Oh man. Get ready for a batch of frownies, guys. It turns out that Uggie, the adorable pooch from The Artist (who wears bow ties on red carpets!), is suffering from an unknown neurological disorder, and will be forced to retire. :(

The Jack Russell’s trainer, Omar Von Muller, was quoted as telling the British newspaper The Daily Mail that he suffers from a “mysterious shaking syndrome. It is a neurological disorder and we’ve spent thousands on vets’ bills trying to figure out what is causing it but the experts don’t really know.” [...]

“It comes and goes and, ironically, it is worse when he’s relaxed. When we were filming you could hardly notice it,” said Muller, adding: “It is a shame this has happened when he is getting the biggest success of his career but we feel the best thing to do is to retire him after the Oscars.” [Hollywood Reporter]

Oh man. Oh man. OhmanOhmanOhmanOhmanOhmanOhmanOhmanOhmanOhmanOhmanOhmanOhman. This news is terrible. I’m not emotionally ready to handle this. Not even close. I had just fallen in love with him! It’s going to ruin my whole day week year. This simply will not do. [sticks fingers in ears] Lalalalalala-can’t hear you-lalalalala. [takes fingers out of ears] What? There’s a tiny silver lining?

For his purportedly final hurrah, Uggie — whose brother, Dash, is expected to step in his paws — will open the Oscars telecast on Feb. 26 alongside host Billy Crystal, according to reports.

I am going to cry so goddamn hard during this.

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Listen on the player above, or download this week’s episode as an mp3 here (right-click, “save as.”)

This week Vince brings in local comic Eric Barry, we get into Burnsy’s Corner, we discuss the AVNs, get several great listener voicemails, get deep about Dane Cook-gate and the world of comedy, Brendan saw a guy get hit by a car, and other jackassery.

• 00:01:37 – In what can’t be a coincidence, Bret’s birthday is the same day as Squirrel Appreciation Day, and Fake Bret appreciates the hell out of the those fluffy tails. We received some listener voicemails: Fake Bret hater from last week is back, the “hottest” Frotcast female listener shows off (vocalizes?) her hard lovin’ skills, and Maggie Thatcher calls in for a rebuttal. The guys talk a bit about beer (I disagree about the Anchor Christmas Ale).
• 00:13:14 – Burnsy’s Corner: Things get a bit holy with some squealing church singing, a 6 year-old girl has a hardcore song about her pets, the guys discuss the aesthetics of hardcore dancing, and Burnsy talks about his new feature for Uproxx.
• 00:38:20 – Cormac McCarthy joins Twitter. Brendan is fascinated with the gay, meth head runaway on Intervention. Vince brings up the news story about Demi Moore being hospitalized for doing whip-its, which leads to a talk that digresses from whip-its to bloody wounds.
• 00:54:13 – Guest of the show, Eric Barry, talks about his friendship with Vince, running the Milk Bar, bouncing people from the comedy shows, and dealing with Haight St. gutter punks.
• 00:59:04 – The Oscar nominations are brought up briefly, but the guys come up with the ultimate Oscar baiting movie. The more interesting nominations follow: the AVN’s Most Clever Title. Eric talks about his fear of sewer babies, and is introduced to the Frotcast classic Jesse Jane clip.
• 01:11:45 – The guys talk about the recent Dane Cook fiasco at the Laugh Factory, his quick rise to fame, the redemptive appearance on Louie, and joke stealing in general. To wind things down a clip from Bones is played dealing with malware, firewalls, fractal patterns, and, you guessed it, bones…and plenty of bad writing and acting.

Vince announces an upcoming gig that you should definitely check out. (February 14th at Milk Bar)

Drunk On! -Adam

EMAIL US at FROTCAST@GMAIL.COM. LEAVE US A VOICEMAIL: 415 275 0030. SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNES. 

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As a wise man once said, “Yo, dawg, why report boring-ass movie news when you could just copy Patton Oswalts tweets n’ shit anyway?” And so here we are. I’ve gotten probably ten emails today from publicists quoting various entities’ reactions to their Oscar nominations, and believe me when I say that I couldn’t possibly give less of a microscopic speck of a particle of a shit on a gay gnat’s penis. The only thing remotely interesting to come out of it all was Patton Oswalt’s account of a fictional Oscars-snub party that he’s been tweeting out all day, starting with “Join me for a drink at The Drawing Room, @AlbertBrooks? Me and Serkis have been here since 6am.”

Billy Crystal Nominees for a Billy Crystal Oscars

The nominations for the 84th Academy Awards were announced this morning and they’re perfectly befitting a show that has Billy Crystal for a host. Safe, traditional, hokey, and above all, boring. Hugo led with 11 nominations, with The Artist just behind with 10. Meryl Streep was nominated for The Iron Lady again, and it’s almost guaranteed that she’ll win, even though she didn’t win anything for Doubt or Adaptation. Andy Serkis was (deservedly) snubbed, as were Brendan Gleeson, everyone from 50/50, Ryan Gosling, Michael Shannon, John C. Reilly (for Cedar Rapids, not We Need to Talk about Kevin or Carnage), and probably someone really awesome who I’m forgetting.

It’s nice to see Midnight in Paris get recognized, not because it was the best movie I saw this year (it was cute), but because it was the only one of these not specifically marketed as an Oscar picture. It’s amazing, you just tell Academy voters what they like and they like it! It’s like MANswers for middle-aged faux-intellectuals wearing shawls. I’m not sure if these idiots thought they were judging art or buying cigarettes. “Debonair dudes prefer Moneyball. It’s the smoothest!” The only way to make this telecast watchable is if they put the horse from War Horse in the audience and keep cutting back to it while it sits there pooping and eating hay.

Best Picture
The Artist
The Descendants
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse

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YOU ARE A MONKEY, DEREK!

With Oscar season about to heat up, James Franco has written an article for Deadline in which he argues that his be-ping-pong-balled co-star, Andy Serkis, deserves the same consideration for wearing a wetsuit and jumping around like a monkey that other actors get for pretending that guys in wetsuits are actual monkeys. As I’ve said before, only through a team of men drawing another man acting like an ape who became a man were we able to discover what it means to be human.

…Narratively it was always his film: I play an emotionally stilted scientist who in the process of mistakenly unleashing a lethal virus on the human race, learns to care for others; Serkis gets to play Caesar, essentially Che Guevara in chimp form.

Che Guevara as a chimp? What an innovative idea, it’s almost as if they got it from a t-shirt…

Andy Serkis is the undisputed master of the newest kind of acting called “performance capture,” and it is time that Serkis gets credit for the innovative artist that he is…

…Audiences are used to large scale effects: impossible explosion, space travel, fantastic fairytale worlds, boys in tights swinging around New York, men with Squids for faces, but there is still a disconnection that happens when a character’s outer surface is rendered in a computer like Caesar’s was. We want to forget that there is a human underneath, the effects are so  well rendered we either forget that the spark of life in it’s eyes [sic] and the life in its limbs is informed by a breathing human or we are so drawn into the ontology of the character we can’t grasp its artistic origins or exactly how it was created. What this means is that we can enjoy such a character – enjoyment testified by the response to such films as Avatar, Return of the King, and Planet of the Apes – but we don’t give artistic credit where it is due.

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