6 Reasons Why I Love Helen Mirren More Than I Did Before Reading Her "AARP" Cover Story

1. She was a late bloomer. Dame Helen Mirren plays such a pivotal role -- and pivotal roles -- in contemporary film that it's easy to forget that she hasn't always been so prominent in our movie and TV watching. David Hochman's cover story on her in the June/July 2014 issue of AARP The Magazine reminded me.

When I first heard the words "Helen Mirren" (actually, read them, in an Entertainment Weekly TV review) she was starring in Prime Suspect, and she was already in her late 40s. In my early 20s at the time, I didn't realize how significant it was for an actress to be breaking through at that relatively advanced age, and until my attempt at reinvention in my own middle ages, I wouldn't fully comprehend the vicarious thrill of it. Twenty years later, Mirren confirms that you can hit your stride later in life and still have a long and fruitful heyday ahead.

2. She waited for love -- and found it. On the subject of good things coming to those who wait and persevere, Mirren and her husband, film director Taylor Hackford (Ray), who met in the '80s and married in 1997, when both were in their fifties, confirm that there's hope for me yet in the romantic arena, too. In fact, there might be even more hope than before.

"I used to say to Taylor, 'Oh, why didn't we meet earlier?' But it's a really good thing because we probably wouldn't be together now. I couldn't have dealt with him earlier on. He would have been much too difficult. He was quite difficult as it was, but I got through that."

3. Regrets, she as but none, not even the absence of motherhood from her list of accomplishments.

"I never felt the need for a child and never felt the loss of it."

With due respect to all of the parents out there, just because it is the most important thing you'll ever do does not mean that particular life hierarchy applies to everyone. As much as I still hope to eventually experience what it's like to have someone call me "dad," I'd like to think that my life wouldn't automatically lack gravitas if it never happens.

Parenthood doesn't necessarily make you a better person, or your life more significant, or complete. It simply means you have children, and you are leading a much different life from those who don't. Around the time I was discovering Mirren in the '90s, Stevie Nicks told me that the one regret she has in life is never having had children. I wish I had been wise enough then to tell her that her music will be just as valuable a legacy.

4. You'll never find her communicating in hash tags. Most of the commentary I've read on the AARP article revolves around Mirren's views on motherhood and why she never went there, but I find what she has to say about social media to be far more fascinating and clever. What can I say? I'm a sucker for a great metaphor!

"It reminds me of a stinky old pub. In the corner would be this slightly disgusting old man who sits there all day, every day. If you went up and talked to him, you'd get the kind of grumpy, horrible, moldy, old meaningless crap that you read on Twitter."

I wouldn't go quite that far, but as much as I appreciate social media as a bridge over the communication gap that separates continents, I sometimes long for the days when "friends" were people we actually knew, and conversations were conducted predominantly in sentences, not soundbites. Now it seems we have become a society of egocentric, narcissistic "followers" who are obsessed with being followed in return, begging to be "liked" by as many people as possible, and oversharing the minutiae of our lives and minds. Blogging wouldn't be the same without it!

5. She really is just like us. Years ago, an Us Weekly colleague surprised me by telling me of an unexpected celebrity sighting: Helen Mirren on the New York City subway during the morning rush hour. "She was riding the subway?" I asked, incredulous. The AARP story re-confirms her down-to-earthiness:

"But the actress, who's keen on the low-budget carrier Ryanair and prefers her little Nokia to a highbrow smartphone..."

Adds Lasse Hallstrom, the director of her upcoming film The Hundred-Foot Journey (due in August), "With Helen, there's no posturing or pretension..."

And she can twerk it, too.

6. She's true to her heritage -- but not limited by it. Mirren has earned Oscar and Emmy nominations for playing at least three English queens (in The Madness of King George, Elizabeth I and The Queen) and two Russian divas (in The Passion of Ayn Rand and The Last Station). Until I read it in the AARP profile, I never knew her mother was English and her dad Russian, which, of course, reminded me that Mirren won one of her four Emmys for her portrayal of one of my favorite writers, Ayn Rand, in the 1999 TV movie The Passion of Ayn Rand.

