Cringe-worthy celebrity antics of the year

As bad as celebrity antics were this year, they remained our guilty pleasure. We’ll never admit it, but these are the moments that had us riveted in 2013.

A drunken Reese Witherspoon resisted arrest and lied about being pregnant. Reuters/ Georgia State Patrol / Handout via Reuters

A recipe for trouble

Paula Deen let fly a career-ender when, during a deposition in a racial discrimination case, she admitted to using the N-word and described the vision she had of using all-black waiters to serve in a mock plantation scenario. Deen fell on her butter knife during a tearful, defiant interview on the Today show, but her empire crumbled, with everyone from Walmart to the Food Network dropping her like a hot cinnamon roll.

So-bad-it’s-good Sharknado makes waves

The campy, low-budget television disaster movie about a hurricane that unleashes an aerial shark attack on Los Angeles has proven that a B-movie can still be a big cult winner, especially when social media acts as its marketing machine. When it premiered on the Syfy network in July, it generated 5,000 tweets per minute at its peak. Tweeters included the actors Patton Oswalt, Mia Farrow and Judah Friedlander. Unsurprisingly, a sequel is in the works.

Paying tribute, Al Jolson style

Julianne Hough’s decision to don blackface for Halloween to portray her favourite character from the hit Netflix show Orange Is the New Black sparked an uproar and drew an eventual apology from the actress, who said she never intended to hurt anyone.

Best performance on film

Goes to Reese Witherspoon. Unfortunately for her, it was on a police video cam, not a movie screen. Witherspoon made headlines when she was arrested for drunkenly interfering in an officer’s attempt to arrest her husband on a DUI charge. In the video, Witherspoon immediately went into character development, telling the officer she was pregnant (an admitted lie). She also trotted out that well-worn line of fading stars: “Do you know my name?”

We’re cringing on purpose

Brad Paisley and LL Cool J’s Accidental Racist, designed to be an ode to racial understanding, united people of all colours: listeners recoiled together after hearing lines such as “If you don’t judge my do-rag/I won’t judge your red flag”, and perhaps the topper, “If you don’t judge my gold chains/I’ll forget the iron chains.” Paisley said he’d only wanted to have an honest conversation about race relations.

Out of the Kardashian Christmas card

Khloé Kardashian called it quits with the troubled basketball star Lamar Odom after four years of marriage and months of endless tabloid headlines juicier than anything we’d seen in their reality show. The last straw for Kardashian allegedly came after video surfaced of a shirtless Odom and a male friend rapping semi-coherently about women and smoking illegal substances.

Isn’t the Us Weekly cover enough?

Kanye West had many righteous things to rage about this year, from the fashion industry not giving him credit for brilliant, life-changing designs such as leather jogging trousers to not getting respect from the US President Barack Obama. But nothing seemed to upset him more than Vogue’s apparent refusal to put his baby mama, Kim Kardashian, on the magazine cover. He likened her to this generation’s Marilyn Monroe and called her the most beautiful woman on the planet.