You've sat through all the Critics' Circles and Goyas and BAFTAs and SAGs. Now: here's this.

Famous Person of the Year

This year, there were lots of people that other people talked about: Tom Cruise (still), little Suri, little Brangelina Baby, little Nicole Richie. And so, yes, by definition, they are all famous.

Better yet, there were even people to admire: Helen Mirren, Stephen Colbert, Alec Baldwin. But who had the really great year? Who cemented his claim on our adoring attention? Who rocked us, then stopped us, then rocked us once more? Who, in short, cut a hole in the box, put their junk in that box, then made us open the box?

Oh, you know who. Justin Timberlake.

It's not enough that he had the best-selling album of the year (because albums don't sell nearly as much as they once did). It's not enough that he had, arguably, the single of the summer (because "SexyBack," when you stop to listen to it, doesn't really have a tune at all). It's not enough that he starred in a movie (because who saw Alpha Dog?) and got great reviews (buried in the movie's otherwise stinkeriffic reviews).

It's not even that he had his best year yet while his ex-flame was concurrently flaming out in the most spectacular, horrible way. (Who ever thought Britney would be the Andrew Ridgeley of their relationship, and Justin the George Michael?)

It's that he made Saturday Night Live funny again.

Who is he? Superman?

Is he Jesus?

Simply put, Timberlake had the best year, and he's the most famous, and dammit, right now he deserves to be the most famous. Seriously, brother -- you put on one double-breasted suit with a neon t-shirt underneath, and stroke that creepy goatee, and hang a wrapped present from your loins while swinging off a basketball hoop, and you've bought yourself a mountain of love from a whole lot of people. Happy, thankful people.

And we think we speak for those people when we say: Oh, JT. You'll always be the dick in our box.

Most Undeservedly Famous Person of the Year

Be proud. Because there were, as always, so many good candidates for this award. The usual Paris-Lindsay-Britney Axis of Evil, the shameless horrors who actually have us getting all nostalgic for the quiet dignity and measured poise of Darva Conger. There are punk-ass pop stars by the dozen, starting with all things Simpson and Simpson-related. Yes, you too, Nick Lachey. And Vanessa what's-her-face. And John Mayer. (Where do they grow all these people?) And there are those lousy lying writers, like James Frey and JT Leroy, one of whom doesn't exist and both of whom we wish didn't exist. And there's Tyra Banks! Tyra Freaking Banks! We don't care if you're fat or slim! Seriously! You neither, Kirstie Alley! Just stop!

So why the feeling of accomplishment? Why the sensation of deserved pride?

Well, because none of these people managed to steal the crown of Most Undeservedly Famous Person of the Year. Because you did.

That's right. You.

Oh, you know you had a big year. You were Time's Person of the Year! You were Spin's Artist of the Year! You cleaned up! Yes, you!

And what did you do to deserve this? Hell if we know.

You put some Mentos in Diet Coke. You fell off your skateboard and put it on YouTube. You turned MySpace into a screaming nightmare of flashing wallpaper and idiotic snapshots. Then you moved onto Facebook, and you weren't much more interesting there either.

Did you write a catchy song? You did not. Did you star in a sitcom and make us laugh? No, you didn't, unless you are Rainn Wilson or Tina Fey, in which case you may stop reading now. Did you make an awesome movie? No, you probably made Babel. Thanks a lot, you!

Frankly, you suck. You certainly don't deserve to be famous. You've had your day in the sun, and now you should sit down and stop hogging the spotlight from its rightful owner, us. Yes, us.

2007 is the year of the us.

Wait. Except for you. Yeah, you. We like your music. You keep going. And you too, the one who makes the funny cartoons.

The rest of you, though -- seriously. Enough.

Newgoer of the Year

Years from now, when your grandchildren are gathered around the underground bunker where you cower in constant fear of gang rape from the amoral thugs who govern the Mad Max-esque post-fossil fuels hellscape that Earth has become (that is, if you're lucky enough to have had grandchildren, thank you very much Alfonso Cuarón), and those grandchildren ask you to distract them from the screams of the unlucky outside by running down the top entertainment story of 2006, what will it be? Surely, what you will rememer most vividly is that 2006 was the year of the celebrity breakup.

Some, of course, were so unsurprising that they actually came all the way back around to surprising us. Obviously, no sensible person thought that Britney Spears and Kevin Federline were in it for the long haul, but having made her terrible choice, we kind of thought she might stick with it just long enough to make the point that we weren't the boss of her. And while Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson had already proven that relationships documented on MTV aren't likely to end well, we thought Carmen Electra and Dave Navarro might actually buck the trend. But when you can't even count on the likes of Heather Locklear and Richie Sambora to make a go out of it after more than a dozen years together, or Marilyn Manson to stick it out with Dita Von Teese when the two of them together barely even add up to one celebrity, or Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn to remain an item out of, if nothing else, pure spite...well, it's enough to make you doubt that the sun is even going to rise in the morning -- now, we mean, not in the apocalyptic future to which we're all doomed.

