2005: Winners and Losers

Once again, as the year hobbles to an end, I offer my pick of the year's winners and losers. I must say, it was hard for me to come up with such a list. For one thing, I had trouble coming up with enough winners. As soon as I thought I had a potential candidate for that list, that candidate had a sudden reversal of fortune. Also, I had far too many losers, which threatened to upset the balance of the whole project. But I finally decided on a list, and I think I got it pretty accurate for the past twelve months.

So first, without any more ado, is my list of winners of 2005:

Mariah Carey. Mimi has been freed! Four years ago, Mariah Carey made one of the most laughable pop musical movies all time and was paid by her record company to go away. Then earlier this year, she released her album The Emancipation of Mimi. Not only was it the second-bestselling album of the year (behind rapper 50 Cent's The Message), but it produced her sixteenth number-one single, "We Belong Together," giving her the most number-one singles of any female recording artist in the past fifty years. She ends the year with more number-one singles than anyone - except, of course, the Beatles and Elvis Presley.

The Fonda family. Jane Fonda returned to the spotlight in a big way, publishing her autobiography and making her first movie (Monster-In-Law, with Jennifer Lopez) since the elder George Bush was President. And, her father Henry Fonda was commemorated on a postage stamp for the one hundredth anniversary of his birth.

Steve Carell. 2005 proved to be a very good year for the former "Daily Show" regular. Not only did Carell appear in one of the most successful movies of the year, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, he stars in NBC's American version of the Britcom "The Office" as the clueless boss. Unlike his "Office" character Michael Scott, Carell is one fellow who knows what he's doing.

Jon Stewart. "The Daily Show"'s unflappable host seems to be weathering the loss of Carell very well, thank you. His already hot show has been energized even further by the rising unpopularity of both the war in Iraq and the President who instigated it, with Stewart lampooning the news of the day with unrelenting precision. His success has rubbed off on Stephen Colbert, whose "The O'Reilly Factor" spoof "The Colbert Report" hit the ground running and shows no sign of slowing down.

Bill Maher. America's funniest curmudgeon survived sexual harassment charges and an attempt by the Bush administration to get HBO to cancel his show. Plus, his collection of his television ruminations, "New Rules," is one of the most popular books of the past year.

The Rolling Stones. Although the term "sixties rockers" now refers to their ages, they made one of the most acclaimed albums of their careers and toured successfully to support it.

Paul McCartney. Ditto, except in the singular person.

Chicago. The Second City has a newfound respectability with its World Series champion baseball team, the White Sox (who last won the Series when Richard J. Daley was in high school) and a tough prosecutor in the form of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who's currently investigating the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity - and has already brought down a powerful vice presidential aide.

Luc Jacquet. Never heard of him? Well, you might have seen his work - The March of the Penguins, an unassuming documentary movie on penguin migration that, mostly through word of mouth, became a surprise hit in the theaters this year.

Lance Armstrong. The cycling legend won his seventh Tour de France, retired undefeated, effectively fought back steroid use charges from a French newspaper, and got the girl - Sheryl Crow. By the way, Armstrong is the only winner from last year on this year's list. :-)

Jason Lee. You know him by his sitcom character's name - it's Earl. As the star as the only unqualified NBC hit show of the new TV season, he's assumed the same role Gary Coleman had in the late seventies; Lee's show keeps NBC going in a period of humiliatingly low ratings overall.

"Ed" alumni. When "Ed" was canceled in March 2004, we Edheads mourned, not just for ourselves, but for its cast members, who were left unemployed and possibly on their way to hasbeen status. At this writing, though, at least four of them have picked up the pieces; Tom Cavanagh stars in "Love Monkey," a new comedy-drama premiering next month on CBS, Jenna Elfman's new sitcom "Courting Alex" (also premiering on CBS next month) will feature Cavanagh's former "Ed" co-star Josh Randall, Julie Bowen appears in "Boston Legal," and the zany Michael Ian Black has done a show for Comedy Central and remains a fixture on VH-1 specials. Now if someone gave Lesley Boone, Darryl Mitchell, or Jana Marie Hupp plum roles, life would be perfect!

Hillary Rodham Clinton. With Germany electing Angela Merkel its first female chancellor and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf being elected Liberia's first female president, coupled with potential male Democratic presidential candidates handicapped by all sorts of baggage, Hillary's reported desire to become the forty-fourth - and first female - President of the United States suddenly seems more plausible. But could she survive both the inevitable Republican onslaught and lingering suspicion of her motives?

John Roberts (the Supreme Court Chief Justice). Originally appointed as an associate Supreme Court justice to replace the retiring Sandra Day O'Connor, he was given the chief justiceship when William Rehnquist suddenly died. Not only did he get a promotion before even starting the job he was originally hired for, he's the youngest Chief Justice since John Marshall assumed the post over two hundred years ago. So he'll be around for a long time.

And now, the losers:

John Roberts (the CBS news anchor). Once rumored to be the successor to Dan Rather as the anchor for CBS's nightly newscast, he was passed over in favor of Bob Schieffer when Rather suddenly retired in the wake of the scandal involving his "60 Minutes Wednesday" story on Bush's military service. Schieffer is only supposed to be a transitional anchorman, holding the post until CBS can come up with a new format and staff for the beleaguered newscast, but Roberts isn't expected to have much, if any, of a role in the revamping.

