Bill Murray is not like other Hollywood actors. For starters, he’s really cool despite doing some lousy films. Apparently, he doesn’t even have an agent or manager and only looks at scripts after he’s checked the mailbox of a personal phone number… which he hardly ever checks.

This could well be the reason why Ghostbusters 3 has been long rumoured, but unable to get moving.

And, rightly, movie execs are going to scrap the film if Bill Murray refuses to sign up. Basically, there’s no replacing Bill Murray.

Plans for the third in the franchise have been muttered about for years now. And with cinema keen to redux, rehash and remake ’80s films, now is the time for another Ghostbusters.

However, Sigourney Weaver has opened that mouth of hers, admitting that she and the rest of the cast are not going to get the go-ahead if Murray doesn’t sign-on.

And yes, typically, he says he’s not even looked at the script yet.

Asked if there were any updates on the project, Sigourney said:

“I guess Bill hasn’t read the script yet. I don’t think any of us would do it if Bill said no. Why would we do that? I think the whole point is to get together and have fun.”

That said, Weaver knows what Murray is like. She’s insistent that she wouldn’t dream of calling Super Bill about the film because she knows what he’s like.

“I would never do that [call him about it]. I don’t think that works with Bill. I did actually ask him about The Guys, because he did it with me originally. I called the 800 number and left the message. And when he doesn’t respond, then you know that he’s not interested. It’s actually a pretty good system. I envy him in a way. No email, no phone calls, no agent, I don’t know what he does.”

So while Ghostbusters 3 seems as far away as ever, the Bill Murray Is Really Cool PR Machine is still kicking into overdrive.

The swine.

Next Week: Slimer’s son talks about his potential role in the film, which has been described as ‘a bit like Scrappy Doo’. Get ready to hate.

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Now that it’s April, we don’t have to remember anything about what happened at The Oscars, and it’s beautiful.

We don’t have to remember the winners. We don’t have to remember the forced stage banter. In fact, aside from the speech where Sandra Bullock praised her husband without realising that he’d been secretly boning a tattooed Nazi fetishist on the sly, we don’t remember a single thing about The Oscars at all. But Sigourney Weaver does.

Sigourney Weaver remembers that her film Avatar hardly won any Oscars, even though it was prettier than everything else, more technologically advanced than anything else and had about 30 more offensive blue Jesus-aliens in it than anything else. Why does Sigourney Weaver think that Avatar fared so miserably at The Oscars – simple, it’s because James Cameron doesn’t have a vagina. Obviously.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is undoubtedly one of the most sexist institutions around. Why, Halle Berry‘s Oscar win for Monster’s Ball in 2002 marked the first time that the Best Actress award had ever been given to a woman – up until that point the recipients were all men in drag. Yes, even Gwyneth Paltrow.

You just have to look at the Oscar statue itself to see how sexist the Academy is – it obviously looks like a man. If there was any justice in the world then each Oscar would have giant boobs and a working vagina – and there’d be a Best Ironing category near the start of the ceremony – but oh no, the rich old men in charge don’t want to give the sisterhood that sort of helping hand.

Sure, Kathryn Bigelow may have made history by becoming the first ever woman to win a Best Director Oscar this year – but don’t you see? That’s even more sexist than anything else! No, really, it is… because, um, Kathryn Bigelow is a woman and, um, letting women receive the same treatment as men is, you know, wrong. And stuff. Wait. Maybe we need Sigourney Weaver to come in and help us out here.

She’s worked it all out. You see, even though it’s officially the most successful theatrically-released PlayStation cut-scene to heavily imply that Native Americans were stupid and useless until white people came along ever, Sigourney Weaver’s film Avatar was largely blanked at the Oscars in favour of Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. The reason for this, as Sigourney Weaver told Brazilian news site Folha Online, is because of good old-fashioned sexism. WP reports:

The reason Cameron lost is because the Academy was more interested in making history by giving the award to a woman. “Jim didn’t have breasts, and I think that was the reason,” she told Folha Online, a Brazilian news site. “He should have taken home that Oscar.” Weaver also voiced her disapproval of the Best Picture choice, suggesting it should have gone to Avatar.

We’re right behind you on this issue, Sigourney, and we’ll do anything we can to spread this message. Give equality to women by never letting them win anything! Remove the female vote! Down with girls! Down with girls!

That was your point, Sigourney? Right?

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What was most offensive about Avatar? Its length? The fact that Zoe Saldana had boobs for no reason whatsoever?

Its GCSE politics? The way that the 3D glasses made your eyeballs start to vibrate inside your own skull? No, you idiots, it was the smoking. Remember how Sigourney Weaver was all like “I sure do love to smoke me some cigarettes!” in Avatar and then she died? That was the most offensive thing about Avatar – apart from, you know, the whole thing being a bunch of gormless hippy bollocks.

In fact, Weaver’s Avatar smoking has riled some people enough to buy ads bemoaning all the free advertising the tobacco industry received as a result. And the tobacco industry has been quick to maximise on this, which explains all the ‘Cigarettes: Now Smoked By Butch Old Ladies Who Turn Into Aliens And Then Die!’ billboards you’ve been seeing everywhere lately.

It’s a well-established fact that, when you see something on a screen, it influences your real-life decisions. That’s why, when you see all the Coca Cola cups next to Simon Cowell on American Idol, you want to punch Simon Cowell in the mouth. Drink Coca Cola. We meant to say that it makes you want to drink Coca Cola. Yes, that’s right.

