Another Saturday Night: Justin Timberlake hosting Saturday Night Live

By now I'm sure most of you have seen (or at least heard about) Justin Timberlake hosting the season finale of Saturday Night Light, with musical guest Lady GaGa.

Husband and I DVR Saturday Night Live every week and watch it over breakfast on Sunday morning. That said, we're not really big fans of the show. Many of the current "stars" are overrated (i.e. Kristen Wiig), their sketches are out of date (i.e. The Lawrence Welk Show. Seriously, SNL?) and the writers couldn't properly end a sketch if their lives depending on it.

But for some reason we continue to watch.

I said to Husband before he hit "Play" yesterday that if they couldn't manage a funny show with a host like Justin Timberlake and the biggest musical act in the world, they had better be planning some pretty big renovations over at SNL this summer.

Luckily for the cast and crew of SNL, the show was funny. Probably the funniest show of the year (not that that's saying much).

I'm always excited when Justin Timberlake hosts Saturday Night Live. Not because I'm a Justin Timberlake fan. Because I really don't think I am. In fact, if you had asked me 10 years ago in the height of his N*Sync days, I would have said I hated him.

But slowly, over the past decade, he's begun to grow on me.

Sure I still don't own any of his albums. And I'd never go see him in concert. But somehow his mixture of halfway decent acting and not taking himself seriously has won me over, despite myself.

It's weird how we shape our opinions of celebrities, people whom we've never (and probably won't ever) met. Over the Easter weekend, my family and I had an interesting conversation. My sister had read an article about Gwyneth Paltrow and how many people seem to inexplicably hate her. (For the record, I did try to locate the exact article, but when I Googled "Gwyneth Paltrow" and "dislike" about seventy pages of articles popped up. Seems this topic is nothing new in the media.)

I'd read the same article and chimed in, "Yeah I hate Gwyneth Paltrow and I seriously can't figure out a reason why."

Gwyneth Paltrow has done nothing to offend me. In fact, I've really only ever seen a few of her movies (Sliding Doors, which I loved, and Shallow Hal, which is actually kind of sweet). I've never really seen her outside of acting either: I don't watch daytime or late night television so I rarely see a celebrity interviewed. But yet the very thought of her makes me cringe.

I feel the same way about George Clooney. For some completely unknown reason, I hate him. This is despite an adorable article I read in Time magazine several years ago. George comes to the interviewer's home for dinner, ends up in the climbing around in the attic trying to locate a smoke detector, and then two days later bumps into the interviewer again at a local restaurant, where he invites him to join his party.

Talk about an everyman! I should love George Clooney!

But I don't.

Conversely, I always think that I love Alec Baldwin. He's hysterical on 30 Rock and for the last ten years has stolen every single movie he's appeared in (his role in The Departed in particular was truly inspired). Then he appears on Real Time with Bill Maher or 60 Minutes and I realize that he's actually rather obnoxious: political to the point of nauseousness, arrogant, and generally not at all funny.

That doesn't stop me from tuning in to 30 Rock every week and defending him when a co-worker attacks him, which occurs on a regular basis. A few years back some of Alec's voicemail messages to his daughter were leaked, causing a public relations nightmare. In one of the messages he called her a "little pig" and my co-worker simply will not forgive him for that, despite how critically acclaimed his work may be.

Husband has a total irrational hatred of Jake Gyllenhaal. I'm not entirely sure when it started, but he hates him and is convinced that he's only 5 feet tall. In reality, Jake is over 6 feet tall, but even if they were standing next to each other, Husband wouldn't believe it.

Are there any celebrities who you irrationally dislike? Or that you suddenly realized that you actually liked? I'm sure I can't be the only one out there who does this!