Thoughts on the 86th Academy Awards

Now that I've had a few hours of sleep (the 2014 Oscar telecast ended somewhere around 7.10am South African time), I can try to offer some (hopefully) coherent impressions and reflections.

1. The acting-nominees clips (long my favorite thing about Oscar night) were, as usual, hit and miss. Of course, they showed Jennifer Lawrence's American Hustle bathroom showdown with Amy Adams for Lawrence's category (Best Supporting Actress), but I'm not sure why they didn't go with Adams' comeback for Best Actress instead of her dismissal of Christian Bale on the tarmac, which was good mostly for her punchline ("You're nothing until you're everything")....

Matthew McConaughey had far better scenes than his post-AIDS diagnosis hospital confrontation with Jennifer Garner, but it was nice to have some acknowledgement that she was in the film, too. (Shame on Jared Leto for not mentioning her in what was an otherwise flawless acceptance speech.)...

Bruce Dern's quiet Nebraska turn was more effective for the cumulative effect of all his scenes rather than for individual ones, so his clip never stood a chance against his showy fellow nominees....

Taken out of context of Dallas Buyers Club, Jared Leto's clip moved me more than the performance did overall. I still contend that he was playing Rayon more as an effeminate and very theatrical gay man than as a convincing transgender woman....

Sally Hawkins' Best Supporting Actress Blue Jasmine clip provided more ammunition for Cate Blanchett's eventual Best Actress win, and Meryl Streep's just highlighted everything I hated about her performance in August: Osage County as well as her previous two Oscar-nominated performances. Not even the Oscar queen can make hammy overacting work.

2. Can we just get Ellen Degeneres to host the damn thing every year? I love how she approaches the Oscars like she approaches her daytime talk show, with an effortless, self-deprecating congeniality that can be biting but never insulting. The whole pizza gag (when she first mentioned pizza, I knew she was going to follow through on the joke) and the selfie bit were better than any of the elaborate skits that other recent Oscar hosts have employed because we got to see a lot of the stars in unrehearsed settings, acting like normal people. In fact, cranky Harrison Ford aside, they actually came across as pretty nice people. No one even seemed to care that Lupita Nyong'o's brother was hogging the right side of the photo? But who was the guy between Jennifer Lawrence and Julia Roberts?

3. Three dreams on my Oscar wish lift came true: No "In Memoriam" popularity-contest applause, a Cate Blanchett triumph, and Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o remembering to acknowledge 12 Years a Slave costar Sarah Paulson -- who was like the Jennifer Garner of that movie -- in her acceptance speech. (Fun fact: Paulson also appeared in another 2013 McConaughey film, Mud.) I don't believe I saw Paulson there, though. Did she go up on the stage for 12 Years' Best Picture win? Although I wasn't rooting for 12 Years, I'm secretly glad it won because now producer Brad Pitt can call himself "Oscar winner Brad Pitt," and a few years from now the Academy won't have to feel obligated to give him one of those he's-due awards. Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp deserve it more.

4. I loved that Christoph Waltz presented Nyong'o's Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Not just because he says her name so appealingly but also because Nyong'o was to 12 Years a Slave what Kerry Washington was to Django Unchained, the 2012 film for which Waltz won his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar last year. I don't think any woman at the Oscars looked better than Nyong'o and Washington, who was a presenter. Although Washington has Scandal and a baby on the way, I still feel bad that she's always an Oscar presenter (well, for the second time), never a nominee.

5. My favorite acceptance-speech line of the night: "The world is round, people." -- Cate Blanchett. She had more of an edge than I usually associate with her. I'd like to be in on that inside " hashtag suck it" joke between her and Julia Roberts, who seemed to get it and take it in stride.

6. As I told a friend on Facebook, I could spend all day looking at Spike Jonze and/or watching his movies. He's that adorable. I had my issues with Her, but Best Original Screenplay couldn't have gone to a more deserving guy. I normally hate it when directors try to act, but I even liked what he did in The Wolf of Wall Street. If only Jonze swung the way his character did.

7. I've never really understood the appeal of the random montages. Did we really need two tributes to heroes (animated and real-life ones)? Why not cut one, or both, or condense them into one, and then expand "In Memorian" to include recently departed TV icons Ralph Waite and Jean Stapeleton, both of whom also appeared in films (The Bodyguard and You've Got Mail, to name two, respectively). Oh, well. There's always the Emmys, and for Waite, who most recently appeared on Days of Our Lives as Father Matt, the Daytime Emmys, too.

8. I'm still not sure what to make of some of the presenters. Goldie Hawn seemed random, but she's a legend. Ditto, Kim Novak. Kate Hudson, who has not made a significant contribution to film in years, is not....

Will Smith is one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, but he still doesn't feel Best Picture presenter-caliber. Smith and Poitier would have made more sense, but the Academy probably didn't want to be too obvious. By pairing Poitier with Angelina Jolie to present Best Director, a win for Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) over Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity) seemed almost possible, if not quite probable. Since Bette Midler and Hawn were already there, why didn't they invite Diane Keaton and make the Best Picture announcement a First Wives Club reunion?...

I appreciated the inclusion of previous nominees like Gabourey Sidibe and Anna Kendrick, but Chris Evans, who has never appeared in anything resembling an Oscar-caliber film, is so MTV Movie Awards, and Jessica Biel's Best Original Score/Best Original Song co-presenting spot should have gone to her husband Justin Timberlake, who's both an actor and a singer, sort of like Biel's co-presenter, Jamie Foxx.

9. I'm still not a fan of all the facial hair on men. When did grooming go out of style in Hollywood. Memo to Ewan McGregor, Jason Sudeikis, Jared Leto, Bradley Cooper and Michael Fassbender: Shave! Please see Matthew McConaughey. He'll show you how it's done.

10. For the first time ever, Sidney Poitier, 87, looks frail. He's like the still-living Nelson Mandela of Hollywood, the epitome of legendary screen greatness. Angela Lansbury, 88, who appeared in the pre-taped lifetime-achievement presentation section, is still looking at least a decade and a half younger than she is. Meanwhile, Brad Pitt, who turned 50 in November, appears to have discovered Benjamin Button's -- or Jared Leto's -- secret to aging backwards. Ditto Jim Carrey. He and Brad kind of have me looking foward to 50, which since all of the major categories were, as usual, utterly predictable, was perhaps the biggest surprise of Oscar night 2014.

5 Random Thoughts I Had While Watching "Dallas Buyers Club"

1. I hate this movie's title. I probably should blame it on Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey, yet another Best Actor Oscar contender playing an actual person, living or dead), who coined the name for his society of paying AIDS patients for whom he crossed international borders to obtain beneficial AIDS cocktails and turn a nice profit while he was at it (membership fee: $400). It sounds like the name of a football team. I keep wanting to call it North Dallas Buyer's Club, mangling the title the way one character confuses Cary Grant for Rock Hudson, calling the latter the star of North by Northwest. Maybe it's the "North" in the title of the 1959 Hitchcock classic that's throwing me.

Though bullriding is the only sport featured in Dallas Buyers Club, in a sense the film's central showdown is like the ultimate sports match: Desperate AIDS patients led by Quarterback Ron vs. a U.S. medical community more concerned with strategy and procedure and making money than saving lives. I'd rather watch this one than the Super Bowl.

2. I think this is by far the best performance of Matthew McConaughey's recent career reinvention, and I haven't seen a 2013 leading-male performer to whom I'd give the Best Actor Oscar over him. But I'm not sure how much of my appreciation of McConaughey's rendering of Woodroof is his performance and how much of it is his stunning physical transformation. Had he not lost 50 pounds for the role, had I not spent the entire two hours squirming in my seat, feeling Woodroof's (and McConaughey's) physical pain, marveling at the actor's dedication to the movie, wondering if he was famished while filming it, would I be quite so moved?

McConaughey didn't just lose the weight and call it a wrap. He nailed the levels of Woodroof's gradual deterioration and his physical upswings due to the drug cocktail he was taking. Do all of those twisted, tortured mannerisms -- the walk, the speech, the gaze -- belong to Woodroof, or are they McConaughey's, for no hard-bodied actor loses 50 pounds without serious physical and medical ramifications? I wonder how he regained the weight, what was the the first thing he ate after filming wrapped, and what he will look like on Oscar night.