And it’s the same with Avatar. Why, when we saw Avatar, its complex power of suggestion made us want to demonstrate our Caucasian superiority by flying to another planet – or, if that wasn’t practical, flying to a slightly ethnic-seeming country – and showing all the stupid locals how much better than them we are by passing ourselves off as a sort of spurious Jesus figure as crassly as possible until one of them lets us have it off with her.

Oh, and smoke. Avatar made us want to take up smoking as well. Mainly it was the misinformed Jesus thing, but smoking a bit as well.

And it turns out we’re not the only ones. Members of Smoke Free Movies – a campaign opposed to the depiction of smoking in films aimed at the young – have become so incensed by Sigourney Weaver’s smoking in Avatar that they’ve decided to take out two full-page ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter bemoaning all the free advertising that the film has apparently given to the tobacco industry. The New York Times reports:

Advertisements in Hollywood trade papers accuse the film of providing the equivalent of $50 million in free tobacco advertising. For every $100 million it earns at the box office, “Avatar” will “deliver an estimated 40 million tobacco impressions to theater audiences,” said the ads, referring to scenes involving a cigarette-smoking character played by Sigourney Weaver.

James Cameron has already dealt with these claims in part, making the distinction between advocating smoking and simply portraying it. Which is a fair point – for most of Avatar, Sigourney Weaver is too busy being a simpering blue alien who babbles on about windchimes and dreamcatchers and God knows how many other kinds of pseudo-spiritual mumbo-jumbo to explicitly state that smoking makes you look both cooler and more grown-up. Which we heard it totally does, kids.

However, James Cameron has yet to respond to the latest batch of Smoke Free Movies ads. Maybe instead of issuing a formal rebuttal he should just send them a DVD copy of Ghostbusters. That filmcontains so much smoking that they’d probably end up pooing blood 15 minutes in.

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It’s helpful when a film’s title describes its contents – Jaws had some jaws in it, Michael Clayton contained a man called Michael Clayton and Kindergarten Cop was famous for featuring those two exact things.

And that theory works beautifully with the Alien series. Alien had an alien in it, Aliens had more than one alien in it, Alien 3 was the third film in the franchise and Alien: Resurrection was a film about some aliens that featured a resurrection as a key plot point.

Which brings us to Alien 5. Which might be happening. Without any aliens in it. Whoops.
Although Sigourney Weaver is possibly most famous for her role as Ripley in the Alien franchise, she doesn’t need it to make a living. She’s been in plenty of other films, from that crappy movie about the village to the crappy movie about the vantage point to, um…

OK, look, perhaps Sigourney Weaver does need the Alien franchise a bit. But that’s just tough luck because, between the two Alien Vs Predator movies that have been released in recent years, the aliens in question now couldn’t be less scary if they came in big clown shoes and spinny bow-ties and constantly did goofy renditions the Soulja Boy dance at 90-second intervals.

So what’s Sigourney Weaver to do? On the one hand her old action movie contemporaries like Sylvester Stallone and Harrison Ford are revisiting old glories in return for piles of cash, but on the other she knows that making another Alien movie would essentially make her Michelle Dessler from 24‘s sloppy seconds. If only there was a third way – a way that made little to no sense on any level but would somehow ensure that Sigourney Weaver had enough money for that nice new speedboat she’s had her eye on.

Wait a minute, there is! Apparently Sigourney has been talking to Ridley Scott about the possibility of making Alien 5. And, here’s the kicker, it doesn’t look as if it’ll have any aliens in it. Filmstalker quotes:

“Both of us feel a kind of commitment to that woman. He’s as much responsible for who she is as I am. We’d have to go back to the drawing board on [the alien]. Ridley said that right away when we first talked about [a fifth film]. What we’re interested in is taking the character of Ripley and seeing what other science fiction story we can tell about someone who has lived several lives.”

You see? Ripley’s life doesn’t revolve completely around her incident with the aliens, so it stands to reason that you could make Alien 5 about other adventures that she’s been on. Like when she returned to Earth and took up tapestry, for example, or the time she thought she saw a fox going through her bins but actually it was just next door’s cat. Any of these scenarios would make a perfectly good film.

Of course, there is one perfectly good option for Alien 5 here that nobody seems to have noticed. Remember in Alien: Resurrection where we saw the seven hideous variously-deformed Ripley mutant clones? Let’s make Alien 5 about them! It would be excellent – not only would it give Sigourney Weaver the chance to play seven characters at once, giving her the chance to show off her acting ability, but it’d probably be the only chance we’d get to see a film about seven deformed mutant ladies and their hilarious plan to start a Salvation Army brass band much to the horror of the local parish council. It’d be a hoot. A hoot!

Now, look, we share your concern here – an Alien 5 that hasn’t got any aliens in it does sound almost unstoppably awful. But don’t forget – Ridley Scott sounds as if he’s heavily involved in the development process of the movie, so Alien 5 could be the movie that takes the series back to its roots.

Or, given that the next two films that Ridley Scott wants to make are a version of Robin Hood where Russell Crowe plays everyone and an actual movie adaptation of the bloody Monopoly boardgame, the whole thing is going to stink so badly that everyone who goes to see it will need to get their brain fumigated. But let’s not think about that option too much. It’ll just make us want to cry.

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