In pretty much every celebrity breakup, there's a winner and a loser. (The rest of the time, of course, there are only losers.) And what loss can be more devastating to a broken-up celebrity than knowing, without any doubt, that the end of one's marriage also means the end of one's fame? Such is life these days for Ryan Phillippe.

Because it is. It really, really is. You already didn't like him -- you saw the Breach trailer and muttered, "That might be good, but I can't see a Ryan Phillippe movie." We know you did, because we were down the aisle from you, and overheard, and muttered back, "Word." He's untalented, he's bitchfaced, and he's not even cute. All that chump had going for him was his marriage to a much more famous and successful Best Actress winner, who we assume just came home from Starbucks one morning, saw his worthless ass sprawled on the couch, glanced over at her Oscar, and muttered, "That'll do, pig." Had we been passing by the window at that moment, we might have muttered "Word" back at that, too.

Ryan Phillippe's fame is ebbing away, and he knows it so surely that just last week, he was using his divorce as a cheap applause line on Ellen. And why not, right? It's probably the last talk-show appearance on which he'll get to exploit his misfortune. Anyway, don't worry, buddy; Chad Lowe's saving you a seat down at the Sad Men's Club, and Freddie Prinze Jr.'s probably soon to follow.

The William H. Macy Memorial HITG! Graduation

Okay, here's the category where we usually cheat. "Who's the HITG! Graduate? The one who burned up that well-regarded, little-seen indie movie and got a surprise mid-life Oscar nomination!" The only problem? This year the Academy decided not to do us a solid on this one. Thanks, dicks.

So without someone else doing our work for us, this was a toughie. TV's biggest breakout star was Masi Oka, heretofore a sub-HITG! barely remembered from guest appearances on Scrubs and Reno 911!. And the stars of the year's biggest indie movies were all either famous already, as in the case of Little Miss Sunshine, or were...Brad Pitt.

So when it came to determining the winner, we turned to a most likely place: the top-grossing movie of the year. And to a most likely role: the showy villain. Who's in somewhat unlikely circumstances: acting under a thick, disfiguring layer of CG tentacles all over his face. Remember? Davy Jones! Even with all the fishy appendages -- including a gigantic claw, which has got to be a physical challenge when it comes to steering a ghostly pirate ship -- connoisseurs recognized and appreciated the salty performance of Mr. Bill Nighy.

While some of us have been appreciatively following Nighy's career since his role as an eccentric (somewhat inadequate) father in I Capture The Castle, and on through the decaying rock star who called Britney Spears's boudoir performance "rubbish" in Love Actually; the vampire king in the Underworld movies; the doomed suburbanite in Shaun Of The Dead, the galactic architect in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy; the amoral government official in The Constant Gardener (he was responsible for having the Rachel Weisz character killed! Even though she was so pretty and nice!); and the desiccated bureaucrat in The Girl In The Café. It was in the last of these that we started to love Nighy's talent so much that we actually developed a bit of a crush on him, despite his stick-insect figure and lipless countenance. Really talented actors are just...sexy, kind of regardless of what they look like. We think this is probably how this lady ended up married to this guy, you know?

Anyway, Nighy had a good 2006: other than Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, there was The Vertical Hour on Broadway -- well known as the play in which Julianne Moore was only okay, and had all her scenes stolen by Bill Nighy -- and as Richard, spectacularly cuckolded in Notes On A Scandal -- about which we'll just say that the kid who played Stephen is actually eighteen, so we're not pervs for thinking that if he and his freckles were always hanging around us, calling us "miss" in that Belfast accent, we might screw him in a trainyard too. It takes a very talented guy to pull focus from the character who's (sexily) breaking the law with her student, and the character who's her crazy gay stalker, but Bill Nighy did it, which is why we feel that Bill Nighy's days of being confused with the Science Guy are behind him at last

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

As usual, the year's most exciting movie experience has been entirely overlooked by the Academy: much as The 40 Year Old Virgin was getting egregiously snubbed around this time last year, there'll be no love at the Kodak for Casino Royale this weekend. It was the year's brainiest action movie, you say? Daniel Craig's sexy-beast performance reinvented James Bond after years the character's spent poncing around in tuxedos, eating cucumber sandwiches with his pinkie up? Whatever, dude, Will Smith cried in a bathroom.