The Academy doesn't generally like to give its Best Actor prize to mainstream hunks. Consider non-winners Rock Hudson and Cary Grant (one name-dropped, the other alluded to, in Dallas Buyers Club), Montgomery Clift, Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, as well as Paul Newman, who had to wait until he was sixtysomething to get his due. I'm convinced that if McConaughey were Philip Seymour Hoffman or Daniel Day-Lewis, or Charlize Theron (to name two recent bulldozer Best Actor winners and the queen of physically transformed Best Actress winners), he'd be a shoo-in.

3. Jared Leto, on the other hand, is a virtual Best Supporting Actor shoo-in, and I'm not entirely sure I understand why. Maybe it's because his character, a transvestite named Rayon who's also battling AIDS and becomes Woodroof's reluctant business partner and friend, isn't onscreen enough, or because he is so familiar to me. As an adult, I've encountered and befriended so many people like Rayon that the character doesn't come across as such an original creation. Perhaps that's the very thing that's so remarkable about Leto's performance: He makes you forget that you're watching a fictional character, much less the hunky guy who used to make Claire Danes swoon on My So-Called Life in the '90s.

4. For your consideration, too: I've had a bit of a soft spot for Jennifer Garner since her days as Sydney Bristow on Alias, and I think she doesn't get enough credit for her acting. As far as I know, she didn't alter her weight for the role as Dr. Eve Saks, and I didn't even realize it was her playing the doctor until her second scene. She gives the character gray areas: At first she's a slave to procedure, but she comes around so gradually that the shift is virtually undetectable to the naked eye.

I could swear there's a slight attraction to Woodroof, which could very well be a traces of Garner's onscreen chemistry with McConaughey, her costar in the 2009 romantic comedy Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. That spark I'm noticing might be more an emotional cocktail of attraction, repulsion, curiosity, appreciation, compassion and maybe even just a smidgen of pity, but Garner hints at it without letting us know for sure. If she were Amy Adams, she'd be guaranteed a Best Supporting Actress nod.

5. The movie and McConaughey wisely don't make the movie or the Woodroof character all about his bigotry and homophobia and how he eventually comes around. I'm not sure that he actually does completely, but he does become a better person through his experiences, understanding the discrimination that gay men, even ones without a death sentence, must endure through the reaction of his friends and colleagues to his diagnosis.

There's no one ah-ha moment, which a lesser movie movie would have offered, but rather a gradual coming to Jesus that you don't really see coming until you realize that Woodroof isn't quite the prick he was at the beginning of the movie, a minority-bashing rodeo cowboy/electrician who would deny a dying guy access to life-lengthening medication because he has only $50 of the $400 membership fee. When he does become a crusader, Norma Rae/Erin Brockovich-style, we're not banged over the head with his heroic deeds, but rather allowed to watch glimpses of humanity slowly add up to someone worthy of admiration.

If Woodroof, who died in 1992, seven years after his diagnosis and one-month-to-live death sentence, was not quite a hero, he was an extremely flawed man who still made a huge difference.

7 Random Thoughts I Had About Matthew McConaughey After Watching "Mud"

1. After seven years of living abroad, I still don't understand why some films get a foreign release before others. Yes, I know Mud was well-received at Sundance, and it was a Palme d'Or contender at Cannes, but it arrived in U.S. theaters in April on a limited basis with relatively little fanfare, despite the big names of Matthew McConaughey (top billed) and Reese Witherspoon (settling for the "and" honors to the right) above the title. I didn't even know the film existed until I read a review of it two weeks ago on the day it came out in Bangkok. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for The Great Gatsby.

I imagine that foreign releases are determined based on the drawing power of the concept and the stars (which would explain why The Lone Ranger, starring Johnny Depp as Tonto, is coming out on July 4 here as it is in the States), so does this mean that McConaughey is considered a bigger draw in Thailand than Leonardo DiCaprio and F. Scott Fitzgerald?

2. Last year when I suggested, in writing, that McConaughey's quadruple play in Magic Mike, Bernie, The Paperboy and Killer Joe would score him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for Magic Mike, a friend objected. "No way," he insisted. "He was just playing himself again. He always plays himself." It's a charge that's recently been leveled at Oscar darling George Clooney, and I see the point, especially since McConaughey, born in Texas, specializes in characters with a Southern twang.

But it doesn't necessarily preclude Oscar love. Katharine Hepburn won four Oscars for spending her career playing variations on a patrician theme, something that her lover and frequent costar Spencer Tracy, who spent much of his own career sticking to a certain dignified persona, knew a lot about. And if Oscar could finally notice Sandra Bullock for simply putting a Southern twist on her sassy Miss Congeniality act in The Blind Side, there's no reason why McConaughey as McConaughey can't score him some Oscar gold (or at the very least, a nomination), too.

3. But it might not have to. I'm convinced that 2013 might finally be McConaughey's year for some Oscar glory. He lost 38 pounds to play a homophobic druggie with AIDS in Dallas Buyers Club, which is due in the Oscar-friendly month of December. (Fun fact: His Magic Mike character was named Dallas.) How far from his regular onscreen routine can he get? If he can somehow still make such a specific against-type role yet another Matthew McConaughey variation, maybe he'll deserve an Oscar just for that.

4. Is this the first time Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon have appeared in the same film? What took them so long? They're two age-appropriate A-list actors with a similar Southern energy; it seems like a no-brainer to put them in a movie together and watch the sparks fly. But it'll have to be another movie. Although they played lovers in Mud, they didn't actually share any scenes together, not even in flashback. The closest thing we got to an onscreen duet was them waving at each other from a distance, but if the look on McConaughey's face was any indication, they'd be on fire together.

5. As soon as I saw Mud onscreen for the first time wearing that crisp white shirt, which became a symbolic conversation piece in the film, I knew it would be only a matter of time before he took it off, and he didn't disappoint. The most beautiful thing about McConaughey's upper torso is now natural it looks. He's toned without appearing like the too-sculpted result of a gym obsession, like this guy. His body is like Reese Witherspoon's beauty -- admirable, accessible, aspirational. It's easier to appreciate because it's not totally out of our leagues, or reach.

6. The chipped front tooth was a nice touch to make McConaughey seem less like a perfect romantic lead, but good grief, Mud was a homeless fugitive living in a boat in a tree who ate like a caveman. How did he get his teeth so gleaming white? Did he have a pistol in one back pocket and a toothbrush, toothpaste and floss in the other. His hair looked pretty dirty, but I still wanted to run my hands through it. Even Ellis and Neckbone, the two teenage boys who befriended him (Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland), though clearly budding heterosexuals, seemed a little smitten, which was probably part of the point.

The romantic streak of a homeless fugitive living in a boat in a tree is a lot more likely to garner support from strangers when he comes in a package that looks like Matthew McConaughey. But there's still no reason why he should have looked better groomed than Ellis's dad (nicely played by Ray McKinnon, whom I liked as the coach in the aforementioned The Blind Side).

Brad Pitt has a similarly rakishly handsome quality (his star-making turn in Thelma & Louise easily could have been handled by McConaughey to similar pulse-accelerating effect), but his talent has never been questioned, partly, I assume, because he's not afraid to get ugly on the job. I hope McConaughey really goes there in Dallas Buyers Club and doesn't just stop at the excessive weight loss.

7. I suppose that as with the title character's supporters in Mud, part of my appreciation for McConaughey is based on how he looks. Not just the dimples and the killer abs, but the fact that he's my age (44 on November 4), and he still looks at least 10 years younger. He gives me hope for myself. But with Benjamin Button himself (Pitt) finally aging in the right direction, starting to show some wear and tear on the cusp of 50, I'd better enjoy the view while it lasts.

5 Random Thoughts I Had After Watching "Argo"

1. The obvious way to make a movie based around the 1979-'81 Iran hostage crisis, which is the first big world news story that I'm old enough to remember in semi-detail, would have been to focus on the hostages. It was a risky move for Ben Affleck, directing his third feature film, to make them almost an afterthought in Argo and instead tell the story of the six U.S. Embassy in Tehran workers who got away (sort of). But it's the relative obscurity of their story -- along with Affleck's confident, straightforward direction and the creative liberties he takes with history (no way did that airport chase actually happen!) -- that give the story so much of its tension and spark. We sort of know how its going to turn out, but maybe, just maybe, we fear as the militants close in on the escape party of seven, they won't be so lucky.

