitted to "investigating" (read: getting sucked in by) the Twilight phenomenon and reading the first book. In the intervening weeks, the madness continued.I not only bought and finished New Moon (more on Book 2 of the vampire saga later) but I also voluntarily went to Planet Hollywood to see Edward Cullen speak. The actor playing the blood-lusting leading man from Stephanie Meyer's' series has a name, of course, but Rob Pattinson is, in many ways, practically unknown. Pattinson drives twihards into paroxysms of desire -- the screams were nausea-inducing -- not because he's a handsome young actor (which he is) but because he is Edward's avatar, the closest any reader will ever come to a touchable version of the untouchable hero. Has a literary (used loosely) figure ever caused such pandemonium before?

October 30, 2008 – Seth Rogen has got to be kicking himself right now. There are only a finite number of opportunities for him to play a lazy twenty-something whose sarcasm is a substitute for ambition -- and he just wasted one of them on Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Judd Apatow isn't attached to this film -- not even as a producer -- so how did this happen? There are only two possibilities: Either Rogen hasn't seen a Kevin Smith film since 1997, or he wanted to be able to say "fuck" a lot. We'll hold Smith accountable.