Her real name: Ilyena Lydia Vasilievna Mironoff. Imagine all that on the Best Actress Oscar she won for playing Elizabeth II (whose royal forerunner and namesake she resurrected for the third of her Emmy-winning performances, in 2005's Elizabeth I ) in the 2006 film The Queen. Mindful of her roots though Mirren may be, is there any doubt that she could have pulled off Abraham Lincoln had Daniel Day-Lewis not been available?

Thoughts on the Third-Season Finale of "Girls"

As we did last week with Episodes' entire third season, let us now consider the third-season finale of Girls through its main characters, the titular quartet.

Hannah Here's the thing about Hannah: She's infuriating. This season she actually showed signs of growth (Loreen Horvath's shrewd observation about Adam aside, Hannah's was the sole voice of reason among the women of her extended family when her grandmother was in the hospital), but when she backslid, she fell way down to the depths of the gutter. I get her frustration with Adam. It didn't take Patti LuPone to tell me that Adam was acting like a prick. If he wants to be an actor, especially a stage actor, he's going to have to learn how to live in the real world while practicing his craft. He can't push his girlfriend away every time he gets an acting gig because she interferes with his concentration process. ("When I see you, I think play time" is so condescending and trivializing.) When Daniel Day-Lewis goes Method, at least he's on location somewhere, presumably away from his wife, Rebecca Miller, so it's not like he's completely ignoring her from just a few blocks away.

But then, actors might be the only people on earth who are even more self-absorbed than writers, which probably makes them a terrible match. Hannah and Adam are both flowers right now, and every relationship needs a gardener. Hannah's timing was so predictable. She told Adam about grad school right before his debut performance as a sort of payback and also to make the moment all about her. (In a bit of brilliant acting, Lena Dunham spotlighted the wheels turning in Hannah's head.) Adam, in return, made Hannah's news all about him. I've hated Adam ever since he came all over Shiri Appleby last season. He and Hannah are probably doomed, and I couldn't be more thrilled.

Walking away from him was the smartest thing Hannah did all episode. And I loved her final word. When I left David sitting alone in that bar in Bangkok a year and a half ago, I so wish I had said "Have a nice trip" on my way out.

Marnie Here's the other thing about Hannah: For a self-involved writer so lacking in self-awareness, she's very good at zeroing in on other people's flaws. I've never been a fan of Marnie, but this season she actually made me wish her bodily harm. Her insecurity is so extreme that it could almost be its own character. It drives nearly everything she does. There hasn't been a single moment this season that she's even remotely seemed like someone I'd want to be around.

I generally don't like it when women on TV go around bitch slapping each other, but I was secretly hoping that Marnie would get hers during the bathroom altercation with Clementine, whose boyfriend she had just kissed. Marnie reminds me of Abby, the character Donna Mills used to play on Knot's Landing, always going after guys who are either involved with or connected to other women. (In the second season, she even started sniffing around Charlie, the boyfriend she had dumped, when he was with another girl, like his unavailability made him appealing again.)

At least you could see what Abby was going for (money and power). Elijah (Hannah's now-gay ex), Ray (Shoshanna's ex) and Desi (the creepy guy in Adam's play who doth protest too much that he belongs to Clementine) are no keepers, and Marnie knows it. She just wants to prove that she can get the guy, any guy. To go around swooning and bragging because your un-single songwriting partner just planted a big one on you seems like the act of an unstable and dangerous woman. She has it coming, and if Desi's jealous soon-to-be ex doesn't deliver it next season, I sort of hope Shoshanna does.

Jessa At least Jessa has an excuse for most of her bad behavior this season. She's a junkie. That's not an excuse, but it's an explanation. The drugs made her do it! I actually liked her for the first time in the season finale, and I wish the storyline with her and the elderly artist (the great Louise Lasser, decades away from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) had played out over more episodes like it did on 90210 when Sally Kellerman was the woman of a certain advanced age. I've never seen myself as the type of person who could bring myself to help someone die, for various reasons, none of them being because they might change their mind when it's almost too late. What a twist. I so didn't see that coming.

Shoshanna Zosia Mamet delivers the goods acting-wise, so it's a shame that Lena Dunham seems to care least about her character. After three seasons, I feel like we hardly know Shoshanna, and I really want to. Why is she such an odd duck? Did her parents make her do it? Have we even seen her parents? During the weekend-getaway episode where she blasted her friends, revealing a previously unseen assertiveness and rage, I actually found myself fearing her a little. There's definitely something there.