2. Here's the difference between an actor like Ben Affleck and one like Brad Pitt. Although I liked Argo a lot more than I did Moneyball, Pitt's performance in the latter allowed Billy Beane to come across as a fully conceived character with a complicated inner life, while in Argo, Affleck's CIA specialist Tony Mendez (like Beane, estranged from his wife, with a child to whom he's endearingly close) is more of a heroic archetype. Thanks to Affleck's inherent likability, we care what happens to Mendez, but the portrayal doesn't really provide him with any truly distinguishing characteristics (other than that he's a pretty nice guy who smokes a lot) the way, say, Don Cheadle did with the similarly heroic Paul Rusesabagina in Hotel Rwanda.

3. Affleck must have a great appreciation and respect for TV actors because he populated his movie with so many of them: Emmy winners Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) and Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights), along with Tate Donovan, Victor Garber and Damages season-four costars Chris Messina and John Goodman. Blink and you might miss Adrienne Barbeau, who played Bea Arthur's daughter on the '70s sitcom Maude and pops up here as an actress in fake-film-within-a-film Argo. Her participation is a neat bit of historic parallelism since circa 1980, Barbeau became a B-movie star and a B movie star after her appearance in the horror classic The Fog.

4. I wasn't surprised to find out that George Clooney was one of Affleck's Argo co-producers. While watching, I kept thinking of The Ides of March, and not just because I was waiting for Phillip Seymour Hoffman to pop up. Like last year's Clooney-directed film, Argo is a taut political thriller with a talented ensemble, a concise story, very little excess fat and a minimum of aftertaste. You'll remember it in the morning, but you probably won't still be thinking or talking about it.

5. The fake-movie-within-the-movie premise that drives the plot and Affleck's comical scenes with John Goodman and Alan Arkin as Hollywood players reminded me of Project Greenlight, Affleck and Matt Damon's this-is-how-you-make-a-movie foray into reality TV. Remember those days, around the time that Gigli and Jennifer Lopez were nearly ruining Affleck's career? I guess you could say he was just warming up for the best that was yet to come.

What's My Age Again?

I know, I know. At 15, Aaliyah said it best (if a tad ungrammatically) in the title of her 1994 debut album: Age ain't nothing but a number.

Normally, I'd be inclined to agree -- anything to ease the slight fear and loathing being brought on by my rapidly approaching mid 40s -- except ain't that so not the total truth. I'm reminded of this every time I see someone of a certain age (in general, 50ish and above) trying to look like it's 20 years ago. The reality of age being a lot more than just a number hits me whenever I'm face to face with someone half my age -- or less -- like that 18-year-old Swedish guy who wants to take me to bed.

Comforting as it might be, age is a lot more complicated than simple numerical values, which I'm reminded of every time I find myself in a hospital waiting room with some imagined ailment that never would have crossed my mind before I hit 35. If age were just a number, maybe I'd be better at computing mine. I was always so good at math.

Remember when you were younger -- as in, under 21 -- and your wildest dream was that everyone would think you were older? After they changed the legal drinking age in the U.S. from 19 to 21, I spent several years counting down to the day I'd reach that magic number (May 7, 1990). It's been backwards chronologically ever since.

Well, at least for the next 20 years. That's when my days of wishing I were older were over for good. From then on, I'd hang on to whatever age I was until the clock struck midnight on the West Coast signaling the segueing of May 6 into May 7. Though I was usually on Eastern time (except for the year I turned 35 in Paris and my years in Buenos Aires, Melbourne and Bangkok), those extra few hours meant everything to me.

Then something strange happened after I turned 40. By the latter part of 41, I found myself automatically rounding my age up a year. Whenever anyone asked me how old I am, I was always 42, although my birthday wasn't until months from then. Part of me figured it was just because I prefer even numbers. And if I'm going to misstate my own age, at least I'm not resorting to desperate age-defying antics like intentionally lying about it to fool people into thinking I'm younger (which I've never done, by the way)? That's what those near-daily workouts are for!

And if you're going to bother, why not lie bigger? I mean, aside from Mariah Carey (as a former People magazine colleague of mine once uncovered, she's been shaving one year off her age since she became famous, making her currently 43, not 42), who'd waste their time with anything less than two years, right?

Hopefully, that's not where this is heading. Once I was a nice and even 42, I didn't stop adding another year prematurely, and now that I'm odd again -- 43 -- I've taken it a step further. I'm unintentionally lying to myself, too, not just others. This morning as I was running around Lumpini Park, thinking about what's to come this week, I remembered that my sister is turning 50 on Friday.

50!

What a big number -- though it does seem somewhat less daunting now than it did a few years ago. Tom Cruise already turned it, and before the year is over, so will Demi Moore and Jodie Foster. And next year, Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp get to find out what it feels like to hit the half-century mark. I shuddered a little inside. On the plus side (or the minus side, depending on whether, like me, you secretly think growing older can be as much of a good thing), I've got six years to prepare myself for going there, too. Hey, I thought to myself, maybe 44 isn't such a bad number, after all.

Wait, 44? What was I thinking? I won't be 44 until next May. I couldn't believe it. I was still rounding up, and there was no one else around. I tried to convince myself that I'm just trying to get even in my mind. I'm not a victim of SORAS ("soap opera rapid aging syndrome" -- a daytime-drama phenomenon where 10-year-old kids go upstairs to study and come down a few months later, fully grown and ready for sex). I'm not about to be recast with an older-looking model.

But just in case, if, several birthdays from now, you see 50 candles on my cake instead of 45 or 46, and I'm looking considerably more ancient, remember: It's just a number!

Hey, denial can be bliss, too.

Burning Question: Did the Year of Charlie Sheen Teach Celebrities Nothing?

Lately I find myself wishing upon a star that we could return to the good old days of the silent-film era when they (those shining stars) were seen and not heard (or read) quite so much. Not because I thought The Artist was such a great movie (although it was), but for their own good. Think of how much worse George Valentin would have had it if the world had been able to hear him. Would his portrayer, Jean Dujardin, have won the Best Actor Oscar over George Clooney and Brad Pitt if we could have heard him speaking his mind?

It seems every day another star is opening his or her mouth and inserting a foot. Melissa Reeves has pretty much ruined my Days of Our Lives viewing experience with her recent tweet in support of Chick-fil-A's freedom of speech (and by extension, its homophobic stance). Watching the August 13 episode of Days -- its first airing since the soap's two-week Olympics hiatus -- I should have been heartbroken watching Reeves' character Jennifer standing outside an elevator with her husband Jack and daughter Abigail trapped inside as a frayed cable threatened to send it plummeting to the ground floor.

But my mind kept wandering to her Twitter transgression. "Was that dry, salty Chick-fil-A sandwich worth it?" I found myself asking the woman onscreen, when I should have been praying right along with sweet, desperate Jen.

Less than two weeks ago, Elton John exercised his own freedom of speech -- again -- by slamming Madonna, again. In an August 5 Australian TV interview, Sir Elton took Her Madgesty to task for being "so horrible" to Lady Gaga:

"Why is she such a nightmare? Her career is over, I can tell you that. Her tour has been a disaster and it couldn't happen to a bigger bitch....

"If Madonna had any common sense, she would have made a record like Ray of Light, stayed away from the dance stuff, and just been a great pop singer and made great pop records, which she does brilliantly. But no, she had to prove that she was like… And she looks like a fucking fairground stripper." 

I love Elton John to pieces, but he really needs to get his genres straight. Ray of Light was considered the epitome of a modern dance album when it was released in 1998. In fact, two of Madonna's most critically and commercially successful albums of the last 20 years -- Ray of Light and Confessions on a Dance Floor -- were both dance albums. Furthermore, nowadays there's no real distinction between dance and pop and even rap. Just ask Nicki Minaj and Flo Rida.

Coming from the guy who commissioned Australian electronica duo Pnau to reinvent his back catalog (and scored the No. 1 UK album, Good Morning to the Night, credited to Elton John vs Pnau, for their effort), it seems disingenuous of Elton to criticize Madonna for her transgressions on a dance floor. As for the state of Madonna's career, is it really in worse shape than Elton's? Both of them are icons who will be stars until they die. They'll never be over. Methinks it's time for Elton to lay off Madonna.

