In a statement released to E! on Tuesday, Beyoncé announced she was quitting the Clint Eastwood–helmed remake of A Star Is Born. She relayed this message in the most anodyne way possible: "I was looking forward to the production … and the opportunity to work with Clint Eastwood. For months we tried to coordinate our schedules to bring this remake to life but it was just not possible. Hopefully in the future we will get a chance to work together." While I acknowledge that the lives of the rich and famous are almost incomprehensibly more full and rich than that of my own — seeing that Beyoncé has no impending tour or album release on the docket, it sounds like her schedule's actually pretty wide-open? Also: months? Months?! If you really wanted this, you would have tried for decades! So what else could be going on? Five conspiracy theories, of various degrees of complete unfoundedness, below:

Clint Eastwood, as Grantland recently attempted to passionately convince you, is a pretty cool dude in totality. It's maybe been hard to remember ever since he talked to a chair, but it's true. For right now, though, we may just have to do the whistle-and-avoid-eye-contact thing a little bit longer. Trouble With the Curve, Eastwood's first onscreen role since 2008's Gran Torino, didn't hit big at the box office this weekend, managing an underwhelming $12.7 million. In a regular year, that might not make much of a difference when it came to Clint rallying Oscar votes. In this year, the year in which Clint talked to a chair, the lackluster numbers means his current "downward slope" narrative sticks. The worst part of all of this? With Curve playing to semi-vacant theaters, a nation of movie bloggers must resist, with all their might, the undeniable lure of a solid "Eastwood/empty chair[s]" formulation.

Our friend Clint Eastwood has recently suffered a bit of a blow to his image, after his recent, high-profile chamber drama opposite a piece of furniture was a critical failure. This comes at a bad time, as Mr. Eastwood's new potentially Oscar-baiting film Trouble With the Curve (his first non-self-directed role since 1993's In the Line of Fire) opens this weekend. Naturally, it falls to us Grantlanders and the power of YouTube to repair his reputation by reminding everyone how much he's contributed to the art of cinema over the years.

In 2008, during the run-up to Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood said that the movie would be his last: "This will probably do it for me as far as acting is concerned … You always want to quit while you are ahead. You don't want to be like a fighter who stays too long in the ring until you're not performing at your best." He changed his mind, though, and will be back onscreen in this year's Trouble With the Curve, a baseball/family drama that's highly anticipated even though it stars Justin Timberlake as an ex-ballplayer. (Goofy romantic comedy lead? Yeah, sure. Professional athlete? I don't know, JT.) It turned out, however, that Eastwood had one more high-profile performance lined up for 2012.

Last night, The Man With No Name showed up as a surprise guest to introduce Mitt Romney at the Republican National Convention. And things … did not … necessarily … go well.

Whether you're an ecstatic Giants fan, a bereft New Englander, or one of the seemingly 14 billion Twitter users who announced a total lack of interest in the "Super Game," we can all agree on one thing: Giant corporations spent the GDP of a failing European debtor state on commercials in the hope that people on the Internet would write stories like this one. And so, in fulfillment of our end of the implicit Super Bowl contract with the automobile manufacturers, monolithic breweries, and snack-food concerns who make bathroom breaks nigh impossible (what, you think we're going to pause the DVR and risk falling 30 seconds behind the tweets, you maniacs?), we're going to hand out a bunch of very, very prestigious awards to last night's advertainment spectacles, mostly in hopes this post will go viral and be sponsored by CareerBuilder.com's Depressed Office Monkeys next year.