Another year, another round of horseshit entertainment awards ceremonies. Fortunately, Fametracker is once again distributing the Rascos, the only awards that measure what showbiz is really all about: pure fame!

Famous Person of the Year

Looking back, 2002 wasn't exactly a banner year for fame; this was, after all, the year in which we were supposed to stop caring about celebrities at all. (We did stop for a couple of weeks in September and early October 2001, but then they won us back. It's those teeth! Damn those perfect, mesmerizing teeth!)

The breakout movie star of the year was Tobey Maguire, who starred in the astoundingly popular but kind-of-underwhelming Spider-Man, and who can now be seen pulling out of the sequel due to a bad back. Okay, this might all be about contract negotiations, but come on -- is this any way for a movie idol to act? Can you imagine Errol Flynn saying, "I'd love to do the movie, chap, but you know -- lower lumbar."

In other news, Nia Vardalos went from a nobody to a somebody; Justin Guarini went from a nobody to a somebody to a nobody, and Kelly Clarkson went from a nobody to a somebody to a nobody who still thinks she's a somebody. Meanwhile, Britney Spears, one of our favorite famous people, has the strengthening smell of a nobody about her, yet still manages to cling to somebody-ness, mostly through kissing, boning, and then denying kissing and/or boning every boldfaced name that crosses her field of vision.

But the race for Famous Person of the Year really comes down to three horses, and two of them are dating: Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck, and Crazy Michael Jackson. Let's start with CMJ.

Crazy Michael Jackson has always been super-famous, but this was the year in which the whole of his fame was predicated entirely on his own craziness. An odd development, really, given that he's been loopy for at least a decade. But one cunning British reporter elbows his way into Neverland, and suddenly every network is reporting this situation as though it's breaking news: Crazy Michael Jackson is, yes, crazy! Film at 11! (Actually, film at 9, 10, 11, and 12:30.)

Jennifer Lopez is a past Famous Person of the Year award winner, and looked like a good bet for a repeat, though she had eyes on a bigger prize. (More on that later.) Sure, compared to everyone else, she should be teaching a Learning Annex course on Creative Spotlight Hogging. But compared to her own lofty precedents, she fell a little short. She was simply just way more fun back when she was molling for Puffy and wearing dresses slit to the navel and held in place by spirit gum and a dream, rather than being anchored, at least for the moment, to the arm of Affleck, the aw-shucks, I-can't-believe-it-either movie star.

Which brings us to our Famous Person of the Year, 2002: Mr. Ben Affleck.

For Lopez, the Bennifer circus was business as usual. But for Affleck, it catapulted him smartly up and over the high stone walls of Castle Fameskull. Sure, he was plenty famous before, but he wasn't playing with the big boys; in fact, his whole shtick was based in part on his own amazement at even hanging out with the big boys.

This, however, was Ben Affleck's year. He had his sort-of hit, The Sum of All Fears, last summer (a hit on the ledger sheet, if not in anyone's heart); he had a bigger sort-of hit in Daredevil this winter; and he never strayed far from the headlines in between. He even bagged a dubiously researched "Sexiest Man of the Year" award, which gave him a choice opportunity to unveil The Face to the world.

The Face, of course, is what put Affleck over the top. The Face is his newly acquired facial expression: the one where he's squinting and pursing his lips and assumedly thinking sexy thoughts. (We'd rather not speculate on their content.) The Face is nicely complimented by The Hair: that strange, plasticized sweepback that J. Lo has apparently had designed for him.

We never saw much of The Face back when he was goofing around with Matt Damon and puppy-dogging after Gwyneth Paltrow. But he's been practicing it a lot lately, and one day soon he may just get it right.

Sure, his relationship with J.Lo has a bit of a Prof. Higgins/Eliza Doolittle vibe to it, with Ben as the student in her crash course in surfing public scrutiny for fun and profit. (In every paparazzi picture taken of them, it always looks like Lopez is about to lean over and whisper further instructions into his ear.) But two things are irrefutable: first, the Bennifer engagement was the fame story of the year, and second, Ben was the primary beneficiary. Now, if only Affleck could star in an actual hit, his journey to the dark side will be compete.

Most Undeservedly Famous Person of the Year

When we awarded Rascos for the very first time, back in March 2000, the world of undeserved fame was very different. The coronation of Richard Hatch as the first winner of Survivor in the U.S. was several months off. Survivor's fellow reality-TV imports -- Big Brother, Popstars, and American Idol -- likewise had yet to premiere. The Real World and Road Rules -- MTV's aging reality series -- had at that point suckered fewer than 200 participants into living their lives on-camera in exchange for fleeting notoriety. It was a more innocent time.

By the time the second annual Rascos were awarded, scores of reality "stars" had flickered briefly, their extinguishment imminent. In addition to Richard, there were Gretchen and Colleen and Eddie and Curtis and Steve and Colby and Jerri and Tina and on and on and freaking on. So at that point, the issue (as far as the thousands of voting members in the Rasco Academy were concerned) wasn't that reality TV hadn't made far too many people undeservedly famous: it was that narrowing the field down to the very most undeservedly famous reality-show participant was impossible.