Meanwhile, perhaps George Michael should lay off Twitter. What happened to the days when celebrities didn't read their own press? God knows, terrible things have been written about Michael over the years. So I'm not sure why he's getting so defensive now over the poor reviews for his performance of his latest single, "White Light," at the Olympics closing ceremony. It wasn't so much the song itself that many took issue with -- though its reviews haven't been glowing -- but its irrelevance to the closing ceremony, which is supposed to be about celebration (or something along those lines), not his own mortality and his bid for a hit song.

I suspect that the song -- and the Olympics performance of it -- would have been better received if he'd left the electronica beat out of it. (Unlike Elton, I have nothing against pop stars doing dance music, but electronica does few favors for the ones who are known for actually singing.) Whatever. Bad reviews is part of pop life -- Michael should know that by now. Perhaps because "White Light" was inspired by something so personal, Michael is being more sensitive than usual.

According to what I just read in The Hollywood Reporter, Michael sent not one but three tweets on August 14 challenging his critics and pandering to his followers:

1)  "Morning everyone! Had a GREAT time at the closing! I hope you are not bothered by the press reports of my scandalous 'promotion' !!!"

2)  "Please join me in telling them to f--- off ! It was my one chance on tv to thank you all for your loyalty and prayers, and I took it. X"

3)  "And I don't regret it. Xxxx"

At least he refrained from cursing (if not spelling out "fuck" qualifies as that), but maybe he needs to take a cue from his fellow blowhard and former BFF/feuding partner and lay off twitter completely. "It would end my career," Elton recently said, explaining why he's resisting the urge to tweet. "I'd be in prison after about two days. I mean, no, God almighty. Me and my big mouth, no thank you. That would be the end of the career."

And the world -- especially Madonna -- breathes a collective sigh of relief.

I Can't Believe Tom Cruise Is About to Turn 50!

No actor who becomes famous playing air guitar in his underwear while lip syncing to Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll" is supposed to still be a star nearly 30 years later. So how is it that near the top of the Hollywood firmament, Tom Cruise -- who, at 21, helped immortalize the 1979 Seger hit in the 1983 film Risky Business – is still shining.

And dare I say it? For the first time in what seems like forever, people are actually excited about a Tom Cruise project that's not a testosterone showcase and/or a Mission: Impossible sequel. That movie would be Rock of Ages, the Broadway musical-based film in which Cruise stars as Stacee Jaxx, the lead singer of the rock band Arsenal, opening June 15. (Personally, I'm more excited to see costar Catherine Zeta-Jones step back into her bitch heels in a musical, but that's just me.) I guess one could call it as a full-circle role for Cruise, who's gone from a kid miming a rocker to a middle-age man impersonating one.

Seven years ago, when he was jumping up and down on Oprah's couch declaring his love for Katie Holmes, who would have thought Cruise's comeback possible? Thirty-one years ago, when he made his film debut playing sixth or seventh fiddle to Brooke Shields in Blue Lagoon, who would have thought Hollywood domination possible?

The secret to Cruise's success? Then (the '80s, when his star was launched) and now, the source of his X factor is hard to pinpoint. He lacks the old-school Hollywood charm of George Clooney; he's never been the sexiest man alive, like Brad Pitt (too short?); and he's too Hollywood slick to be the superstar next door, Big Willie (Smith) style. His celebrity always has been more about his onscreen brand (square-jawed hero) than any standout personal qualities (pre-Oprah, he was the blandest of interviews, revealing blindingly white teeth and not much more), putting him more in line with the Harrison Fords and the Mel Gibsons of Hollywood.

But while those once-brand-name action stars have plummeted to the B and C list, Cruise, who turns 50 on July 3, remains solidly A-minus. It's hard to think of another '80s icon this side of Madonna who remains at the forefront of the collective public consciousness.

Unlike Madonna, though, Cruise didn't stay on top by constant reinvention, but by the opposite. He found his screen calling early on -- that aforementioned square-jawed action hero -- and he's spent the bulk of his career offering variations on that theme. He could have played Ethan Hunt, the character he reprised for the third time in last year's Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, at any point in his career, and pretty much did in 1986’s Top Gun, soon to be reprised in a sequel.

That's not to say he hasn't thrown the occasional curveball. Yes, it took cojones to play the bad guy in Magnolia and Collateral Damage and to send up his jock-ular image by sporting a pot belly and bald spot in Tropic Thunder.

Over the course of his stardom, however, Cruise has been most controversial offscreen. Rumors about his sexuality have dogged him for nearly his entire career, and his credibility has been challenged by his unwavering devotion to Scientology, the religion to which he reportedly was introduced by his first wife, actress Mimi Rogers, six years his senior.

His 10 year marriage to Nicole Kidman did more for her career than it did for his, but during the ‘90s, Cruise hardly needed a professional boost. With the exception of Eyes Wide Shut, his 1999 Stanley Kubrick-directed duet with Kidman, and 1999’s Magnolia, for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor (in my humble opinion, it was his second-best performance, after Rain Man, for which Dustin Hoffman got all the credit -- and the Oscar), every film Cruise made from their 1990 marriage to their 2001 divorce, was a $100 million-plus box-office hit. So was Vanilla Sky, the 2001 film on whose set he met Penelope Cruz, the costar who would become his girlfriend of three years following his still-mysterious-after-all-this-time split with Kidman.

Next up: Katie Holmes, for whom he nearly destroyed his image, and not because she was a lowly former TV star who was 16 years his junior. Not content to have one of those hush-hush Hollywood romances, Cruise had to bare his heart and soul publicly. His over-the-top public display of affection in front of Oprah Winfrey derailed his career for several years: His three starring vehicles between 2007 and 2010 – Lions for Lambs,  Valkyrie and Knight and Day – each grossed less than $100 million at the North American box office.

Though only the first of those films was a total commercial disaster, his return to near-bankability was somewhat unexpected -- at least by me. Following the success of Ghost Protocol, which outdid the three other films in the series, Cruise probably could have coasted for a few years, but with Rock of Ages, he's taking a bigger risk than playing a baddie. I mean, who ever thought they'd see Cruise in a musical? The movie's director Adam Shankman (Hairspray) calls his character a “brilliant mashup” of Axl Rose, Keith Richards and Jim Morrison, which is probably not the role anyone would have expected to find him playing at this point in his career.

But can Cruise sing? “He actually has a fantastic voice,” Shankman said, sounding kind of surprised. Frankly, so am I. Not because Cruise can sing, but because he's pulled off such an unlikely comeback. Oh, and he's about to turn 50. Maybe it really is the new 30 -- okay, 40 -- after all.

Does "The Big Bang Theory" Star Jim Parson's Public "Outing" in the New York Times Count?

Every time a celebrity comes out of the closet standing on his, or her, own two feet, rather than being dragged out of it, kicking and screaming, it's a small victory. But the recent New York Times article that casually mentioned that The Big Bang Theory star Jim Parsons is gay -- as far as I know, the first direct acknowledgement in the mainstream media -- has a sort of deja vu feel to it. Parsons is just the latest in a long line of male performers -- Neil Patrick Harris, Ricky Martin, Clay Aiken, Adam Lambert, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer, Richard Chamberlain -- who confirmed what anyone with semi-functioning gaydar, or who has ever secretly read an issue of The Enquirer or Star, probably already knew.

Yep, he's gay. Pass the peas, please.

It was obvious to me the first time I saw Parsons as virginal physicist Sheldon Cooper on the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, which I probably enjoy a lot more than I should. When he won his Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series in 2010, I updated my Facebook status to comment on the openly gay Emmy ceremony: One gay comedy actor wins, while in the supporting comedy actor category, a straight guy, Eric Stonestreet, beats out three gay guys, by playing gay.

When nobody "liked" it or had anything to add, I wondered if it was something I said/wrote. I backtracked in my mind and began to question my gaydar. Was it malfunctioning? Then a few months ago, when I saw Parsons being interviewed by Ellen Degeneres on her talk show, he confirmed what I'd suspected without actually confirming anything. No 39-year-old actor spends that much time talking about his mother (and Ellen's), his sister and his nephew unless he's family.

