To anyone who “kept up” with Khloé Kardashian’s trajectory as co-host of The X Factor, the reality star’s firing this week from the show hardly comes as a surprise. She had no live TV experience, no hosting experience, and no musical experience. She was a deer in headlights in every sense of the phrase, a wide-eyed Bambi fumbling to gather her legs under her in a job she couldn’t have been more ill suited to fill.

Her eyes would dart back and forth between cameras, unsure of where she should be looking. She’d literally shout at viewers, thinking she had to be heard over the screaming live audience. A fixed, terrified smile never left her face as she robotically recited whatever lines were being fed to her by producers. “Wow. What a phenomenal night,” she’d offer in a staccato deadpan. Certainly, there was no meaningful connection being made with the contestants. “I’m so nervous and I’m not ... even ... any of these ... groups ... right now,” she once lifelessly shrugged as a handful of competitors awaited their fates.

On the opening night of the Tribeca Film Festival, festival co-founder Robert De Niro and his wife, Grace Hightower, stepped onto the red carpet, almost instantly obscured by a noisy mass of photographers. Less than 15 feet down the same carpet, in a fitted suit and clear-rimmed glasses, and with fewer cameras around him, stood Matt Berninger, lead singer for one of indie rock’s most respected bands, The National. Bemused, two journalists behind me wondered aloud “what this guy is doing here.” One commented that he had “never heard of ’em.”

A little way off was Tom Berninger, Matt’s younger brother. Vaguely Philip Seymour Hoffman-esque in appearance, Tom is a slacker type familiar to many: he’s a 33-year-old metalhead who lives at home with his parents and somehow never quite manages to finish what he starts. Tom is also the reason the band was there. Though his previous director credits were mainly homemade slasher flicks—one revolved around a murderous rampage-prone barbarian with an identity crisis—Tom’s new “self-mockumentary,” Mistaken for Strangers, was selected as the opener for this year’s festival. He was as flabbergasted as the journalists behind me were. 

“My message is to give the haters the finger and be yourself,” Ke$ha says in the premiere of her new MTV docu-series Ke$ha: My Crazy Beautiful Life. Damned if, until now, the glitter-soaked pop warbler hasn’t heeded her own advice. This is, after all, the woman who first hit it big with a musical ode to debauchery, who wears a fan’s molar on a necklace, who created her own line of condoms emblazoned with her likeness.

My Crazy Beautiful Life, whose first episode aired Tuesday night, tracks the Katy Perry–Lady Gaga love child as she prowls the globe on her first headlining tour. “Brace for some serious wackiness,” you probably thought. After all, when teasing the series earlier this year, Ke$ha revealed that she drank her own pee and smoked glitter during the filming process. That Ke$ha! She’s so crazy, what with her brushing her teeth with a bottle of Jack, glitter fetish, and pee-pee chugging! Surely, then, a so-called all-access documentary series airing on MTV would gleefully exploit the auto-tune maven’s penchant for crazy, unleashing a torrent of sparkly ridiculata to entertain viewers.

April Ludgate, ‘Parks and Recreation’

As the surly intern turned assistant on Parks and Recreation, April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza) hates her job almost as much as her boss Ron Swanson does. While she may act apathetic about her administrative tasks, her dedication to keeping her perpetually unhappy boss happy—trying to schedule all of his meetings on a day she doesn’t think actually exists, for example—is admirable.

At just 25 years of age, Evan Rachel Wood has established herself as a gifted, highly unpredictable actress. After her breakout role as a troubled young girl in Thirteen, she’s gone on to star in a diverse array of films, including Julie Taymor’s musical Across the Universe, Darren Aronofsky’s dark drama The Wrestler, and George Clooney’s political thriller The Ides of March.

