Hollywood Exclusive by Marilyn Beck & Stacy Jenel Smith

Jon Cryer isn't holding out hope that the third time will be the charm for him when the winner of the Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy is announced at the Sept. 21 awards show.

The last two times Cryer was nominated for "Two and a Half Men," he lost out to "Entourage's" Jeremy Piven.

"Laugh all you want," Cryer says. Piven "is my nemesis. He's a force of nature." He expects to lose to him again, "or I think this time to Neil Patrick Harris ('How I Met Your Mother')."

Win or lose, Cryer looks forward to attending the television industry's honor-thy-own fest. His wife doesn't share his excitement. He says of entertainment reporter Lisa Joyner, whom he married last year, "When we heard the news, she was thrilled for a moment, then filled with dread as she started to worry about what she'll wear. The event is such a big deal for women that she really doesn't look forward to it. But she'll be there with me — or I'll be very lonely."

The nice-guy actor has had little time to think of loneliness — or leisure — in the last year or so. Last summer he shot "Tortured," an upcoming big-screen feature in which he co-stars with Laurence Fishburne and James Cromwell, and which he describes as a "drama I sort of stumbled into about the line between good guys and bad guys — if doing something bad for a good reason is moral or immoral. "

He's also featured in the upcoming "Weather Girl" feature, recently completed the big screen "Shorts" with James Spader and is about to start the feature, "Stay Cool."

Why does he work so hard? It sounds like he asks himself the same question sometimes.

"It was so hot in Austin while I was there shooting 'Shorts.' I asked myself, 'Why are you doing this to yourself? You've got the most incredible job in television.'"

He returns to that incredible job early next month, finishing up "Stay Cool" on free days.

SORTA SORDID: Comedienne/actress Caroline Rhea reports her sex scenes as a hapless housewife in the MTV Networks' Logo channel's "Sordid Lives: The Series" debuting tomorrow (7/23) were no joke.

"My sister said, 'You look a little uptight in one of them.' I'm like, 'Uptight? I could barely breathe,'" says Rhea, who co-stars with Olivia Newton-John, Rue McClanahan and Bonnie Bedelia in the series based on the play and 1999 feature film.

"I had so many foundation garments on, I was like Tutankhamen.

It inhibited my ability to move my wrist slightly. They were like, 'Touch his shoulder.' And I'm poking at him because I can barely touch his shoulder." Just when she started thinking things weren't going that badly, "I hear the director say 'Carrie, have you ever had sex before?' I thought, 'Okay, I'm not pulling this off.' I'm a new genre of comedy porn. It's on a gay channel. I don't have hot sex lesbian scenes, but my sex scenes will turn straight men gay. It's totally embarrassing. I don't know how anybody does it.'"

Rhea, who lost her father the end of last year, says shooting the wild comedy was just what she needed to offset what she was going through in her dad's last days, "like this little silver lining to a big cloud." She adds that being transformed into her southern character — complete with big, teased hair and coral lipstick — was "very liberating. They asked, 'Do you need drops to make you cry?' and I'm like 'No, between how I feel about my dad and looking at what my hair looks like I can cry all by myself, thank you. No worries.'" She adds, "I got so enmeshed in that character I can't stop talking with the Texas accent. People hear me and go, 'Where you from?' I say 'I'm from Canada.'"

THE BIG SCREEN SCENE: Kris Kristofferson, who's been bouncing from film to film of late, including the forthcoming "Lords of the Street," "Powder Blue" and "He's Just Not That into You," will soon head to Alberta, Canada for shooting of "The Last Rites of Ransom Pride," director Tiller Russell's film about a band of Texas outlaws.

CATCH A WAVE: "Surf School" filmmaker Joel Silverman is getting back to the sand and sea, prepping to go into production with "Surf Movie" — a comedy about a group of California surfer dudes who head to Costa Rica to avoid summer school, only to wind up helping an auntie of one of the boys who has a problem with real estate developers trying to put her off her land.

With reports by Stephanie DuBois and Emily Feimster.

To find out more about Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith and read their past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 MARILYN BECK AND STACY JENEL SMITH

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