"Is coming out over?" one headline asked, in response to Parson's non-outing outing in the Times. Though he wasn't exactly forthcoming with Ellen, it's not as if Parsons has ever hidden the fact that he's gay, and she never brought it up. He's attended award shows with his longtime companion Todd Spiewak, and he's never tried to pass himself off as Charlie Sheen.

But coming out is far from over, and if any A-list male action star ever bothers to do it, it will once again be front-page, cover-of-Newsweek news. In Parson's case, the way the New York Times nonchalantly revealed his sexual persuasion without announcing it with exclamation points and rainbow flags is commendable. It treats being gay the same way it treats being straight -- as a matter of fact. But had the subject been an actor of Brad Pitt's or George Clooney's caliber, or if Will Smith had kissed that male Russian reporter back, I suspect it would have been an entirely different story.

Perhaps Parson's sexual orientation wasn't treated like breaking news because it wasn't. The Times could have gotten more publicity mileage for its story with a photograph of a shirtless Parsons and his boyfriend sucking his nipple, but that probably would have gone over less well than Time's mother-son pose did. His outing won't change the world, or likely alter anyone's perception of gay people. We'll need need a different actor to take us completely by surprise before that happens.

In the meantime, here's an idea: Why not make Sheldon Cooper gay, too? It's not like the writing isn't on the wall in bold print. The last time I watched, Parsons' Big Bang Theory character was on the way to becoming a 40-year-old virgin, one who has never exhibited the slightest interest in the opposite sex -- or sex at all, for that matter. That would make it a win-win for CBS. The show would get tons of attention for outing the character, and CBS would never have to worry about showing him kissing a guy.

To Cate Blanchett on Her 43rd Birthday

As much as I love my singing divas and Oscar-winning actresses, I'm not the fanatical fanboy type. I've never seen every single one of anybody's movies, or listened only to the songs of one singer any day of my life. And although I rarely forget important birthdays in real life (thanks to having an excellent memory for such things, and to, well, Facebook -- again), I don't exactly commit to memory the big days of famous people, unless they happen to be turning an age ending in 0.

So there's no reason I can think of why I should have woken up this morning knowing that today is Cate Blanchett's 43rd birthday. I'd like to say that it's easy to remember every year because Blanchett was born exactly one week after I was, but that would be only partly true. The fact is that Cate Blanchett is not just any mere mortal actress. I mean, look at her. The woman is practically a goddess. Move over, Hera! (Speaking of which, why hasn't a film ever been made showcasing the queen of the Greek deities, a role that would fit Blanchett to a G?)

She's been called her generation's Meryl Streep, and the second coming of Katharine Hepburn. Those are accolades most actresses might spend their entire careers trying to deserve. But to call Cate Blanchett the next anyone would be to sell short one of the world’s most singular individual acting talents.

Still, it's easy to understand why people are tempted to throw in vintage references among the many superlatives used to describe Blanchett. Her classic yet unique beauty recalls a time when icons like Bette Davis and Vivien Leigh roamed the earth of Hollywoodland. Who else but Cate Blanchett would dare portray Hepburn onscreen (as she did in 2004's The Aviator) and then go on to win an Academy Award for it?

"She plays the same character every time." "She's always playing herself." It's a criticism leveled at some of Blanchett’s Oscar-winning Hollywood peers: Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Reese Witherspoon. But you can’t say that about a woman who could pull off playing Hepburn, Bob Dylan and Britain’s Queen Elizabeth I (twice) and earn Oscar nominations for perfectly embodying each one of them. The irony? Who could portray Blanchett in 10, 20 years? God help the actress (or actor) who even tries.

Where does the time go? It's a question I ask myself on both of our birthdays every year, and it could be applied to Blanchett's career as well. Her first major film appearance was 15 years ago, opposite Ralph Fiennes in 1997’s Oscar and Lucinda, which came out two years before The Talented Mr. Ripley, a dreadful movie that I recently saw on Thai TV, one that only had two things going for it: Jude Law and Blanchett, BAFTA-nominated for playing a character who wasn't even in the book. Doesn’t it seem like we’ve only just begun to get to know her, only started to tap the surface of a talent that runs so deep that it might take several more decades to get to the bottom of it?

For her vast screen work and high Q score, precious little is known about Blanchett, the woman. We know she is a mother of three sons and the wife of playwright and screenwriter Andrew Upton, but we rarely see her in the tabloids, unless it’s a snapshot of her on the red carpet at some official event. When Blanchett finally made front-page news for something other than her acting, it was in Australia's Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, for her unpopular support of the country’s carbon tax. She's costarred with Brad Pitt, ultimate movie star (after George Clooney), in two films -- Babel and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -- but could any living A-list actress be more his celebrity antithesis?

That's probably why it's so easy for Blanchett to disappear into her roles. If she brings any of herself to her performances, how could we possibly know? She’s beautiful and regal, yet she perfectly captures the white trashiness of a school teacher who would stoop to sleeping with an underage student, as she did in 2006’s Notes on a Scandal, a movie as notable for how successfully she stood up to co-star Dame Judi Dench as for how she convincingly dressed down to the level of a woman committing such a hideously low-rent crime of passion and poor taste. For her effort, she scored the third of her five Oscar nominations.

Like her fellow Australian superstar Nicole Kidman and her fellow Academy darling Kate Winslet, she's spent much of her career negotiating the tricky career path between indie movies and big-budget fare. She can star as Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as Marian opposite Russell Crowe’s prince of thieves in 2010’s Robin Hood and, once again, as Galadriel in the upcoming two-part blockbuster-to-be The Hobbit, while filling her resume with quirky, little-seen art-house fare like last year’s Hanna and The Gift, the 2000 Southern Gothic drama that probably was most notable for containing Keanu Reeves' best performance. It figures: How could he not raise his bar with Cate Blanchett on the set?

Further south, way down under, the Melburnian thespian devotes her time on and off the clock to preserving the art of stage acting in her country. To that end, she and her husband are artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company, where she has recently played such iconic stage roles as Blanche DuBois and Yelena in Australian revivals of A Streetcar Named Desire (2009) and Uncle Vanya (2010), respectively. She's one of Hollywood's most-respected talents, an icon home and away, but no one back home would ever accuse her of going Hollywood.

That's the difference between Blanchett and Kidman. One talented Australian beauty marries stars -- first Tom Cruise, then country singer Keith Urban – while playing one as skillfully as she does any of her screen roles. The other lives and loves under the radar, building her reputation in Hollywood without ever truly becoming a part of it, one unforgettable performance at a time.

Why I Secretly Sort of Want to See "The Avengers," Or What the Hell Is Mark Ruffalo Doing in This Movie?

As a general rule, I don't do superhero movies. Not anymore.

As a kid, I read my big brother Jeff's X-Men and Fantastic Four comics, mostly because I wanted to be as cool as I thought he was, and it gave us a common interest, two more things to talk about. Usually I didn't actually know what I was talking about, but I did think a black and blonde superheroine (X-Men's Storm) was pretty cool, and the "death" of good girl Jean Grey and her apparent rebirth as bad girl Dark Phoenix was as good as anything Luke and Laura were doing on General Hospital.

In the '80s, I saw the Superman films but preferred reruns of the '50s TV series. Even better: repeats of the '60s Batman series. I went to the cinema for all four Batman movies in the '90s -- and loved exactly one-half of them (the Tim Burton-directed half). After that, I sort of lost interest. That means I missed Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man, the first Superman reboot, Fantastic Four, The Incredibles, Hulk (part of which I once did see on mute in my gym in Buenos Aires) and The Incredible Hulk, X-Men and all of its evil spawn, as well as B-listers like Daredevil, The Green Lantern, The Green Hornet and Catwoman.

I did make it to see The Dark Knight in the theater but only because I was visiting my friend Dave in New York City, and he insisted. I didn't love the movie as much as everyone else did, but at least I got to cross an Oscar film off of my must-see list during the summer. Since Heath Ledger is not around to reprise his Oscar-winning role as the Joker, I have no interest in seeing the next Batman film, or the Spider-Man reboot with Andrew Garfield as the web slinger, or the second Superman reboot (though I must admit that Amy Adams as Lois Lane might pique my curiosity just enough to check it out).

