These Rasco awards are extra-special: they're the fifth annual Rascos. That's halfway to ten, y'all! And the winners noted below will always know that their Rascos are special, and that they can never have that taken away from them. Though some of the winners may wish it could be.

Famous Person of the Year

We tried to avoid this. We really, really did. We called together the hundreds of executives, middle managers and under-the-table labourers employed here at Fametracker HQ and asked everyone to come up with some -- any -- alternative.

"Surely," we cried from that little balcony we have that hangs over the atrium, and from which we deliver all our panicked edicts and corporate pep talks to our assembled minions, "There must be someone else! There must be someone who better personified the notion of fame in the year 2003! Please! Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?"

We scoured our minds for some formerly peripheral star who'd been vaulted, Russell Crowe-style, to sudden A-list celebrity. But all we could come up with is Naomi Watts, and, let's face it, she's nobody's famous person of the year. We considered Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey or, as we like to call them, Osbournes 2004. We pondered the multi-headed Bennifer, those stale-dated stars of yestermonth.

Okay -- what about musicians? Surely, rock 'n' roll heaved forth some worthy demigod? How about... Clay Aiken? The human Muzak machine? If only he were inaudible!

Or how about Beyoncé -- she won five Grammys, right? That's a big deal, isn't it? Then again, no one cares about the Grammys. No one even understands the Grammys. Ladies and gentlemen...the winner for Record of the Year! Album of the Year! Single of the Year! Song of the Year! Single Recorded Album Song of the Year! Suddenly, five trophies doesn't seem like such a big deal.

No. In the end, it couldn't be avoided. Or, rather, she couldn't be avoided -- which is ironic given that she's as thin as a tongue depressor and looks suspiciously like Peter Weller playing Robocop, in those parts when they took his metal helmet off.

Oh, you know who it is. You're not going to make us say it, are you?

All right. Here goes. And the 2004 Rasco for Famous Person of the Year goes to...Paris Hilton.

Because no one last year -- or, perhaps, any year -- more starkly personified undiluted, undeserved and inexplicable fame.

Not only does she not have a talent, but she doesn't even pretend to have a talent! Then again, you only need talent to be talented. Fame is a whole other skill set.

What these "skills" are, exactly, even we're not sure. Rapacious vanity? Unrelenting, near-cyborgian desire for the spotlight? The ability to draw sustenance from the pop-pop-pop of flashbulbs, just as Aquaman fed off the drip-drip-drip of a showerhead at those JLA board meetings? Whatever the requirements may be, Paris Hilton clearly has them all met and then some.

Look, don't blame us. Blame yourselves. You can't back out of it now. You can't say "But I laughed at her when she was on the cover of Radar!" You can't say, "But I only watched half of the sex tape before my boss walked in!" And you certainly can't say, "Sure, I sat through every episode of The Simple Life, even that special outtakes episode, but I was watching it -- you know, ironically!"

Too late. You created this Famenstein's Monster and you unleashed her onto the world. We are only here to document that fact. All we can say now is: You go, girl! No, seriously.

Most Undeservedly Famous Person of the Year

Paris Hilton.

No, wait, she's disqualified, because if she were eligible for this award, we'd have to, like, glue the statuette into her palm and then close down this site forever.

Let's rewind a little. This award has generally gone to misfits, hangers-on, flashes-in-the-pan, and reality-show "stars" who were already melting into has-beens before the credits had rolled on their final episodes.

Last year, it was Evan Marriott. In 2002, it was Shrek. (He'll be up for the award again next year.) In 2001, it was the Hilton sisters, back when there was actually two of them, before Paris swallowed Nicky and absorbed her life essence. And back in 2000, at the very first Rascos, it was Carson Daly.

Ah -- remember Carson Daly?

This year, though, we're giving it to a star. A genuine, magazine-cover-hogging, Oscar-presenting, tabloid-dominating, first-credit-demanding movie star. And that man, friends, is Colin Farrell.

Why Colin Farrell? For starters, he's not even the most likable guy in Hollywood named Fa(e)rrell.

But more important, Farrell just shouldn't be famous. Certainly not as famous as he is. That's not to say he's not a good actor; he seems like a pretty good actor. That's not to say he's not good-looking. He is good-looking. It's not even to say we don't find his calculated "I'm just an Irish lad who'll shag anyone and say anything" routine diverting. For that we do.