John Kerry. Though he lost the 2004 presidential election to Bush, he came close enough in the popular vote to remain a possibility for 2008 and put himself in a position to be a spokesman and a de facto leader for Senate Democrats. Kerry's political viability started coming undone before the 109th Congress even convened, however, when his presidential campaign was found to be sitting on money it hadn't even bothered to spend - money that might have made a difference in the outcome of the 2004 vote. Then in January, he went on "Meet The Press" with Tim Russert to express his thoughts and feelings on the election and the coming year. . . and demonstrated his inability to do so. Kerry has spent the past year sending e-mails to his "supporters," informing them of his sponsorship of modest social legislation that has virtually no chance of making it to the Oval Office. Kind of like Kerry himself.

Cedric the Entertainer. Hey, did you hear the one about the comedian with a stage name that sounded like the name of a medieval king, and how he hosted the annual Washington press corps dinner - and got upstaged when Laura Bush told a dirty joke about her husband? And how he starred as Ralph Kramden in an all-black movie version of "The Honeymooners," which got yanked from the theaters almost as soon as it opened? No? Well, guess you had to be there.

Renee Zellweger and Kenny Chesney. January: Boy meets girl. April: Boy marries girl. August: Girl separates from boy after four months of marriage and demands an annulment. December: Boy and girl divorce. Geez, my parents had a longer courtship than that marriage!

Mercedes-Benz. One could argue that General Motors had a bad year. It started with a botched deal with Fiat, continued with rotten sales of its newest North American models, moved on with announcements of plant closings, got worse with the rising cost of health insurance for its workers, and climaxed with extending its employee discount to its customers just to move more cars out of GM dealerships. But at least GM's overall quality is improving, and Cadillac has regained its once-lost luster. Meanwhile, DaimlerChrysler's Mercedes-Benz division - once the maker of the most desirable luxury cars in the world - is churning out cars that break down with numbing regularity, assuming they even work to begin with. Their engineering is still top-notch, but what's to be gained from a Benz's sophisticated handling if it spends more time in the shop than on the road? I should have known Benzes were getting cruddier when their commercials started getting tasteless.

Houston. The residents of Texas's largest city saw what could happen to them if a hurricane like Katrina were to hit them. Then Rita came at them, and they made it a point not to repeat the mistakes made in New Orleans when that city tried to evacuate its citizens. Houstonians succeeded in that respect - but they made entirely new mistakes! Although Rita largely spared Houston, the evacuation was so haphazard that Interstate 45 was jammed almost halfway to Dallas. Then the Astros lost the World Series after playing in the championship for the first time ever, while the region's most prominent politician, Tom DeLay, got indicted in a fundraising scandal. And they thought Enron was bad?

Public transportation. Bush wants to kill Amtrak, and he's more than halfway there, what with Amtrak having had problems with its once-admired Acela trains and having had its president fired by a board dominated by White House hacks, while transit workers have gone on strike in both Philadelphia and New York. Public transportation isn't just taking a hit in America; London's Underground workers are also threatening to strike, and Britain's own intercity rail system remains an embarrassment.

France. Until recently, American liberals had viewed France as a paradise on earth because it had several things America does not - namely culture, intelligence, and John Malkovich. But France's reputation as a country that has its act together came apart this year like an underdone crêpe. President Jacques Chirac couldn't get voters to approve the European Union constitution, Paris lost its bid for the 2012 Olympics, Arab and black Muslim youths in the housing projects rioted for two weeks to vent their frustration with living in poverty, and the politicians' collective response to the riots showed them to be, amazingly, even more racist than their American counterparts. Also, Gerard Depardieu announced his retirement from the movies. What are the French words for "That sucks?"

Judith Miller. The former New York Times reporter entered jail as a martyr for freedom of the press, and left as a disgraced, unemployed newswoman with her credibility in tatters. When the inevitable television movie is made about the Valerie Plame scandal, I predict that Miller will suffer the further indignity of being played by sitcom actress Harriet Sansom Harris (Bebe on "Frasier").

Jennifer Aniston's ex-"Friends." While Aniston's acting career is in high gear, her former "Friends" costars are all in free fall. Let's review them the way they were credited on the show, shall we? - alphabetically! Courteney Cox is currently making a movie whose release is eagerly awaited by no one, Lisa Kudrow's HBO series "The Comeback" wasn't, Matt LeBlanc's "Friends" spinoff "Joey" is on hiatus after underwhelming viewers, The Whole Ten Yards was so bad that many folks hope Matthew Perry doesn't make another sequel called The Whole Eleven Yards, and David Schwimmer's career is schinking rather than schwimming. With "Friends" like these . . .

Madonna haters. Her career won't die no matter how hard we try to kill it! >:-(

And finally. . .

George W. Bush. Iraq. Social Security reform. Iraq. Katrina. Iraq. FEMA. Iraq. Harriet Miers. Iraq. The Valerie Plame scandal. Iraq. Revelations of spying on Americans. And, of course, Iraq. How soon will it be before W realizes his father was lucky for not winning a second term?

That's it for this year. Who knows what the next twelve months will bring?