So why in God's name is The Avengers getting such a rise out of me? Although I love Robert Downey Jr. and enjoy looking at Chris Evans (Cellular is one of my all-time guilty cinematic pleasures) and Liam Hemsworth (blame it on my weakness for hot Australian men), I have yet to see either of Downey's Iron Man films, Evans as Captain America or Hemsworth as Thor in their respective 2011 movies.

But I don't think I can pass up the opportunity to see Mark Ruffalo as both Bruce Banner (a big-screen role previously played, but hardly definitively, by Eric Bana and Edward Norton) and the Hulk (whose two previous screen appearances was courtesy of CGI).

Few actors in Hollywood have had as curious a career as Mark Ruffalo. I've loved him ever since I first saw him in You Can Count on Me, couldn't take my eyes off of him in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and was thrilled when he finally earned his first Oscar nomination last year for The Kids Are All Right. He plays the man-child so well, and since I can't seem to get enough of them in real life, it would make sense that an actor who embodies them so perfectly on celluloid would hook me, too. I'm not so sure if the sexuality of lipstick lesbians is as fluid as Queer As Folk, Grey's Anatomy and The Kids Are All Right would have us believe, but I totally understand why Ruffalo would make Julianne Moore bi-curious. If you're going to cheat on Annette Bening, he'd better be really worth it.

"That doesn't even look like him," Lori declared as we stood looking at Ruffalo as Bruce Banner on the Avengers poster in the cinema in Bangkok's Central World, where the film opened this week, well ahead of its May 4 U.S. premiere. She was right, but who else would even know that? It's not like the general movie-going populace is used to seeing Ruffalo on magazine covers and reading about him in the tabloids. Many people probably don't even know his name, only that he's "that guy in that other movie," one in which he probably wasn't playing the lead. He hardly ever plays the lead.

Though he's every bit as skilled and handsome as the Brad Pitts and Ryan Goslings of Hollywood, Ruffalo has had most of his success in supporting roles or playing the second-billed romantic interest to female rom-com stars like Reese Witherspoon (in Just Like Heaven) and Jennifer Garner (in 17 Going on 30). Even when he gets a shot at a franchise, he has to share it with a bunch of other actors.

I don't know what The Avengers will ultimately do for Ruffalo's career -- maybe nothing, maybe everything. If it turns out to be the latter, I want to be able to say that I was there when a long-gestating box-office star was finally born.

And the Oscars Will (Should) Go To...

Perhaps I've already said -- er, written -- too much on the subject, so I'll try to keep my 2012 Oscar predictions short and sweet.

Best Actor
Who will win Jean Dujardin
Who should win Jean Dujardin
Why? I could easily see George Clooney and Brad Pitt swapping roles and still pulling off nominations. But who else of the five nominees could have done what Jean Dujardin did in The Artist, offering such detailed characterization, while uttering a mere two words of dialogue? It's an iconic performance and Dujardin completely owns the role, which is actually what iconic performances are all about.

Best Actress
Who will win Viola Davis
Who should win Michelle Williams
Why? By now, Davis's lock on this contest is part of her manifest destiny as a strong black actress living, working, and (as she is quick to point out) struggling in America. This moment is hers. But why Williams over Meryl Streep? In The Iron Lady, Streep gave us the celebrity version of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, not an actual human being. (Meanwhile, the current-day scenes were pure conjecture -- that old lady could have been anyone's dotty grandma.) In My Week with Marilyn, Williams gave us a real live woman, burdened by immense talent, beauty and insecurity, who just happened to be named Marilyn Monroe.

Best Supporting Actor
Who will win Christopher Plummer
Who should win Christopher Plummer
Why? I'll still stand and cheer if Kenneth Branagh's or Nick Nolte's names are called, but for Beginners' Plummer, this is more than a lifetime achievement award. It will be recognition of the artistry that went into creating such a positive, authentic portrait of man finally coming out at the end of the evening, without a hint of cliche or overt sentimentality.

Best Supporting Actress
Who will win Octavia Spencer
Who should win Octavia Spencer
Why? Nothing against Viola Davis, who turned in brilliant work, but The Help simply wouldn't have been the same without Spencer, balancing herself so nicely on that tightrope between comedy and drama, and her character's questionable baking habits.

Best Director
Who will win Michel Hazanavicius
Who should win Michel Hazanavicius
Why? For making me feel like maybe I was born at the wrong time. The Artist left me wishing it were 1929 again so that I could experience the silent-film era, in all its fading glory, firsthand.

Best Film
What will win The Artist
What should win The Artist
Why? Because it's the one nominee that I could watch over and over and over, and years from now, I still won't be sick of it.

Five Things I'm Praying for on Oscar Night

This year, I already have so much to be thankful for. As of yesterday, I know that the 2012 Academy Awards have a network home in Australia -- Channel 9, aka GO! -- which means three things: A) I won't have to watch with them in badly dubbed in Spanish, which I did every year I was living in Buenos Aires (except one -- see C), until 2011, when my friend Roberto taught me how to turn off those annoying voices.

B) I won't have to scramble to watch them live online. Maybe those TV-on-your-computer websites work in the U.S., but I've yet to find one in Buenos Aires, Melbourne, Bangkok or London that has allowed me to see more than a few stop-start images before freezing up completely.

C) I won't have to rely on live blogging, which I did the year I was in London (2010) and Sandra Bullock won her once-in-a-lifetime prize. As you probably can imagine, reading the Oscars isn't nearly the same as watching them.

It's going to be strange watching the drama unfold on Monday, 27 February, beginning at 12.30pm, instead of on Sunday night (as Melbourne is 16 hours ahead of United States Eastern Time), but I'll adapt, especially if it means I can anticipate a drama-free Oscar experience for the first time in six years, and I won't have to stay up late to make it to the bitter end. (Also, it means no middle-of-the-night viewing -- er, reading -- as in London!)

Now, on with the show, and what I'm hoping happens -- or doesn't -- on Hollywood's biggest night.

1) Please, no musical performances! The GRAMMY Awards were just a couple of weeks ago, and frankly, I've had my fill of pop stars wowing us with their blindingly gaudy celebrity, and Adele blowing us away with her voice. (Okay, we get it! She can sing!) And since there are only two nominees for Best Original Song this year, it's not like the Academy cares about music anyway. After seeing the YouTube clip of Jason Segel and Jim Parsons performing the nominated song from The Muppets in the film, I'm convinced that I never want to hear that thing again.

Oh, and is there anyone who isn't convinced that the contest over who gets to sing the In Memoriam tribute is a two-woman race, between Academy Award winner (and go-to Whitney Houston-tribute girl) Jennifer Hudson and -- who else? -- Adele. Now there's one very good reason to consider a vocal-free montage to honor the dearly departed.

2) I'm begging to you, just one upset! How many years do we have to watch the same actors accepting the same prizes on every single award show? This year, we're way overdue for at least one shocking moment -- and don't let it be in Best Supporting Actor. Christopher Plummer earned that prize, dammit, and he's not going to live forever.

But I've certainly grown weary of the canonization of Viola Davis over the last few months, and (I can't believe I'm saying this) I'm secretly hoping for a Michelle Williams Best Actress upset. (Keep in mind, Williams fans, that very few actresses -- Kate Winslet, Shirley MacLaine, Geraldine Page and Susan Hayward come to mind, and no one else -- lose three times and go on to win.) Five-time loser Glenn Close would be even better but is as unlikely as a win by Charlize Theron, who wasn't even nominated. In lieu of all that, I'd certainly go back to Bangkok (on Tuesday) a happy man if Jean Dujardin snatches the prize from George Clooney's greedy paws. (Isn't one enough, George?)

3) Can we just lock Billy Crystal in for lifetime hosting duties after the show? There have been respectable mediums (Hugh Jackman, Steve Martin) and embarrassing lows (Anne Hathaway and James Franco) in the eight years that Crystal has been away, but not a single high. I'm convinced that hosting the Oscars is a one-man job: Billy Crystal's.

4) Let's leave the fashion parade to People magazine and Us Weekly. Not that I've ever been the most serious journalist alive, but if you put me on a red carpet with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, or George Clooney, or Meryl Streep, the one thing I would never ask is "What are you wearing?" I've always been convinced that only fashion editors care. Does anyone watching at home give a damn, frankly? Does the average human being even know the difference between Armani and Givenchy? I think not.

5) More Uggie, please! No, I didn't get my fill of that adorable Jack Russell Terrier in The Artist -- nor on The View the other day. I don't know about the other four, but I'm pretty sure this is one prayer that's destined not to go unanswered.

8 Random Thoughts I Had While Watching 'The Artist'

Better late than after the Oscars, right? The Artist finally hit Australian screens last Thursday, so 11 weekends into its U.S. run, I at last can add my two cents to the hundreds of shiny pennies that already have been tossed into the critical pool.

1.  Was there a better-cast actor in 2011 than Jean Dujardin? He not only perfectly captures the carriage and mannerisms of a 1920s screen star, but his dark good looks actually seem to be straight out of the early part of the last century. Every time I see him on the red carpet or at award shows, I need to check my calendar to make sure it's not circa 1930.

2.  I'm still not sure how a (mostly) silent film gets a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nod, but "Make way for the young" might be one of the most resonant movie lines in years. So declares Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo) during an interview on the eve of the 1929 stock-market crash/fall of George Valentin (Dujardin). The movie's turning point hinges on this bold statement, which is applicable not only to the film's 1929 silent-to-talkies setting but to the chronological middle ages, too. As anyone who's ever turned 40 knows, Hollywood celebrities aren't the only ones who have to learn to adapt and reinvent when fresh meat arrives on the scene.

3. Is Peppy short for Penelope? It took me a minute to make the connection: Is Peppy Miller, the rising star played by Bejo, somehow related to Penelope Ann Miller, the actress who was almost famous in the '90s and appears here as Valentin's wife? It's a pretty thankless role, but she does get one of the best unspoken lines. Too bad it comes when the actress is off screen, at the end of her character's "Dear George" note.

4. Is James Cromwell 7 feet tall or what? The former best supporting Oscar nominee (for 1995's Babe -- did anyone else make the connection when Valentin jumped over that pig?) towers over Jean Dujardin, and in one scene his head practically touches the top of the doorway.

5. I must love dogs because this movie wouldn't have been the same without Jack. I wonder how many takes it took for them to get the adorable Jack Russell terrier played by the adorable Jack Russell terrier Uggie to roll over and play dead on cue.

6. And the award for my favorite film of 2011 that I can enjoy as much as admire goes to... You know you are watching a near-perfect movie when A) you could you watch it all day on repeat, and B) you wouldn't mind seeing the full-length versions of the movies within the movies.

7. In lieu of Tears of Love, I'd take The Lost Weekend. Director Michel Hazanavicius really nails the look and the feel of Hollywood's silent era right up to the '40s (though the film only goes up to the early '30s). Dujardin's later scenes, from when he drunkenly hallucinates in the bar on, remind me of The Lost Weekend, the 1945 portrait of an alcoholic for which Ray Milland won the Best Actor Oscar.

8. Speaking of the Best Actor Oscar, it might not be as much of a done deal as people might think. Even if he hadn't won the Screen Actors Guild award, I'd say Jean Dujardin, ironically, playing a George Clooney-type star some 70 yeas B.C. (Before Clooney), might have a slight edge over Clooney and Brad Pitt. And I secretly want Berenice Bejo to pull the Oscar out from under Octavia Spencer, too, though that's about as likely as a full-blown silent-movie revival!

Is George Clooney a Good Actor? (Or Is He Just Brilliant At Playing Himself Onscreen and Off?)

The other day, a film-critic friend and I had dissenting opinions -- several of them -- and our healthy debates, naturally, turned to the subject of George Clooney, one of my favorite actors. The other guy's take on the soon-to-be-quadruple Oscar nominee for acting (and likely two-time winner come February 26) was one I've heard countless times: "Doesn't George Clooney always play himself?"

Wait, that guy he was playing in Syriana was George Clooney? I do not think so, and if he was, then he gained 30 pounds and f**ked up his back on the set for nothing (if you consider a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nothing). My friend concurred (which didn't make up for all the terrible things he'd said about the music in Drive), but still...

I considered three of my favorite Clooney performances -- in Intolerable Cruelty, in Michael Clayton and in Up in the Air -- and I had to admit that there's a common thread stitched into all of them. The characters may have had different names, occupations and crosses to bear, but they were all blessed with The Clooney Charm, that undefinable and undeniable thing we've all seen on the red carpet, in interviews and at the winner's podium at so many award shows. But let's not forget, what you see is not necessarily what you get: The off-screen Clooney, the public persona, could very well be his greatest performance of all, and if it is, it trumps anything Daniel Day-Lewis has ever done.

It's the charisma and suave likability of the Clooney character (in real life and in reel life) that made his kitchen staredown with Ryan Gosling in The Ides of March, or the fact that he looked a little bit old in The Descendants (the one that should bring Academy Award No. 2 any week now) so unsettling this Oscar season. That said, even when he veers slightly off his usual course, there's still no mistaking The Clooney Charm (yes, capitalized because it's an almost-human force of George's nature and demands proper-noun treatment).

But here's the thing you need to know about George Clooney: He's not Meryl Streep. He doesn't specialize in every accent under the sun or mimicking historical figures and pop-cultural icons. He doesn't play the bad guy, he doesn't time travel, and he doesn't go gay just because it's one of the easiest ways to catch Oscar's attention while screaming, "Look, I'm playing against type."

That doesn't mean he can't pull off all of the above, and some day he might. For now, his key career roles are normal men in difficult or unusual situations, real people. It's no wonder that many of his characters resemble the actor himself. But he's not the first highly regarded screen performer to play variations on a theme that is himself. Katharine Hepburn did the same thing for much of her career -- Wasn't her character in Summertime (left) basically her character in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, 10 years younger, unmarried without children, and vacationing in Venice? -- and she was awarded four Oscars for what appeared to be a lack of effort.

And that's where actors like Clooney, and Hepburn, mislead us, mess with our minds. It's often been said that actors like them are so good because they makes it look so easy. It's a little cliche but not untrue. As great as Daniel Day-Lewis is, I wonder if he could play an average Joe onscreen and impress anyone. Not playing himself (and taking Method acting to unbelievable extremes) is his hook, and that comes with its own set of potential mood killers. When you watch him onscreen, you are always fully aware that you are experiencing great acting. But it rarely looks like anything you'd see in the real world.

He would have turned a movie like The Descendants into a one-man show: Portrait of a Lawyer Falling Apart Spectacularly. Cue Oscar buzz! With Clooney taking the lead as Matt King, I felt like I was eavesdropping on conversations between real people while watching The Descendants -- which is the best thing I can say about a somewhat overrated film and my least favorite of director Alexander Payne's last four efforts for reasons that had everything to do with the fact that he made Hawaii look like a drab place that I never want to visit, the annoying voice over that vanished about 30 minutes in, and a punch in the forehead that led to a bruise under the left eye.

Which is not to say that the performances were uniformly great: The best friend of Matt's wife, awkwardly portrayed by Mary Birdsong, went so over the top in her grief over the news of her BFF's certain death that she didn't seem sad at all, just histrionic for the sake of making a mark. She could have learned something from Judy Greer, an actress previously best known by me for being one of Charlie Sheen's many scores on Two and a Half Men, who aced her breakdown scene later in the film.

I do understand Birdsong's situation: Actors in smallish roles have to work hard to stand out, while the star can underplay and make his or her mark over the course of the entire film. In The Descendants, as in most of the Clooney films I've seen, even when the scene calls for heavier emoting than usual -- the one in which Matt bids his unfaithful wife a tearful adieu as she lies dying in a hospital bed -- Clooney does it the way a real person would, without snacking on the scenery.

So maybe he's not as daring as his good friend Brad Pitt when it comes to choosing roles, or he doesn't possess the range of Johnny Depp, to name two of his contemporaries. But as a singer, neither did Frank Sinatra, who is still considered to be one of the greatest of all time. Unlike Nat King Cole, he didn't tackle a lot of stylistic ground, but I've never heard anyone fault him for that. You don't have to hit high notes, low notes and everything in between to be a standout singer. You just have to master your own possibly-limited range.

And so it goes with Clooney. If you want to watch chameleons in action, I can tell you where to find them. But there's an art to playing the regular guy, too, even if he looks a lot like the actor playing him. If you're going to be yourself over and over onscreen, or variations on a character type that strongly resembles you -- or rather, the public's perception of you -- you have to be entertaining while you're at it, and like Clooney, you have to do it better than anybody else.