But none of that explains why Colin Farrell is suddenly, like, the fifth most famous actor in Hollywood. We know the machine needs a new poster boy and Cruise and Pitt are both sailing past forty. We know the Vin Diesel thing isn't working out as planned. We know Johnny Depp's smelly and Ice Cube's scary and Wahlberg's wooden and Affleck's imploded. We know you're all still waiting for a return on your media investment in Billy Crudup and Jim Caviezel.

And it may well be that one day Colin Farrell will deserve to be treated like the new Tom Cruise. But that day is not today, nor was it yesterday, nor the day before that. Nor was it the day SWAT came out, or Phonebooth or Daredevil or Hart's War or The Recruit.

In other words, can't Farrell be in one big hit before we coronate him as the next huge star? Just one? He may yet prove to have the goods. Then again, so might that guy sitting over there in the corner booth at Denny's. And you're not putting him on the cover of Esquire, are you?

Colin Farrell may one day be a big star. Until that day, we proudly present him with the 2004 Rasco of Most Undeservedly Famous Person.

Please, Colin, don't try to smoke it.

Newgoer of the Year

As with obnoxious guests who linger too long at a party, we can honestly say of the cast of Sex and the City: Oh, thank goodness they're finally gone.

Not that they weren't fun to have around, but come on! We lay on that futon for hours hoping they'd get the hint! We handed Sarah Jessica Parker her little leopard print bolero jacket and "matching" electric pink boa, like, hours ago! Oh man -- we really thought Kim Catrall was going to stay for one more eye job.

We understand it's a bit of a cheat to award the Newgoer of the Year Rasco to the S&TC cast. After all, everyone's known they were going for quite some time. In fact, they recently engaged in a farewell publicity tour so tear-stained and overwrought in its histrionics that you'd think they were orphans and puppies being shot into space.

Frankly, we're overcome with relief that this show is finally going off the air. We have no beef, mind you, with a half-hour dose of fizzy dialogue and wacky fashion every week, for those who want to watch it. Personally, we never loved the show, but unloved shows are easy enough to avoid. Usually.

S&TC, however, leached out to stain the whole culture like red underpants in a load of whites. How many execrable books alone have been greenlit thanks to that simple, magical pitch-meeting phrase: "It's Bridget Jones meets Sex and the City"?

More than that, if you enjoy awards shows (as we do, save for ones that start with "G" and end with "rammys"), you too may have been confounded for years by the way S&TC has dominated categories ostensibly reserved for comedies. We've watched the show on several occasions, but we must have missed the "comedy" episodes. Fizzy dialogue? Check. Cocktails? Check. Comedy?

We're still waiting.

Now, however, we can pass the time by charting the post-S&TC careers of the show's fearsome foursome. Of course, it goes without saying that we wish these lovely ladies all the best. It also goes without saying that, if we had genuine high hopes in our cold hearts about their continued career success, we probably wouldn't be awarding them a Rasco for Newgoers of the Year. But let's take this case by case:

Kim Catrall -- hey, it's been a great ride. Enjoy writing those sex books. We imagine that, at this point, Suzanne Somers is your best-case scenario.

Cynthia Nixon -- you fascinate us. We suspect you'll pull a Lisa Kudrow and slip off the radar, surfacing only occasionally for showy roles in indie films. Or perhaps you'll join the cast of Reba as Reba's lost younger sister. Your call.

Kristin Davis -- you are the Connie Selleca of the twenty-first century. Don't fight this. Just proceed directly to ABC's Movie of the Week casting department, where you can slip off your Manolo Blahniks and slip into the shoes of Valerie Bertinelli.

SJP. The style icon. The ringleader. The "this award's for all of us, even though it only has my name on it" trophy winner. You're a tough one. But here's what we see in the crystal ball: a two-year hiatus. Sporadic magazine covers. A secondary role in a romantic comedy ensemble film, perhaps involving Colin Firth. A "Catching Up With Carrie" mini-feature in InStyle. A much-trumpeted NBC sitcom about a harried New York magazine editor who moves into a co-op run by aging hippies, which lasts three weeks. Wait -- the farther we go into the future, the fuzzier it gets... what's that we see? It's a bottle...you're holding it up...it seems to say "Proactiv."

