Don’t Be Snide With Schneider

To the unwritten rules of Hollywood, which include 'Never be taller than Tom Cruise' and 'Never ask Jessica Simpson a personal question', we can now add 'never piss off Rob Schneider'. To look at him, the cuddly, curly-haired star of The Hot Chick, The Animal and, best of all, Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo seems like he wouldn't hurt a fly. But woe betide those journalists who have a pop at the great man and his body of work, as the LA Times' Patrick Goldstein found out to his cost this week. In a recent column on the gradual deterioration of quality of movies in the Oscar race, Goldstein bizarrely decided to single out the fact that Hollywood makes movies like Deuce Bigalow as a symptom of general dumbing. In fact, he went so far as to call Schneider's comic meisterwerk 'a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic.' Ooh