The intermission scene with her and Ray was the highlight of the finale. It was so raw and real. We've all been there, wishing we could turn back the clock and redo a bad choice, but how many of us have the guts to actually beg an ex to take us back a year after dumping him. (I briefly considered it last year, so I understand what it took for Marnie to do it.) It doesn't matter that I don't understand why she wants Ray. What does matter is that it's not because of what happened between him and Marnie -- Shoshanna clearly had a reconciliation in mind even before Marnie revealed her fling with Ray -- but rather, in spite of it, which must be true love indeed. I don't want them back together next season, but I do want to know what's really going on with Shoshanna.

10 Great Romantic Movie Moments for Valentine's Day

Coming up with a list of 10 romantic anything in movies was a tougher task than I thought it would be. Although I consider myself to be a diehard romantic in everyday life, I prefer my onscreen experiences to be darker, midnight blue over Valentine red (unless the latter is the color of a bleeding, broken heart). So with the exception of Pillow Talk, my all-time favorite films -- Trois couleurs: Bleu, Interiors, Dangerous Liaisons, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Central Station, The Heiress, Room at the Top... -- tend to take a bleaker, blacker approach to life and love than your average rom com.

I guess Oscar and I have that in common. Of this year's nine Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, only one, Her, would qualify as being anything resembling romantic, and its central love story is between a lonely guy and a computerized voice. Thankfully, Hollywood has had a long enough tradition of being in love with love that I did eventually manage to pull out 10 favorite movie moments where red-hot romance reigns supreme, even if they're often painted black.

Richard Gere carries Debra Winger away in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) At age 13, I was as susceptible to the power of love and a classic Hollywood ending as the next future existential angst-ridden adult.

Berlin's "Take My Breath Away" in Top Gun (1985) The perfect marriage of love, movies and '80s pop.

Sean Penn + James Franco in the subway entrance in Milk (2008) Boy meets boy has never seemed so sweet, so erotically charged, so the way it would actually happen when boy meets boy in real life.

The fight club in Women in Love (1969) "Love is a battlefield," Pat Benatar once sang, but if you think about it, sex is the part that looks most like war. Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates) and Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed) may not be engaging in coitus in Women in Love's most famous nude scene (imagine Michael Fassbender and Tom Hardy in a modern remake!), but it looks an awful lot like foreplay, and the aftermath is unmistakably afterglowing. Mmm, yes. True bromance indeed. And the way Reed pinky-fondles Bates shoulder sends a chill down my... (Watch it here.)

Edward declares his love to Elinor in Sense and Sensibility (1995) Someone recently told me the story about how he proposed to his girlfriend while they were climbing Table Mountain in Cape Town. As they neared the top, her fear of heights kicked in, and she couldn't go any higher. No problem. He pulled out the ring and popped the question right there, just a few scary ladders from the summit. High as his new fiancee was (literally) and must have been (figuratively), as stunned, violently happy new brides-to-be go, I imagine that Emma Thompson's Elinor still had her beat.

Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy dance in Pride and Prejudice (2005) I can't say I was so quick to buy into the attraction of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy in the Oscar-nominated remake of the Jane Austen classic (Matthew Macfadyen's wiggy-looking hair and the 11-year age difference between him and Best Actress Oscar nominee Keira Knightley, then 20, was too distracting), but we've all been there, so into loving the one we're with that everything and everyone else in the room just disappears. Poof!

Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas wash each other clean in The English Patient (1996) I didn't care much their epic romance the first and only time I saw Oscar's 1996 Best Picture (it was all about Best Supporting Actress Juliette Binoche), but the one love scene that still stands out in my mind is Fiennes and Scott Thomas in the bathtub. There's something so subtlely sexy in the way they switched expected positions -- woman in back, man in front -- that made the idea of being straddled by your lover while soaking in both of your own watery grime almost appealing for this die-hard shower person.

