Emmy Awards

Okay, I have no issue with the shirt and the jeans in and of themselves, but would it have killed her to dress up a little for the party? Maybe a skirt?

I know that on Deadwood, Trixie might have counted putting on her very best "Look, ****s*cker, If you don't **** off I'm going to rip off your *****" expression as getting dolled up for a fancy night out, but Hollywood is not the same world of whores and powermongers that Trixie's from -- I mean, in Hollywood, people shower more.

Frances Conroy has a tiny but brilliant role in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels -- the poor woman never saw Ruprect coming -- and so no matter how weary of Six Feet Under I got, I will always kind of love her.

And yet...

[Wait, wow, is it just me, or have we had a lot of "and yet" statements on this site lately? "We like her... and yet..." It's the Julie Chen "but first" of GFY; I am looking forward to the day when delicious Evil Dr. Will returns for Big Brother All-Stars 2: Hot, Pale Dermatologist Boogaloo with a "But First" and an inexplicable "And Yet" shirt that two mysterious bloggers have sent him... maybe along with one that says, "Sack UP, ho," just for good measure.]

Ahem. End of aside.

Anyway: And yet, I'm sad to report that Our Lady of "Why Does He Have A Cork On His Fork?" showed up dressed for the funeral of her own fashion sense.

Ms. Conroy seriously looks like she wandered over to the HBO Emmy party right after she got her velveteen frump-funk on at the Rock Star: Supernova taping. Perhaps that's Gilby Clarke's guitar strap slung so bizarrely around her hips, hurled triumphantly from the stage; indeed, I hope that's it, and that she's just another crazed, loafer-clad fan of Supernova's humdrum riffs and half-naked horndogs. Because, as it's horrendously unflattering, there really is no other good reason for that belt -- nor, indeed, for the rest of the outfit.

These are desperate, confusing times. To bastardize a line from War Games, that classic ode to the olden days of the Interwebs: We are at F.Con 1.

Any time you hear Debra Messing being interviewed about working on Will & Grace, she usually cops to being the most humorless person on the set.

... Okay, maybe that's my paraphrasing, because I'm predisposed not to like her on account of all the rumors that she's a prickly harridan. But she has gone on the record as saying her wit is by far the slowest out of that crowd. And there's nothing wrong with that -- not everyone has to jockey to be the funniest person in the room -- but that insight does make it rather fitting that she bored the pants off me during her final red-carpet trot in the name of Grace Adler.

My first, incredibly eloquent thought when I saw this was, "Well... all right. I guess. Snore." I'd have liked to see a necklace to add interest, or an updo that didn't look quite so thoughtlessly thrown up; you can't see its ragged edges here, but suffice to say it did put the "mess" in "Messing," and I blame her entirely for failing to captivate my imagination and forcing it to wander into that awful, punny place.

Something about it isn't quite right, an elegant idea oddly executed -- the fit is a tad wonky, and the fringe looks surprisingly cheap. It's as if she were the model for a picnic-supply themed Project Runway challenge, and Jeffrey "If He Made My Mother Cry I Would Have Bitch-Slapped His Undersized Head, Which Looks Like It Was Squeezed Out Of A Tube, And Then Throttled Him By His Neck Tattoo" Sebelia had one night to cobble it all together out of bulk-bought paper napkins.

Speaking of paper napkins:

Consider my enthusiasm curbed:

I hate this so much. The color is great, and from the front it looks lovely, but I seriously hate the back.  This sort of thing can be done, but it has to be done carefully, or you look like a junior level figure skater who's lost her way. Remember Cate Blanchett in that amazing Galliano hummingbird dress? This one:

That's how you do formal back shenanigans. It's whimsical, but it's understated.

This is neither whimsical, NOR understated:

Just 15 minutes before his call time on the red carpet, Jeremy Piven had just rolled home from a six-day bender, thrown on a shirt, covered up his hickeys with a random satin scarf he would try to call an "ascot," and had his mom refresh his hair plugs with some Elmer's glue. Fairly certain he still smelled like skunky booze and feet and pretty much positive he was still drunk, he resolved to go ahead run with it: Wave to the fans, blame his beer sweats on the heat, and wash off the tequila funk some other day.

Now, if only he could remember why he was holding the pointy and gold naked lady...

Ah, of course: for imitation body shots.

I have SUCH a mental block against Vanessa Minnillo. As I've mentioned here before, I thought Nick Lachey was dating Christina Milian up until about a week ago. I am incapable of pronouncing her name correctly: I keep calling her Vanessa Milliano.  Every time I see her, I think, "THAT'S Vanessa Minnillo?" Because apparently I think she looks different than she does.

She probably wishes she HAD looked different than she did last night, too:

I like the color, but otherwise: yikes. It's so...Vegas Vacation. She looks like a high-class Wayniac.

If Tracey Gold is Peter Pan, does that make Kirk Cameron Wendy?

Oh my God, dude, put it away:

What would you say about you, if you were me? I feel like we'd get a little, "No one needs to see that," and a bit of, "look, I'm sorry: it's just not working for me at all. Horrendous. Horrendous," and then maybe an unfunny gay joke about La Seacrest, and then a barb about the 70s and/or Burt Reynolds. Not even Paula could find something nice to say about this. Nonsensical, yes. But not nice.

In these crazy times -- these wild, unpredictable times -- we are grateful that until she is recaptured by the doctors whose straitjacket she slipped out of a few years ago, there will always be Paula Abdul.

And sure, this isn't as loony as half of what she wears, but the pattern is a trifle young for Ms. A -- it's much more befitting, say, an 8th grader at her very exciting graduation into high school than a talent-contest judge.

And, no less, a talent-contest judge who probably never had an 8th grade graduation, because you can't very well pass Language Arts when your idea of a complete sentence equates more to my three-year old niece's rudimentary finger-painting than, say, Claude Monet. [Although, at least my niece has a vision when she's smearing paint around.]

Listen, Tyra, I've got no beef with you wearing a wig all over town, especially since your wigs are good ones:

See, I LOVE wigs. I am a huge fan of wigs! When I'm an old lady, I plan to wear a rotating series of wigs: platinum blonde for Monday bingo nights;  long, dark and curly for Tuesday's dialysis appointment; short and red and flippy like Ginger from Gilligan's Island for Wednesday night's cocktails at the Assisted Living Centre with my girls;  a giant Afro for Thursdays, when the pool boy comes. Et cetera.  And let's face it: you're a babe. However, you're also a babe who's got loads of cash and more contacts in the hair-and-makeup world than the rest of us would make in twenty lifetimes. So why aren't the edges of your wig EVER EVER EVER properly blended into your forehead? It's not like you don't have the acreage up there, and we know you know that.

Check out the close-up after the jump: