Why So Crazy, Josh Brolin?

Why exactly did the actor drop his pants (among other things) at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards?

As you've probably heard by now, actor Josh Brolin went a bit sideways at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards (where he scooped up some hardware for his excellent Milk performance). Nutshell: He called Times critic Ben Brantley a "motherf***er" for panning a performance of his eight years ago, he called Russell Crowe an asshole, he said Sean Penn made him "want to be gay," and then he dropped his pants for the camera.

Okay then.

But what's all this really about? Is Mr. Diane Lane just kind of twitchy? Or is something else going on? We've rounded up some factors which might have contributed to the breakdown:

  1. Police Mistreatment? A new video just surfaced, taken when Brolin and other cast and crewmembers were arrested in some sort of bar-brawl flap in Louisiana last summer. The poor guy's clearly in what Defamer calls "post-pepper-spray shock."
  2. Shrewy Mother-in-Law? His stepmother is Barbra Streisand. For the record, we love her -- she's a hot pile of bombastic brilliance -- so we're not bashing her chops. But the lady's famously a bit on the obsessive side. We 100 percent believe she demands toilet paper to match her complexion.
  3. Daddy Issues? As a publicity stunt for No Country For Old Men, Ethan Coen wrote a piece for Esquire claiming that Josh Brolin was actually a casting-office mistake -- they'd intended to hire his father, the then-much-famouser and more-respected James Brolin, and that once the son showed up on set, it was too late to fix the problem. So they just rewrote the part. The story wasn't true, but we guess Brolin Jr. seemed like enough of a sadsack at the time that most people swalowed it straight. Brolin Jr. later called the whole thing "hysterical." Um, ha?
  4. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? He spent months in character as George W. Bush to film Oliver Stone's biopic W. That would mess with your head, too.
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