This year, one reality TV star has forced us to violate our own unofficial rule about excluding reality veterans from Rasco consideration: Evan Marriott, a.k.a. Evan Elder Wallace, a.k.a. Joe Millionaire. The odds are that you watched the show in which he starred: when the finale aired last month, one out of every three people watching TV in the U.S. were tuned to Fox. JM shamelessly ripped off the (ostensible) premise of The Bachelor, tweaked it Fox-style (turning it more explicitly into Bitches Love Money, as Wanda Sykes famously put it), and then outdrew the original, attracting twice as many viewers to its conclusion as watched the Bachelorette finale two nights later.

The buzz surrounding JM grew exponentially; not since the first season of Survivor had a reality show so quickly and thoroughly ravished a nation. The show was the subject of jokes on SNL. Marriott made multiple appearances on Live With Regis and Kelly over the course of the series. His banana-hammock modelling shots turned up on TheSmokingGun.com. So far, he has appeared on the cover of People three times. Marriott sat in the front row at shows during New York's fashion week. He even landed an endorsement deal with KFC.

It is logical that so much of the media attention the show has received should focus on Marriott -- he was the titular star, after all -- but as anyone who watched the show can attest, the things that made it so addictively watchable never included Marriott's personal magnetism. A roiling cauldron of charisma, he is not. In fact, the less attractive he was to the viewer, the better the show: if the idea is to prove how many personal deficiencies a certain kind of woman is willing to ignore in a man if she believes him to be stinking rich, then the more deficient he is, the more entertaining it is when the women overlook the fact that he just stinks. (And no, you didn't see Marriott in a special cameon in this week's episode of Survivor; that was an actual hunk of unappetizing beef.)

The point is, Evan Marriott has absolutely nothing to recommend him personally. He is a charmless, ignorant, unsophisticated, hairy, champagne-cork-popping, flip-flop-wearing, goatcheese-eschewing, blowjob-in-the-forest-getting boob. And yet we all know who he is. And that shit ain't right.

Newgoer of the Year

How soon after she announced that she was quitting Buffy the Vampire Slayer do you think Sarah Michelle Gellar placed a panicked call to her publicist, vowing to take it back? Twenty minutes? A couple of hours? A week? Or did she just skip the press and go straight to Joss Whedon, getting on her knees and offering to do anything -- a...ny...thing, even anything he'd ever made Buffy do to Spike -- to give her her job back?

Maybe she didn't panic. Maybe she doesn't want her Buffy gig back...yet. In fact, she has several movie gigs lined up to keep her busy in the near future. It may not be until all of those get shredded by critics and tank at the box office -- as each and every one of her previous movies has done -- that she may regret her perhaps too-hasty decision to ditch the only entertainment product she was every really any good in.

Yes, Buffy's ratings have steadily declined over the past four seasons. Yes, it's only the biggest fish in the smallest TV pond, since its move to UPN. And yes, while it is a solid cult hit, it hasn't been showered with recognition at the Emmys, or on any award show not affiliated with Nickelodeon. And yes, last summer Gellar starred in a movie that grossed over $150 million domestically. But that movie was Scooby-Doo. And one of the post-Buffy movie gigs she's lined up is the Scooby-Doo sequel. So basically, she's chosen to stop playing an interesting, flawed, ass-kicking heroine (admittedly one who's seen better days), and instead put the future of her career into the paws of a computer-animated dog.

So, okay, that's not 100% true. Not every movie she makes will be another Scooby (largely because the sequel will probably cost more than the original and thus lose money). But Gellar has yet to prove that she can open any other kind of film. Scooby earned her the most money, and yet the worst reviews of her career. As for her other movies -- they're all retreads of things she's tried before, and failed with: Romantic Comedy is another Simply Irresistible. Voicing an animated character in Happily N'Ever After is reminiscent of her voicing an animated character in Small Soldiers.

If Gellar were really surrounded by people who had her best interests at heart, one of them would tell her that she is a TV actress. If she doesn't want to do Buffy anymore, that's fine, but she should quit setting herself up for failure with these movie roles that are out of her depth. Sarah Michelle Gellar could probably have had a fine career as a junior-miss Kim Delaney, but that's not good enough for the little diva. She'll be out of our lives soon enough.

The William H. Macy Memorial HITG! Graduation

Okay, first off: no "Mr. Cellophane" jokes here. Because we've never looked right through John C. Reilly. (Plus, while we love us some John C., like everyone else in Chicago, he's really not such a hot singer.)

He is, however, such a hot actor. Sure, other former HITG!s had banner years -- Chris Cooper comes to mind -- but no one did it quite so dramatically as Reilly. He was in so many big movies this year -- The Good Girl, Gangs of New York, The Hours, Chicago -- that people were writing stories about how many big movies he was in. He didn't slowly sneak his way into the public's consciousness, like a cat burglar. He stormed the beaches from all directions. He was a one-man SWAT team of sudden recognition.