Meg Ryan's final words to Nicolas Cage in City of Angels (1998) Sometimes in fiction, the best way to achieve romantic immortality is to die before the end of the final act. Look what death did for Romeo and Juliet! If it weren't for what Maggie says to Seth as she lies dying on the side of the road -- "When they ask me what I liked the best, I'll tell them it was you" -- I'm not even sure I'd remember the movie today. (Watch that scene here.)

Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche achieve romantic nirvana in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) Speaking of death becoming lovers in the final act, the exchange between Tomas and Tereza in the last frames never fails to kill me. Tereza: "Tomas, what are you thinking?" Tomas: "I'm thinking how happy I am." That's love, the kind that can move mountains, if not quite cheat death. (Watch it here.)

Venice in Summertime (1955) Not to be mistaken for Venice in summertime, which, as I witnessed firsthand for the first time last year, has very little to do with romance.

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.

What You Talkin' 'Bout, Helen Mirren?

I've heard it over and over, so many times during my seven years living outside of the United States (usually from Brits) that at times it's practically shamed me into silence: The Queen's English is the only proper English.

People from the United States not only don't know what they're talking about, but most of the time, they don't know how to say it either. (Their thoughts, not mine.) We might get a better linguistic rap than Australians -- except in the United States, where Aussie accents are considered to be a powerful aphrodisiac, second only to British ones -- but not by much.

During my first year living in Buenos Aires, I dated an Argentine guy who was studying English at university in hopes of one day becoming an English professor. His own professor, an Argentine who had studied English in the UK, had mastered the language and used it flawlessly, or so she thought because she spoke the Queen's English. In her mind, U.S. English was only a few steps up from "Plate English" (a presumably self-coined phrase for broken Argentine English and a reference to the Río de la Plata that flows past Buenos Aires).

"Lift, not elevator. Toe-MAH-toe, not toe-MAY-toe. Careful with your 'a' sounds. Long vowels only. Period. Class dismissed."

I seethed when my ex told me about his teacher, who sounded like a haughty language snob who got an ego boost from dismissing the verbal expression of speakers from entire countries because they didn't say things her way. (Incidentally, on our first date, my ex and I had watched the 2007 Oscars, during which Helen Mirren won for her portrayal/uncanny impersonation of Elizabeth II and her graceful negotiation of that Queen's English in The Queen.) How dare she turn up her nose at the way my fellow countrymen speak? That's my job!

As someone who had been ridiculed growing up for having a strange Caribbean accent, and someone who had more recently moved to a new country where I didn't speak the language and was in the process of learning it, I knew how it felt to have to climb your way up from the bottom of the linguistic ladder. Sure as a journalist and as a full-time practitioner of proper English (though not the Queen's), I found good grammar and a command of any language to be incredibly sexy (and still do), but I had a lot of patience with people from non-English-speaking countries who, like my ex, occasionally, or even frequently, mangled English. Unlike people who were born in the U.S., grew up speaking English and still sound as if it's their second language, foreigners have an excuse.

But I'm not above falling for the Queen's English. Attached to the right face, it can make my knees buckle. On my list of ways to woo me right, speaking with a proper English accent would rank right up there near the top. There's just something about the formality, both in speaking and in writing, the colour and the organisation of words. It can turn the most pedestrian thought into utter brilliance, make a young hooligan with no academic prowess sound not only older but wiser, too.

I'm convinced it's why the Academy has such an obsession with handing out Oscars to British actors, even ones who, like Ireland's three-time Best Actor winner Daniel Day-Lewis, play characters (Lincoln's Abraham Lincoln, for instance) who talk like Americans. It's the part of the reason why Helen Mirren, even if she weren't such a brilliant actress, probably could still round up Oscar buzz (and, in two cases, nominations) for playing second-tier wife roles such as Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George, Sofya Tolstoy in The Last Station, and Alma Reville in Hitchcock.

She can deliver a line like "And you are a stone-hearted bitch. I lost five children. Why couldn't one of them have been you?" (which she did in The Last Station) and make it sound like Shakespeare. At the 2008 Oscars, when she presented Day-Lewis with his second Best Actor Oscar (for There Will Be Blood) by faux-knighting him, I thought, "There go two of the best speakers in the English-language world."

But maybe Mirren should stick to the scripts. When I read an online teaser indicating that she had weighed in with a warning for wayward twentysomething actresses Lindsay Lohan and Amanda Bynes, I was expecting the utmost in eloquence and excellent advice, and for the first time ever, Mirren thoroughly disappointed.

