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Elliott leads MTV music award nominations

Missy Elliott worked her way to a leading eight nominations for this year's MTV Video Music Awards.

The rapper's video for Work It, a surreal, Daliesque mixture of flies, gray skies and twisted trees, is up for video of the year, best female video and best hip-hop video, the cable music channel announced Thursday.

In technical categories, it was nominated for best direction, special effects, art direction, editing and cinematography.

Justin Timberlake followed with seven nominations for Cry Me a River and Rock Your Body.

And Johnny Cash's version of the Nine Inch Nails song Hurt earned six nominations. The song is off his album of covers, American IV: The Man Comes Around.

Rappers 50 Cent and Eminem also received five nominations each.

The 20th annual MTV Video Music Awards will air live from Radio City Music Hall in New York at 8 p.m. Aug. 28. Chris Rock will be the host.

Tom Bergeron of Hollywood Squares and America's Funniest Home Videos will host this year's Miss America pageant telecast.

Bergeron said he's happy to sign on with the world's most famous beauty pageant, even if it isn't the freshest thing on network TV. "I referee a tic-tac-toe game and I introduce clips of people hitting themselves in the (groin). This will help my career, if anything," he said.

The pageant airs live Sept. 20 on ABC.

An army major convicted of cheating his way to the top prize, equal to $1.6-million, on a British TV game show said Thursday he has left the armed forces.

Maj. Charles Ingram, 39, relied on coded coughs from an accomplice in the audience to correctly answer the 1-million-pound question, a jury concluded.

Both men and Ingram's wife, Diana, were convicted of deception in April and received suspended jail terms of a year to 18 months. The program, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, never paid the 1-million pounds.

Showtime has picked up Family Business, about an average San Fernando Valley, Calif., clan who happens to run an adult-film company, for a second season.

Production on the new season is scheduled to begin this summer. Camera crews will again trail Adam Glasser (porn name: Seymore Butts), his mom, Lila, and cousin Stevie as they juggle family life with the demands of running his production company.

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