All of which is deserved, of course. For awhile, Reilly seemed destined to be stuck as Philip Seymour Hoffman's caddie in the Paul Thomas Anderson Players. And Reilly's penchant for playing lovable but hapless doofuses (doofi?) means he's delivered many memorable performances in his career, but never exactly seemed poised for a sudden vault to stardom. But who knew that this year, more than ever, the movies would be all about the lovable, hapless doofus? And that John C. Reilly would play every single one of them?

Some people groused that he was too busy this year, which must represent a new groundspeed record for going from underappreciated to overexposed. But no one should begrudge him this sudden ubiquity. We say: enjoy it, John C. Reilly. This is the year that the hapless man finally found his hap.

Most Likely to Become a Personality Before the Rascos are Awarded Again

We may be a little late on this one: did Jennifer Love Hewitt already turn into a personality without our noticing?

She's been playing "Herself" an awful lot lately. She doesn't have a failed talk show (yet), but she did kill her Party of Five spinoff, Time of Your Life (which she also produced) after less than a season. She's seen her co-stars -- most notably one Jennifer Garner -- go on to greater fame and acclaim than she has ever had. These days, the only place you see Hewitt is in red-carpet photos taken at someone else's premiere, and in Neutrogena commercials -- and now that the much cuter Kristin Kreuk has also started endorsing Neutrogena's products for teenagers, Hewitt is in an unfortunate position: does she keep talking about bacne like she did when she was nineteen, or does she face facts and get the company to bump her into the commercials for adult women, along with Angie Harmon and Julie Bowen?

Jennifer Love Hewitt had a good run of it. It's not entirely her fault that she's all washed up at the age of twenty-four; it happens to a lot of child stars. It's not the worst thing in the world for a former celebrity to be demoted to Personality status: at least Personalities still get to go on talk shows. If Hewitt accepted her Personality status, she wouldn't have to exert herself in movies like The Tuxedo that should have just gone straight to video anyway. And in a few years, she could come out with a line of hair products (this is after Neutrogena fires her for being too old, mind you) or costume jewellery or creepy-looking collectible dolls and hawk it on QVC. And that might still be enough of an oar in the showbiz water to get Hewitt invited to movie premieres, showing up to which is what she seems to like most and be best suited for anyway.

This generation could use a Sally Kirkland. Jennifer Love Hewitt is a perfect fit.

Lifetime Achievement Award

Generally speaking, lifetime achievements awards are reserved for people in the twilight of their career; people who can look back at astonishing achievements, but who've essentially retired from active duty.

Not so Jennifer Lopez.

Lopez is the Clubber Lang of fame, and she's coming out you from all directions. The albums! The songs! The perfume! The dresses! The movies! The boyfriends! The nipples! It's hard to resent her multi-pronged assault; damn, it's just hard to keep up. This year, she came out with two movies, eight new albums, forty-three singles, a divorce, and a high-profile engagement. Sure, the singles are forgettable and the movies regrettable, but pointing that out is kind of like getting mugged, and then saying afterward that the mugger had questionable taste in footwear. Check your pockets: you're missing the point.

This year, Lopez even pioneered the practice of promotional synergy, releasing a single, "Jenny From the Block," that was essentially a press release set to music. "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got," she sang, even while, on the cover of Us Weekly, you could find her flashing her new pink diamond engagement ring. We can't wait for her follow-up singles: "No, U Really Like My Movies" and "These Aren't the Droids (You're Looking For)."

It's funny to think that we used to marvel at Madonna for switching up her identity every few years. Now she seems like she was moving in slow motion; after all, Lopez has faster cycles than the moon. Sometimes she toggles between identities, depending on whether she's on the cover of Hello! with Ben (the new Grace Kelly!) or in a video with LL Cool J (the new Sheila E!). She's making Madge look like a rank amateur. (Madonna's image makeovers are just embarassing now; she's like a little kid emerging from a closet in different play-time outfits. Look, I'm a cowgirl! Look, I'm a geisha! Look -- for the love of all that's holy, just look!)

Lopez can sweetly coo through an interview that her marriage is just fine, thanks for asking - then dump the mute bum later that afternoon. While the slightly-dazed-by-it-all Affleck is out there sputtering through interviews, trying to get his head around all that's happening, Lopez hangs back and coolly observes the scene, pursing her pink frosted lips, her fuzzy Kangol cocked.

It's hard to see how this will all turn out for her: marriage to Affleck seems just to confining, too immutable, especially now that she's successfully washed the stain of P. Diddy out of the cloth of her career. You have to assume that at some point she'll have to start making movies, records, or perfumes that somebody, somewhere, actually likes and feels passionate about. In the meantime, though, she makes a fascinating subject. The traditional struggle has been between artistry and fame: you do something, people pay attention, and you go from there. With Lopez, there's no distinction between the two. Songs, films, scents, whatever: that's all secondary. Getting our attention is her art.