Personal Life
Ebert is married to trial attorney Charlie "Chaz" Hammel-Smith. Chaz Ebert is now vice president of the Ebert Company and has emceed Ebertfest.
Roger Ebert suffered from alcoholism and quit drinking in 1979. He is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and has written some blog entries on the subject. He has been friends with, and at one time dated, Oprah Winfrey, who credits him with encouraging her to go into syndication. He is also good friends with film historian and critic Leonard Maltin and considers the book Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide to be the standard of film guide books.
A supporter of the Democratic Party, Ebert publicly urged liberal filmmaker Michael Moore to give a politically charged acceptance speech at the Academy Awards: "I'd like to see Michael Moore get up there and let 'em have it with both barrels and really let loose and give them a real rabble-rousing speech." During a 2004 visit to The Howard Stern Show, Ebert predicted that the then-junior Illinois senator Barack Obama would be very important to the future of the country. During a 1996 panel at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Conference on World Affairs, Ebert coined The Boulder Pledge, by which he vowed never to purchase anything offered through the result of an unsolicited email message, or to forward chain emails or mass emails to others.
He is critical of the Intelligent Design movement. He has also stated that people who believe in either creationism or New Age beliefs such as crystal healing or astrology are not qualified to be President. Regarding his belief system, he doesn't "want to provide a category for people to apply to " because he "would not want convictions reduced to a word" and states, "I have never said, although readers have freely informed me I am an atheist, an agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist—which I am". Ebert has also expressed disbelief in pseudoscientific or supernatural claims in general, calling them "woo-woo".
On April 25, 2011, he achieved one of his long-time goals: winning one of the weekly caption contests in The New Yorker magazine after more than 100 attempts.
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