"I don't know if you're allowed to say this on television: Don't be up your own bum. People get up their own [bum], and you really don't need to. It's the thing of the young, and just don't do that."

What does that even mean? It's not just that the imagery is disgusting, but I'm not even sure what her message is. That they're too full of themselves? That they're too immature? Isn't there a way to say this that doesn't make Mirren sound like she's auditioning to play Eliza Doolittle 40 years on? Where's the insight, that famous Queen-ly elegance and eloquence? Did those action-movie fumes she inhaled while filming RED 2 (out July 19) invade the part of her brain that's responsible for verbal expression? Bynes offers more compelling stuff on Twitter.

I expect better from the Queen's English. I was hoping for more from a supremely talented and supremely sophisticated 68-year-old actress who, for 97 minutes in 2006, convinced me that she might have been The Queen. If Bynes and Lohan can decipher her advice and end up taking it, let's hope they do as she says, not how she says it.

Was Michelle Obama's Oscar Appearance a Presidential PR Blunder?

Yesterday, when I watched the 85th annual Academy Awards in the middle of Monday afternoon Australia time, I purposely did so in a bubble. There was no checking out Facebook status updates to see what everyone was saying. When I blogged my impressions afterwards, I didn't want to be corrupted by any outside influence other than my friend Lori's.

Hours later, when I finally started reading through the impressions of my Facebook friends, a few things jumped out at me: 1) I wasn't the only person who was disappointed by the live performances of Adele and Barbra Streisand. 2) Daniel Day-Lewis aside, there was no clear consensus on who should have won in any of the major categories. 3) Seth MacFarlane wasn't as terribly received as I expected him to be. 4) Michelle Obama's co-presentation of the Best Picture winner might not have been the best PR move.

My initial inclination was to disagree with the Obama digs, possibly even comment, but it deserved some more thought. Was it really such a bad thing for the First Lady to so closely align her husband's administration with Hollywood by appearing at the Oscars? Would onlookers take this as a sign that the Obama administration was frivolous, not just in bed with celebrities but basking in afterglow, too?

Hmm...

Hasn't Washington been in bed with Hollywood since John F. Kennedy invited Marilyn Monroe under his covers (a one-time urban myth that's apparently now widely regarded as fact, judging from the last episode of Smash)? My Facebook friends weren't the only ones scowling, though (see what the Washington Post had to say here). It took me less than 24 hours to respectfully dissent and conclude that if people hadn't already drawn this conclusion, why should they start now?

The political times they have a-changed. We now live in a world where its leaders are far more accessible to the general public, if only as living, breathing celebrities -- tabloid fodder. It's a world where a former U.S. Vice-President can narrate an Oscar-winning documentary (Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth), where Presidents and First Ladies can be called "Grammy-winning," where controversy over Beyoncé's performance of the national anthem can upstage everything else at a Presidential Inauguration, where actors and actresses can regularly score Oscars for playing world leaders, where the Queen of England can costar in an Olympics skit with James Bond.

There's no longer any meaningful separation of church and state where the official religion is Hollywood and celebrity. After all, we're talking about the wife of a politician, Barack Obama, who ascended to the most important office in U.S. politics in much the same fashion as Daniel Day-Lewis ascended to the position of the most-important man in movies (a three-time Best Actor!) on Oscar night -- amid rapturous applause and breathless enthusiasm. Obama was the first American rock-star celebrity President.

Years ago when I was an intern at People magazine, I was assigned the task of fact-checking the Managing Editor's annual year-end sit-down interview with the President (then George Bush Sr.). I was astonished and impressed that the magazine I worked for could actually get such access. What did the President have to gain by talking to the magazine that regularly covered all the semi-sordid details of the love lives of Princess Diana and Julia Roberts? I was thinking like a PR queen.

But by that time, the U.S. President already was increasingly no longer seen as a political windbag, trotted out occasionally to throw the first pitch at baseball games. The unofficial start of the President's march toward modern celebrity is open to debate: Did it begin with JFK? Was it when the country's voters hired a former actor (Ronald Reagan) as their 40th President? Was it when Bill Clinton turned the U.S. Commander-in-Chief into tabloid bait by constantly feeding the rumor mill with his alleged dangerous extra-marital liaisons, which culminated with his nearly career-destroying tryst with White House intern Monica Lewinsky?

