I don't think there's a clean line between for-fun celebrity AMAs and PR exercises. They blend smoothly into each other, and the real division is just whether it trips your personal "authenticity" alarm.

There's an easy well to tell, just look in the OP and see if they're plugging something. John McAfee is not. Woody Harrelson was.

Everyone is plugging something all the time. Just because they're plugging their general popularity rather than a particular movie does not make something unassailably authentic.

I get the feeling from a few of them that the subjects of the AMA don't want to be there and that they're almost forced to do it by their PR. I'm used to the AMAs of old where the subjects really got into it.

You mean like Woody Harrelson's RAMPART? :P

Well, this one did feel a bit different, certainly more involved than others.

By the way, how could one buy a beer to this man? With something he said in the AMA I solved something that had bugged me for a long time.