POP STOP

Andy Lau (劉德華) demonstrated once again his dominance of all things pop by sweeping five awards at Hong Kong TVB's Jade Solid Gold Music on Saturday. Little surprise that the Canto-pop poster boy wrecked shop at the show, but two of the awards require careful reading to make sense of their difference: Most Popular Male Hong Kong Singer in Asia, and Most Popular Male Singer in Hong Kong.

It seems like the organizers are splitting hairs on this one, but at least the names of the two awards put to rest any debate over whether these events are actually nothing more than extravagant popularity contests.

Three of Lau's most recent songs won individual honors, including the Most Popular Chinese Song prize for After All I Have Love (原來我有妳).

Among the ladies, Joey Yung (容祖兒) walked away with five awards, including Most Popular Hong Kong Female Singer, while Kelly Chan (陳惠琳) won the Most Popular Hong Kong Female Singer in Asia award.

Lau has now earned a vacation, which he said he will take in Thailand to contribute some of his considerable cash to areas hit by last month's tsunami.

That would be on top of his contribution to the massive Love fundraiser organized by Hong Kong actor Eric Tsang (曾志偉), which included about 400 people from the entertainment industries in Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Singapore and Taiwan.

Twenty-thousand showed up for the concert on Friday in Hong Kong, raising HK$33 million, while ETTV's affiliated TV fundraiser hosted by Chang Fei (張菲) and Jacky Wu (吳宗憲) raised NT$52 million before it had gone off the air.

A separate fundraiser, held at the Taipei 101 building on Saturday starring most of the pantheon of Taiwanese singers, raised NT$47 million.

The other major live-music action in Taipei over the weekend was Mayday's (五月天) massive concert on Saturday with over 40,000 in attendance. It was unusually cold with a misty rain, but that didn't stop the band's guitarist Monster (怪獸) from taking off his shirt to show off his new, full-arm tribal pattern tattoo. For a pop band, the size of the tattoo is a bit surprising, but not as much as their promise to donate NT$1 million from the ticket sales to tsunami relief.

Fans of Faye Wong (王菲) got a scare this week when rumors began circulating after the final stop at Guangzhou on her 14-month, nine-city tour that suggested she would retire from her singing career to marry her current boyfriend Li Yapeng (李亞朋). Wong's agent denied the diva would be stepping out of the business, but was mum on the topic of a possible marriage to Li.

Another denial coming out of Guangzhou was by the local organizers of a S.H.E concert originally planned there for tomorrow. The show was cancelled reportedly because of bad ticket sales, but organizers insisted the cancellation was actually due to a lack of equipment after some of it was destroyed in a traffic accident while being delivered from Shanghai. They promised the show would be rescheduled for the coming summer.

Setting the stage for a glorious Oscar showing, Zhang Yimou (張藝謀) received the best-director prize at this week's US Film Critics Awards for House of Flying Daggers (十面埋伏). The prestigious critics association, whose decisions often foreshadow Oscar winners, also gave Zhang's film top honors for cinematography.