Wherever and whenever it began, today the limits to what the Presidential inner circle can do in the name of celebrity are being pushed further and further back. We regularly see them on talk shows, hear them weighing in on celebrity scandals (after Kanye West dissed Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Barack Obama publicly declared him a "jackass"), and not too long ago, I distinctly remember seeing Michelle Obama doing push-ups with Ellen Degeneres on Ellen.

Is co-presenting the Best Picture Oscar with Jack Nicholson (who, by the way, wrongly said it's traditionally a job for one person, as I can recall seeing it being handed out by Kirk and Michael Douglas and Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman in the not-so-distant past) worse than getting down and sweaty with Ellen? One can argue that from a PR standpoint, both were excellent moves on Michelle Obama's part. We always talk about humanizing our political leaders to make them more appealing to the general public, and what is more humanizing than exercising on daytime TV and telling the world that you love watching movies, too?

In a year in which so many of the Best Picture nominees had a political bent (Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln, Django Unchained and frontrunner Argo), the timing couldn't have been better -- or worse, depending on how you feel about the controversy over whether the makers of Zero Dark Thirty were given inappropriate access to top-secret information by the U.S. government. But it also was the year in which one candidate -- one that had a far better chance of staging a Best Picture upset -- depicted the 16th U.S. President's quest to free the slaves.

The Best Actor award had just gone to Daniel Day-Lewis for portraying the man who was largely responsible for making Michelle Obama's husband's presidency possible, and having her flanked by decked-out personnel was in keeping with the whiff of cheesiness that dominated the rest of the Oscar proceedings. I wonder how people would have reacted had God Himself ventured down from heaven above to give Best Picture to Life of Pi (speaking of shameless propaganda masquerading as storytelling).

While I can understand the concerns over Washington being too closely tied to Hollywood, it's not like the Obamas made the bed that Washington and Hollywood now lie in together. Zero Dark Thirty didn't even have much of a chance of winning anyway. Furthermore, political pundits and PR experts were possibly the only ones tsk-tsking over Obama's involvement. The rest of us were probably too blinded by the starpower -- hers, not Jack Nicholson's -- what she was wearing, how she keeps her bangs looking so great, to care about the political implications.

And in the end, the grand prize went to Argo, a film that canonized CIA operative Tony Mendez, hailed Canada, and gave no significant props to the American President. If director Ben Affleck was going to leave the U.S. Commander-in-Chief off to the sidelines of the action, how fitting that Michelle Obama would sneak him back toward center stage just in time for the grand finale. I'd call that the most genius PR move of the night.

20 Random Thoughts I Had While Watching the 2013 Academy Awards

1. Seth MacFarlane was looking so nervous and uncomfortable during his opening monologue until William Shatner arrived in time to (sort of) save the clunky routine. I wonder why nobody considered hiring Captain Kirk as host. Or why Shatner didn't stop MacFarlane from doing that terrible song about A-list actress boobs. I love the bit with Sally Field, though -- she looks 10 years younger -- and sock puppets never fail to amuse me, especially when one of them is supposed to be Denzel Washington, drunk and coked-up in the cockpit at the Flight wheel.

2. MacFarlane is charming and clean-shaven (the latter making him a rarity among guys on stage tonight), the kind of person I'd want to talk pop culture with, one-on-one, at a star-studded party. The Griffins on Family Guy, which he created, is my favorite TV modern family, and that Ted (the eponymous teddy bear lead of MacFarlane's 2012 directorial debut) is adorable. But did anyone even know what MacFarlane looks like before he was announced as the host of the 2013 Oscars? I keep wanting to call him Seth McFarland! Who were Oscar producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron hoping to lure by hiring him? Younger, hipper viewers? Was Jimmy Fallon too busy?

3. I'm glad they've done away with those unnecessary A-lister testimonials during the acting presentations and have gone back to just showing the clips.... And the first Oscar goes to... Christoph Waltz for Django Unchained -- just as I expected. This is his second Oscar in two nominations for acting in a Quentin Tarantino film. I wonder if this means they'll be inseparable going forward. Five years ago, most people hadn't even heard of Waltz. Now he joins Michael Caine, Jason Robards, Peter Ustinov, Anthony Quinn, Melvyn Douglas and Walter Brennan -- all legendary -- as a (at least) two-time Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner.

