Saving Grace has already earned Holly Hunter a Golden Globe nomination, and few would be shocked to hear her name on Thursday when the Emmy nominations are announced. Hunter plays an Oklahoma City detective who lives large for better or for worse — throwing herself into her work but also drinking, smoking, and sleeping with the wrong people. She's also being visited by Earl, an unusual angel who encourages Grace to set her life straight.

The show's second season premieres tonight at 10 p.m. EDT and PDT on TNT, and last week, Hunter spoke with some reporters about her character, the show's second season, and her feelings about making the jump from movies to TV. Here are some highlights:

On whether Grace changes at all this season:
"I think she changes all the time, actually. I think there's give and take inside her. There's always movement. She's very kinetic. And I think she's also kinetic in a psychological way. . . . The most thrilling thing about her is how live she is. So many people are truly asleep for long periods in their days and their lives. I think Grace spends an extraordinary amount of her time really awake, awake to a real, true curiosity about why people do what they do. She also is a real tester of what people are capable of and what she herself is capable of."

On what opened the door for Saving Grace to exist:
"What preceded that was the success of The Shield and Rescue Me and The Sopranos — really started the wild, wild west in cable. FX and HBO kind of started this new idea, which was real character drama, and a character who does anti-heroic things, not just a character who's quirky but a character who straddles two worlds — one world being highly charged with questionable thoughts and behavior, such as Denis Leary and Tony Soprano and Vic Mackey. Those characters live in a more similar vein to how Grace lives, except that Grace is a woman. That's where cable is really kind of taking off. It's given women opportunities to play highly controversial characters, women who are doing things that maybe they wouldn't have been able to do on television 10 years ago, like Weeds on Showtime or Glenn Close in Damages or Minnie Driver in The Riches, women who were living lives of real, deep grayness."

To find out what Hunter thought was the toughest part of transitioning to TV, read more

• Army Wives will be back for a third season, with 18 episodes scheduled to air sometime in 2009, Zap2it reports.
• According to Hollywood Reporter, Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms will star together in a "bachelor-party comedy" titled Hangover.
• Jordana Brewster will guest-star on Chuck as Jill, the college girlfriend who legendarily broke Chuck's heart, reports Entertainment Weekly.
• The success of Wall-E has apparently sparked new talk of a Hello, Dolly stage revival, Variety reports.
• ABC and FX topped GLAAD's annual "responsibility index," Reuters reports, while NBC and Fox, among others, received failing grades.
• ComingSoon has the news that Jon Heder will star in another Napoleon Dynamite-type oddball comedy, titled Loudermilk.
• Gio wins? Ugly Betty's Christopher Gorham has been cast in the CBS midseason series Harper's Island — though ABC still insists we haven't seen the last of Henry, TV Guide reports.
• ComingSoon writes that Fox has acquired the screen rights to the recent NYT bestseller One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War.

Photo courtesy of Lifetime

Well, Jack Black is.
Paramount is announcing today that they will move forward on a sequel to School of Rock, the 2003 comedy in which Jack Black played a substitute teacher who teaches a bunch of fifth graders how to properly rock 'n' roll.

OK, actually, it kinda sounds. . . really cute.
I'm not often excited about sequels, but this one might turn out to be pretty adorable. Variety describes the plot:

[T]itled School of Rock 2: America Rocks, [the movie] picks up with Finn leading a group of summer school students on a cross-country field trip that delves into the history of rock 'n' roll and explores the roots of blues, rap, country and other genres.

I'd really like to take that trip myself, actually.
It's definitely a cute enough premise, and screenwriter Mike White is back on board, which is good. I generally like his projects (The Good Girl, Year of the Dog, Orange County). And in all honesty, I think the students' little U.S. music tour might actually teach us some stuff.

Source

Big news for So You Think You Can Dance fans from Monday's session at the TCA press tour. Jessica King, who slipped into the top 10 last week, is out with an injury, and Comfort's taken her spot in the competition.

Nigel Lythgoe wouldn't be specific about the nature of her injury or the time that it happened — though he said he hopes Jessica herself will be available to do that on the show this week. Comfort hadn't left LA yet when Jessica had to drop out, and she was back in rehearsal as of Monday morning.

In fact, all of the top 10 dancers were in rehearsal, which was a bit of a bummer, since I'd really been hoping to check out Twitchington in the flesh. Instead, we got a foxtrot from Kourtni and Matt (who really are that tall) and a solo from Thayne (who really is that smiley) before Nigel, Mary Murphy, Cat Deely, and Mia Michaels took the stage for some Q&A. Some highlights:

• Mary explained that she'd been using her "hot tamale train" expression for years to describe dancers — typically fiery ballroom dancers. The hot tamale train typically doesn't pull into the station during more emotional performances, no matter how much Mary likes them; she's usually too close to crying for that. Also, if some couple gets two tickets on the hot tamale train, that means Mary thinks they're headed for the finale. Now we know.
• Mia doesn't think she's a mean judge. "I'm just being very honest," she said. She insisted that in rehearsals she's "Mama Mia" and the dancers look to her for tough love.
• When the choreographers work with the dancers, they have an hour and a half on Friday and three hours on Saturday — and that's just about it.

For a little more — including a new pairing Nigel accidentally revealed — just read more

When I saw She & Him play a live show here in San Francisco, Zooey Deschanel sounded great but seemed a bit nervous to be performing in front of such a large crowd. In this first video of a song off her album with M. Ward, those stage jitters are nowhere to be found. Instead we get to see the quirky, ironic Zoe we've come to know and love onscreen.

"Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?" is such a cute song and the video made me laugh out loud, mostly due to the strange animated creatures and a smiling Zoe frolicking together in an otherwise dark little world (see: animated blood spilling out from an oft-murdered Zoe).

I won't give anymore away; to check it out for yourself, read more

Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II: The Golden Army won the weekend box office with an estimated $35.9 million, not only handily beating the current competition, but also surpassing the first Hellboy's opening weekend earnings ($23.2 million). Yippee! I'm happy for that ragtag group of superheroes.

On the other end of the spectrum was Meet Dave, which Variety described as "one of the worst opening grosses ever for an Eddie Murphy pic." The details are even more painful. Consider this: It cost $60 million to make Meet Dave and it only earned an estimated $5.3 million over the weekend. That's not a pretty picture.

Hancock remained a draw (fun aside: at the movie theater over the weekend, a group of young boys sped past me while one yelled, "Hurry up! I don't want to miss a single second of Hancock!"), coming in second place, followed by the 3-D action flick Journey to the Center of the Earth. Pixar's Wall-E came in at No. 4 followed by Wanted to round out the top five.

Photos courtesy of Universal Pictures