Predictability Rules at the 2012 Golden Globes: Are the Oscar Winners Already a Done Deal?

Can Oscar resist a Gallic beauty in a tux? I hope not!

It's beginning to look a lot like it will be yet another predictable year at the Oscars.

Although the nominations won't be announced until Tuesday, January 24, a clear pattern has already emerged. After the January 13 Broadcast Film Critics Association's Critics Choice Awards and the Hollywood Foreign Press's Golden Globe Awards two days later, the 2012 Oscar frontrunners are all but set in stone.

Sound familiar? It should. In recent years, there's been little variety among the picks made by the Critics Choice Awards, the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Oscars. Win one, win all -- at least for the most part. You'd have to go way back to 2003, when Adrien Brody, in a twist that I didn't see coming until they showed his Oscar clip, stole Best Actor right out from under the noses of Jack Nicholson (About Schmidt) and Daniel Day-Lewis (The Gangs of New York) for a true Oscar miracle.

Since then, Oscar has kept his surprises mostly to the odd bone -- an out-of-left-field nomination -- thrown to an actor or actress who hadn't figured much into the precursor contests (Laura Finney for The Savages, Tommy Lee Jones for In the Garden of Elah). This year looks to be pretty much the same. Best Picture and Best Director seem likely to go to The Artist and Martin Scorcese for Hugo, respectively, on February 26, and Globe winners George Clooney (Best Actor, Drama, for The Descendants), Octavia Spencer (Best Supporting Actress for The Help) and Christopher Plummer (Best Supporting Actor for Beginners) should start editing their Oscar acceptance speeches.

For Oscar's consideration!

Not that I have a problem with those choices -- Spencer and Plummer are more than deserving, and I'll see about Clooney this week when I finally see The Descendants, which just opened in Melbourne on January 14 -- but a bit more friendly competition would be nice. Will we ever again get to see Brad Pitt -- star of three Best Picture nominees since 2006, and this year, the likely star of two (Moneyball and The Tree of Life) -- walking onstage to accept anything? It's been 16 years since his Best Supporting Actor Globe win for 12 Monkeys! Always a nominee (well, this year's Moneyball nod, a foregone conclusion from the minute the film opened last September, will be only his third bridesmaid experience), never a winner. At least Bridesmaids' Melissa McCarthy's Oscar traction -- which I still think should have gone to co-star Rose Byrne -- apparently stops here.

Right now the only race that appears to be an actual race is Best Actress. Viola Davis (The Help) took the Critics Choice Award on Friday, and Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady) and Michelle Williams (My Week with Marilyn) won the drama and comedy Best Actress Globes, respectively, but I'm still going to go not so far out on a limb and declare this the year of Streep. It's hers to lose.

Which means that the only remaining excitement left this Oscar season will likely come on January 24, when we find out who's in the running. I'm still hoping for a last-minute Best Actress surge for Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia) -- as much as it pains me to say it, she, not Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs), should take that fifth slot alongside Davis, Streep, Williams and Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin). Meanwhile, Dunst's co-star Charlotte Gainsbourg, like Byrne, would be a lovely addition to the Best Supporting Actress roster.

And if there's any justice in the Best Actor race, we've seen almost the last of Leonardo DiCaprio (J. Edgar), and Ryan Gosling (Drive), Woody Harrelson (Rampart) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (50/50) -- give or take Michael Fassbender (Shame) or Michael Shannon (Take Shelter), whom I predict to snag spots 4 and 5 if DiCaprio is left out -- will duke it out for the fourth and fifth Best Actor slots. They'd join Clooney, Pitt and Globe comedy winner Jean Dujardin (The Artist), who I'm secretly hoping will triumph with the Academy because he's so handsome, and it's about time that Oscar, who occasionally goes home with Gallic beauties, bestows that honor on a male one.

The movies, like life, are full of surprises. Shouldn't the Oscar race be, too?

What Must Leonardo DiCaprio Do to Win an Oscar?

You'd think that starring as J. Edgar Hoover, one of the most controversial men of the 20th century, in J. Edgar would be Leonardo DiCaprio's ticket to the podium on Oscar night. 

Right?

Wrong. Probably not with Brad Pitt (Moneyball) and George Clooney (The Descendants) in the running. And definitely not with Meryl Streep expected to finally bring home the gold for the third time for playing former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. I can't see Oscar going home in one night with with two actors playing two vile and reviled historical figures.

Since Streep is widely considered to be more overdue for her third win than DiCaprio is for his first (if only the Academy would focus on performances and not on who's due and who's not), I'm giving her the edge. If DiCaprio wins the Oscar for J. Edgar (and for the record, despite his typically excellent work, I don't think he deserves to), I'll eat it -- if I can pry it from his grip.

As for the movie, my feelings about it are mixed. It wasted two great actresses -- Judi Dench, as Hoover's mother, and especially Naomi Watts, as his career-long personal secretary -- in the epitomization of thankless roles (though Dench does have one standout clip -- see below). It featured some of the worst old-person make-up I've seen since Julianne Moore aged 40-odd years in The Hours. (DiCaprio, however, does make an extremely convincing old coot. He could be Phillip Seymour Hoffman's brother 20 years from now.) And at times, I felt like I was watching re-enactment scenes in a History Channel documentary.

Still, I enjoyed it more than Moneyball (yes, more anti-sports sentiment) in spite of its biopic-cliche overload. Maybe it's my love of U.S. history. Back in school it was the one class I was always wide awake for, and some things never change. History was the one thing that pulled me into Midnight in Paris, too. So I suppose, in a way, I can relate to Oscar's obsession with biopics. Six out of his last nine Best Actors have starred as A-list historical figures, so the odds should be on DiCaprio's side. 

Right?

Wrong. Again. For one thing, DiCaprio's age works against him. Oscar typically likes his Best Actors fortysomething and above. But even if DiCaprio, 37, were three years older, he's still in the wrong movie. Oscar also likes his Best Actor winners in critically acclaimed films, which J. Edgar is not. (His Best Actresses, like Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side, and probably Streep in Lady, tend to have an easier time getting away with critical duds.) 

One of director Clint Eastwood's miscalculations, I think, was skimping on the details of Hoover's cross dressing, which is merely broached during a conversation between Hoover and his mother in the film's best scene, and his homosexuality. DiCaprio prancing about like a transvestite "daffodil" (Hoover's mother's word, not mine) would have all but guaranteed him the Oscar.

Some of Sean Penn's best work in Milk (for which he won his second Oscar and which, intriguingly, won J. Edgar writer Dustin Lance Black an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay) was when the film explored the romantic and sexual dynamic between Harvey Milk and his lovers, played by James Franco and Diego Luna, and J. Edgar is most moving when it gets out of the political board room and goes into the bedroom -- literally. The scene where a fist fight with Clyde Tolson (played by The Social Network's Armie Hammer, who must be quite an actor because I keep thinking he has a twin brother) ends with a kiss and Hoover's warning not to ever do that again, does more than any other to get to the root of Hoover's evil. 

Deeply closeted and conflicted, he used public displays of morality to compensate for what he perceived as his inner immorality. It's as cliche as a gay man with an overly doting mother who would rather "a dead son than a daffodil," yet the scene is a telling one. Too bad Eastwood and Black offer little else that transcends routine biopic melodrama and connect-the-dots characterization.

If I were making the movie, I would have put Hoover's relationship with Tolson at the center, weaving in the historical details (which are all pretty much already matters of public record) into their story instead of the other way around. (Hoover's narration/dictation to Chuck Bass -- I mean, Gossip Girl's Ed Westwick, playing his biographer -- barely touches on Tolson.) J. Edgar is more revealing as a romantic drama than as a political or even a historical one, and DiCaprio, like the movie, excels when detailing Hoover's personal angst. The Hoover vs. Tolson throwdown would be a great Oscar clip for when Natalie Portman presents the nominees. Of course, we'll probably get one of Hoover's many pontificating sequences instead.

Yes, I'm pretty sure DiCaprio will get his fourth nomination, and for now that will have to be his reward. Better luck next time -- which, if he really expects to win, should be around 2015.