A very pregnant Wood is at Tribeca to unveil her latest film, romantic comedy A Case of You. Directed by Kat Coiro from a screenplay by brothers Justin and Christian Long, the film stars Justin Long as Sam, a disillusioned novelist who is infatuated with Byrdie (Wood) the barista at his local Brooklyn coffee shop. He eventually stalks her Facebook profile and seeks to win her over by becoming the man he thinks she wants—that is, conforming to all the things under her “likes” section. The experiment goes swimmingly, until Sam realizes he may be biting off more than he can chew. The film boasts a stellar supporting cast as well, including Vince Vaughn as a snappy agent, Peter Dinklage as a saucy gay barista, and Sam Rockwell as a stoner guitar instructor.

The madman stands in the psychiatric ward, wild-eyed and streaked with blood, his throat raked with deep scratches. As security cameras surveil him from glistening tile walls and an observation window peers down on him from on high, a doctor and orderly tend the patient, carefully removing his street clothes and dressing him in hospital garb, scraping samples from beneath his fingernails, gathering his belongings in brown paper bags, and leading him to a simple cot. There he lies in fetal position, reeling from thoughts of the atrocities he has committed, which spool endlessly in his mind. When nightmares torment him, his warders rush down to subdue and soothe him; the serene and efficient doctor (Jenny Sterlin) will apply a hypodermic; the gentle, massive orderly (Brendan Titley) will scoop him up balletically, tenderly depositing his wracked frame back on his cot. This may sound like a surreally sensitive episode of “Lockup”, but it is not: it is The National Theatre of Scotland’s fiendishly imaginative reinvention of Macbeth, now on Broadway; directed by John Tiffany (Once) and Andrew Goldberg (The Bomb-itty of Errors), and relayed in a protean tour-de-force by the Scottish actor Alan Cumming.

In a kind of antic trance, Cumming’s lunatic reenacts the well-known tragedy, channeling every one of the play’s major roles like a modern-day Sybil. Three flat-screen televisions crackle above the stage, evoking Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters. One moment Cumming is Macbeth, irresolute and haunted, his accent burred with rolling Scottish Rs; the next, donning a simpering sensuality, he becomes Lady Macbeth, goading her husband to treachery; another moment he assumes a different voice and stance and rides a wheelchair throne as the doomed King Duncan, another moment he shoulders a rough blanket and swaggers as brave Macduff. Taking up an apple, he becomes Banquo; taking up a doll he is Malcolm, son of slain King Duncan. Even as he sits and weeps alone on his cot, multiple personalities surround him. Plucking a child’s sweater from an evidence bag, he caresses it, mourns it: the garment embodies the little son of Macduff, Macbeth’s youngest victim, whose murder he will soon replay, in a demented, unhealing catharsis, drowning it in the small bath of his sickroom. This production is a banquet for those who love to decode layered meanings and to feast on the psychological nuances that stud Shakespeare’s most-produced play. Audience members, even those who have seen Macbeth in the theater 10 times before, hold their breath as they watch “memory, the warder of the brain” (Lady Macbeth’s words) punish her guilty, tormented inmate. And Cumming’s electrifying performance never stops prompting the unlikely question: what will he do next? 

1. Psy, “Gangnam Style”: 1,552,071,214 views

No surprise here. After posting the eccentric video in mid-July 2012, K-pop singer Psy became a sensation, appearing on every television show ever, spawning countless spin-off videos, and inspiring David Gregory to dance. (Or, at least, try.) The video reached 100 million views in 51 days, but hasn’t stopped its climb to record heights. Not a bad run for a subtle commentary on South Korean classism.

The effortless transformation of Justin Bieber from dreamy teen heartthrob to heartless, self-centered pop star continues apace. The latest news is that the possibly troubled singer has decided to abandon his pet monkey to German authorities rather than go through the complicated process of getting the animal back to America.

The latest display of ego-centric celebrity attitude comes just days after Bieber penned a message saying he hoped the Dutch schoolgirl Anne Frank would have been a Belieber.

Seems like there’s an app for everything these days—boiling an egg, hailing a cab, cursing in foreign languages—but avoiding sleeping with your cousin?

Well, yes, there’s an app for that too. In Iceland.