The William H. Macy Memorial HITG! Graduation

As the years roll by here on Fametracker, the HITG! Graduate Rasco is consistently the hardest to predict. There's always some character actor or other with a potential breakout vehicle, but it's never clear until the year is out whether any of them will really take. For instance, after American Splendor last summer, we were sure it would be Paul Giamatti's year, but then the movie peaked too soon and pretty much washed out at the Oscars; back to supporting weasel roles for you, Pig Vomit! David Paymer could have broken through to the big time with his lead role as an Irish (seriously) mobster (seriously) in ABC's FBI drama Line of Fire -- if anyone had watched or even heard of it, which they didn't. Justin Theroux might have been profiled in this slot had Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle not repelled audiences like cinematic Kevlar, or had his Alias guest shot lasted longer than two episodes.

But none of those guys had quite as good a year as did one Ms. Patricia Clarkson. In fact, if the Academy members hadn't been so useless then, Clarkson might have been here last year, as we discussed her Oscar nomination for her note-perfect turn as Cathy Whitaker's best friend Eleanor in Far From Heaven. She was ignominiously overlooked then, but this year she's racked up a nomination for one of her four indie roles in 2003; the Academy recognized her for Pieces of April, but it could just as easily have been for The Station Agent, Dogville (if it had actually been seen outside a festival setting), or...well, fine, not All the Real Girls, which stank.

Clarkson has been cool like a latter-day Frances McDormand for a while now -- kicking ass in prestigious indies like High Art one day; classing up big-budget pap like The Green Mile the next. Right now, she's playing Kurt Russell's dowdy, '80s-y wife in Miracle. And she's still cool.

Clarkson may not be a household name yet -- or possibly ever -- but she's probably in the same fame league as Joan Allen and Laura Linney by now, and we'll take that. Because we love her.

Most Likely to Become a Personality Before the Rascos are Awarded Again

George "Goober" Lindsey. Fred "Rerun" Berry. Kelsey "Frasier" Grammer. All cut from the same cloth, people.

Sure, Lindsay and Berry never won Emmys for their signature roles. But what Grammer shares with them is that they all became so closely identified with those roles that they played them for years -- in Berry's case, pretty much right up until his death last year. So it shall be for Kelsey Grammer; he just doesn't know it yet.

Grammer has been playing Frasier Crane for twenty years -- the first nine on Cheers, and then eleven more on Frasier, ending this season. Along the way, he's attempted other roles -- a news anchor in 15 Minutes, a poorly received Shakespeare stage attempt, and the voices of Sideshow Bob on The Simpsons and the title character on the already cancelled Gary the Rat. But none of them has really caught on, which is precisely why he should have clung to Frasier as tenaciously as his cocaine-atrophied muscles would allow; once the show is done, he'll still be Frasier, forever, for the simple reason that we've never seen him be anything else, and we probably never will.

And six months from now, Kelsey Grammer is going to wake up and realize that and rue the end of a long-running series -- but not Frasier. Hollywood Squares. And then he'll call his agent and agree to do a personal appearance to open a strip mall in Torrance. Because he shall be a Personality.

Lifetime Achievement Award

We don't have any designs on fame ourselves; our lives are stressful enough without worrying that a wide-angle paparazzo shot of us picking our nose is going to show up in Us Weekly. But if we did want to become famous, now we know not only how to achieve fame, but how to secure it in perpetuity, and we owe that to Nicole Kidman.

Naïvely, we weren't entirely sure she'd pull it off after divorcing the most famous actor in the known world. But now, three years on, we realize that their parting was part of Kidman's master fame plan all along, because she's much more famous now than she ever was as Mrs. Cruise. Her strategy as a celebrity bride was to work juuuust enough to be able to continue calling herself an actor, but never in any movie that would eclipse her husband's. She kept her pictures in the right magazines by showing up on his arm at various events, and never made it to any glossy covers of any consequence until she and her husband made Eyes Wide Shut, the movie that would turn out to be their last together.

Then when the marriage ended, the virtuoso fame engineering began: she had the news of her miscarriage leaked to the press, ensuring that public sympathy would be on her side. She starred in two huge movies in a single summer, and shit-talked her ex on the talk-show circuit. The next year brought another huge movie, and a bauble Cruise had never won himself: an Oscar! And now, she's so firmly ensconced that even when she delivers a changeably accented and generally pretty rote performance in a bloated mess of an award-beggar and fails to be nominated for an Oscar, her "snub" gets almost as much coverage as do the actual nominees.

Nicole Kidman started out an unpedigreed looker from Australia, and methodically crawled her way up the ladder to be installed permanently as one of the most famous people in the world. A pursuit of fame so focused and unshakable that it could hinge on marrying Tom Cruise must be recognized. ANd so we do recognize it. Nicole Kidman, welcome to the Fame Hall of Fame.

- MFF & WC