IDOL MINDS ARE THE DEVIL’S WORKSHOP: As suspected, the photos that surfaced late last week that claimed to be Idol contestant Antonella Barba caught in fellatio delicto with an anonymous young fellow are fakes, at least according to her best friend and fellow Idol auditioner, Amanda Collucio.
“I’ve studied them,” Collucio told the New Jersey Star-Ledger. “It’s not her nose. She’s never had (acrylic nail) tips in her life. She’s the least slutty person I know.”
She said that earlier photos, which hit the internet a week ago, of Barba posing in a variety of skimpy outfits – including a shot of her covered in rose petals meant to evoke a famous image of Mena Suvari in American Beauty – were real, taken for a calendar she made for a longtime boyfriend. “They were meant to be seen by one person and one person only,” Coluccio said. “She’s been crying. She’s horrified … She’s most upset about what her parents think.”
The whole issue might be a moot point by tomorrow night, when the next round of contestants are voted off the show. Barba’s performances haven’t been stellar, but according to the Star-Ledger piece, “it’s possible a voting bloc of hormone-addled teenage boys is asserting itself” by voting for Barba to stay, in addition to the unofficial Idol website votefortheworst.com, which organizes voters to support the “most entertaining train wreck” on the show just to keep things interesting – Barba is a current favorite on the site.
For her part, Collucio sounds disillusioned by the whole experience. “’We both went to fulfill a dream but were made into characters,” she said. “American Idol is the fakest show on TV. We’re so real and down-to-earth, and I wish people could see that.” I think, by this point, that Collucio should have learned that people tend to see what they want to see – and if they don’t, someone will come along and give them the next closest thing, real or not.
PICK OF THE NIGHT: Life On Mars returns to BBC Canada tonight at 10pm with the first episode of the second and last episode of the hit British crime series. Alliance gave the first season a second run on Showcase last year when it developed a following, and hopefully will do it again – the series, a sort of cross between The Sweeney and Lost, deserves a big following, even if that might mean a U.S. network transplant of the show. It’s hard to imagine how that might work; so much of the show’s atmosphere relies on the grimy setting – England in the early ’70s, economically depressed and still far from rebuilt after the devastation of a war three decades earlier. See it now, and relish the pre-Thatcher squalor that gave birth to punk, as well as Philip Glenister’s gleefully belligerent, sexist and foul-mouthed performance as the “Guv,” a performance fully as memorable as Ian McShane in Deadwood.
