Kevin Clash is an Emmy-award-winning performer and producer with dozens of TV and film credits to his name, but he's far better known as a furry red monster. Clash is the puppeteer and the voice behind Elmo, one of the most popular characters on the seminal children's television show Sesame Street, which this week marks its 40th anniversary with a series of special episodes and a two-disc DVD set, Sesame Street: 40 Years of Sunny Days. Clash ...

If Taylor Swift has any lingering insecurities after the Kanye West incident at the MTV Video Music Awards, the six nominations she received for the American Music Awards should clear those right up. Paula Abdul, Snoop Dog and Adam Lambert announced the nominees for the 37th annual American Music Awards in Beverly Hills, California, on Tuesday, and Swift is up for favorite female artist in the pop, country and adult contemporary categories. The 19-year-old singer, whose acceptance speech ...

Jay Leno says immediacy is key to his new show, and he should have plenty of it for his prime time premiere Monday, when Kanye West is a musical guest. The rapper created a fan and artist uprising Sunday night when he jumped onstage at MTV's Video Music Awards to hijack singer Taylor Swift's acceptance speech. Leno could reprise his 1995 ratings-grabbing moment when he asked actor Hugh Grant, "What the hell were you thinking" Grant had been arrested two ...

In a country built on a system of checks and balances, it's intriguing to have an award that allows the President to reveal some personal preferences. Since February 1963, when John F. Kennedy's executive order made bestowing the Medal of Freedom a Presidential privilege the highest civilian honor in the nation has offered unique insight into the elite group of people who inspire our Commanders-in-Chief. Officially, the award, which President Obama is scheduled to present to 16 people on ...

Academy Award winner Nicolas Cage has pretty much got this acting thing down. After all, he started acting at the age of 15 and, well, he's got that Oscar. So he doesn't really need to deliver another gut-wrenching performance to demonstrate his chops. In fact, he can deviate from a traditional film and venture into animated territory. He's voiced animated characters in the past, but in Disney's new 3-D tale "G-Force," Cage lends his voice to a mole. ...

Veteran actor Karl Malden, who won an Academy Award for his role in "A Streetcar Named Desire," has died at age 97, his manager said Wednesday. Malden died in his sleep about 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, said his manager, Bud Ross. Malden appeared alongside Marlon Brando in two of director Elia Kazan's classic films of the 1950s -- "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "On the Waterfront." He won the best supporting actor Oscar for "Streetcar," which was released in 1951, in ...

The Cannes Film Festival's highest honor, the Palme d'Or, went on Sunday to Michael Haneke for his film The White Ribbon — both establishing it as the best movie of the festival and triggering the annual debate among critics and fans over whether the award was a revelation or a gross miscarriage of justice on the part of the Cannes jury. 'Twas ever thus. Between 1939-1954, Cannes' highest accolade was called the Grand Prix du Festival International ...

For 11 of its 12 days, the 62nd Cannes Film Festival was in large part the Cannes Movie Festival. At a hallowed venue where minimalist art films usually dominate, this year sensation often ran rampant. Blood spurted from necks, noses, guts and, in one memorable gross-out moment, a penis. Extreme characters spanned the globe: a vampire-priest in Seoul, a French crime lord in Hong Kong and an American drug-dealer in Tokyo. Sam Raimi brought a horror movie about a ...

Outsiders may debate whether bullfighting is sport or art, but within the normally close circle of Spanish aficionados, there is only one correct answer, and it has nothing to do with basketball. Yet if bullfighting is an art, does that make all its practitioners artists? Most definitely not, has been the answer of many bullfighting insiders ever since Spanish Culture Minister César Antonio Molina announced on Feb. 27 that this year's prestigious Fine Arts medal for bullfighting would go ...

A British couple have been rescued from their 13-meter yacht in the Atlantic Ocean after they drifted for weeks with a broken rudder. "Slumdog Millionaire," the little film that overcame tremendous odds simply to earn an American release, won eight Oscars Sunday night at the 81st annual Academy Awards, including best picture. "Most of all we had passion and we had belief, and our film shows if you have those two things, you have everything," said producer Christian Colson, surrounded ...