While Casino Royale was the best thing to happen to the Bond franchise in decades, it didn't represent good news for everyone. Consider the sad case of Pierce Brosnan. Amid all the rapturous media coverage of everything Royale did right -- thrilling script, convincing violence, considerably less poncing -- just highlighted what past Bond outings had done wrong; we end up associating all of it with the last Bond, Brosnan. And it's not his fault: he didn't write those lame scripts. He didn't make all those clumsy product placement deals. He didn't CAST DENISE RICHARDS, for heaven's sake. But he's still got to be the last guy to be in a crappy Bond movie -- not a position anyone envies.

The problem for Brosnan is that Bond movies have been so campy that anyone who plays the character is practically a Personality already, even when everything's going right. Sure, there are those attempts for actors to counter-program the role, but the effect is still "Bond fights for his adorable Irish daughter" or "Bond lives among the Canadian First Nations" or "Bond gets wasted and marries Julianne Moore."

Before GoldenEye, Pierce Brosnan was in the weeds, trying to end his identification with the character of Remington Steele -- and not doing so well, if the high point of those years was playing the smarmy Obstacle Guy in something like Mrs. Doubtfire. Now he has to live down essentially the same role, but on an international scale, and in a franchise that we've all spen the past six months agreeing was moribund during his tenure. Yeah, it was cute when he strode through that hotel lobby in his skivvies in The Matador, but let's not be cute: the man's getting old. Those roles are going to run out just in time for the calls to start offering him gigs spoofing James Bond at trade shows and in ads for Efferdent.

Lifetime Achievement Award

Fame is a funny thing. Hopefully, most of the time, it's a funny-ha-ha thing, which is the premise this very website is based on. And in the eight years (it's true!) that Fametracker has been tracking fame, fame itself has changed. Sure, there's been celebrities all through history, from Pliny the Elder to Pat Harrington Jr., to, yes, even Buddha. (Who can forget the summer of Buddha mania?)

But when Fametracker started, in 1999, things were a little different. There was no Us Weekly. (It was just plain old Us -- remember that magazine? It was like People's prettier, dumber little sister.) There were no celebutards like Paris Hilton. (She was alive, sure, but no one had heard of her, nor cared about her, and she had a different nose back then). There was no need, in fact, for a new word for such people, combining "celebrity," "debutante," and "retard." (As they do.) In fact, back then, there weren't even blogs. (We think. Maybe they had them at MIT. Those nerds get everything first.) Why, we barely had radios!

And so people who were famous back then were, for the most part, famous for some reason; e.g., they'd been in a lot of movies. Except for George Hamilton and Zsa Zsa.

Now, however, the new kind of celebrity -- the one who's famous for being famous, whose fame is like a candlewick that doesn't need the wax of achievement to keep it burning and burning -- well, they seem to have taken over. They seem to be everywhere. These days, the best-case celebrity scenario is that you have a few hit songs, then coast for years in a slow decline toward public humiliation, get into and out of a bad marriage, then eventually shave your head. That's the best-case scenario.

Worst case? Anna Nicole Smith.

Sure, she may be more on our minds since she died recently at the surprisingly young age of thirty-nine (both surprising as an age to die and surprising because she seemed older somehow, more aged, like she's always been around, like rocks). But in death, as in the latter part of her life, she's come to perfectly represent what celebrity is today: one part circus, one part freak show, one part dancing monkeys, one part nuclear meltdown.

Anna Nicole Smith was never good at anything, ever. She was pretty once, that's true. Then, later, she was good at acting stupid while on drugs. While on TV. It's a stretch to call that a "talent." Then she was good at what can only be called antics. The word "celebrity" obviously shares a root with "celebrate," but -- and we mean no disrespect to the person -- there was quite literally nothing to celebrate about her.

Now she's being compared, laughably, sadly, to Marilyn Monroe. Monroe was never a great actress, but compared to Anna Nicole Smith, she may as well have been Uta Hagen. Monroe was married to DiMaggio and Arthur Miller. Anna Nicole Smith was (maybe) married to a guy universally known as Not That Howard Stern The Other Howard Stern.

More important, Monroe stood for something: she represented the friction of a post-war country innocence rubbing up against a newly liberated sexuality. And maybe in that sense they are kind of similar.

Anna Nicole Smith is a funhouse Marilyn -- almost literally, in her exaggerated, and later plastic-surgerized, physical looks -- and, as such, she is the Marilyn we deserve. She, too, represents something about her time. She's too talentless to be tragic, too grotesque to be celebrated. And yet, she was the perfect contemporary celebrity: someone who simply stumbled into the hot spotlight, and then realized that, these days, it's not so hard to stay there.

- MFF & WC