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Entertainers of the Year

Which stars of 2007 will make Entertainment Weekly's list? Nominate your picks, and see previous winners

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Borat Photograph by Gavin Bond

Sacha Baron Cohen

A year ago, if anyone had told you that one of the biggest movie sensations of 2006 would involve a faux Kazakh TV reporter who travels across America spouting racist, sexist, anti-Semitic drivel, you'd have thought they'd been drinking fermented horse urine. Even those familiar with British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen from his 2003 HBO series Da Ali G Show wouldn't have guessed that Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan would become a phenomenon. Borat Sagdiyev, a gleefully offensive walking id from a bizarro-world Central Asian nation, seemed just too off-putting for the mainstream.

Yet the zeitgeist was primed for Borat. Following a surprise smash debut, the film has earned over $100 million so far, setting film critics' keyboards ablaze and leaving moviegoers marveling at 35-year-old Baron Cohen's ability to turn all manner of real-life Americans — Pentecostal churchgoers, drunk frat guys, genteel Southerners, militant feminists — into foils for vicious guerrilla satire.

While Borat bumbled across America, recklessly making sexytime with our cultural sensitivities and reaping lawsuits in return, the real Baron Cohen has remained largely hidden behind his creations. His turn as a gay French race-car driver in Talladega Nights proved he can get laughs in a conventional comedy, and he's set to star with Johnny Depp in Tim Burton's adaptation of Sweeney Todd. But with plans afoot for a movie based on his character Bruno, a gay Austrian fashion reporter, the question remains: Can Golden Globe-nominated Baron Cohen pull off a gotcha comedy now that he's famous? Borat and Bruno producer Jay Roach is a believer: ''He's like Peter Sellers meets Andy Kaufman meets Buster Keaton. He's capable of anything.'' —Josh Rottenberg


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