4. What's with A-list guys neglecting to shave and/or cut their hair? Paul Rudd, Bradley Cooper, George Clooney, Ben Affleck, Hugh Jackman, Jean Dujardin (and several long-haired winners in the non-acting categories)... Few men look good with a full beard, except Anne Hathaway's beaming hubby (who could pass for a less-cute Ryan Gosling), dead U.S. Presidents, and Daniel Day-Lewis as dead U.S. President Abraham Lincoln -- and even Day-Lewis shaved for the Oscars.

5. Is it just me, or do the Oscars seem so cheap this year? From the awkward onstage banter to the old-fashioned set design to the bad Muzak version of "I Walk the Line" that plays as Reese Witherspoon walks onstage to the Jaws time's-up music during long-winded acceptance speeches, it looks and sounds only a few steps above the Critics Choice Awards. I do like the nominee slides and how they are designed to look like movie posters, though?

6. Why is MacFarlane doubling as the pre-commercial break announcer, too, previewing upcoming appearances from Channing Tatum, Jennifer Aniston and others (and not even trying to hide that he's reading off a teleprompter)? Shouldn't the guy who does that be heard and not seen?

7. I wonder if Liam Neeson (who was initially cast as Steven Spielberg's Lincoln) is kicking himself for dropping out because he thought he was too old for the part. At 60, he doesn't look much older than Daniel Day-Lewis, 55, and he's six years younger than Sally Field.

8. Jennifer Garner and Jessica Chastain are such an odd choice to co-present Best Foreign Film (which goes to Amour with surprisingly little fanfare). But then, they did both co-star in 2013 films with Australian Joel Edgerton. I bet Chastain is glad she's not the one who co-headlined with him in The Odd Life of Timothy Green.

9. Watching Jennifer Hudson this season on Smash and performing what is now her signature song, too (sorry Jennifer Holliday -- welcome to the world of joint custody), during the Oscar tribute to recent movie-musical nominees, I'm impressed by how much she's grown as a performer and singer since blowing me away with her version of Barry Manilow's "Weekend in New England" nearly one decade ago on American Idol (which promptly got her booted from the show the following night, by the way).

10. Adele's make-up is flawless (as usual), but it sounds like an off night for her. She's not even trying to reach any of those seemingly unattainable high notes she's become so well-known for. Overall, her performance is not making me care for "Skyfall" any more than I do, which, sadly, is not very much.

11. My friend Lori's sums up Kristen Stewart much better than I can amidst all the Oscar non-excitement: "She is the same on screen as she was just there on stage -- uninterested. And therefore, uninteresting." Exactly. And would it have killed her to run a comb through her hair before presenting with sweet, handsome (and clean-shaven) Daniel Radcliffe?

12. Here comes Barbra Streisand! Take it away, Lori: "Am I wrong, or is this very cabaret? She looks good, but her voice is very thin." I'm disappointed that she's making her segment of In Memoriam all about Marvin Hamlisch, though he did co-write the Oscar-winning song she's singing, "The Way We Were." And where was Donna Summer, the late queen of disco who sang the 1978 Best Original Song, "Last Dance"?

13. I really like Best Original Song nominee "Before My Time" from Chasing Ice. I wish Scarlett Johansson were around to sing it.

14. Best Original Song winner Paul Epworth just called his co-winner Adele Adkins "the best person I've ever worked with." Poor Florence Welch (from Florence + the Machine, whom Epworth has produced)!

15. I don't even know how to explain the Ang Lee Best Director upset. Either the Academy was really taken by the special effects in Life of Pi, or the members were effectively touched by the heavy hand of God -- which Lee wielded so mercilessly in the present-day bookend scenes. I'm going to go with the former. If it hadn't been for the visual spectacle -- the water, the CGI animals, the 3D! -- if Lee had just relied on story, the way, say, David O. Russell had to with Silver Linings Playbook, I wonder if it would have fared as well as it has.

16. Did last year's Best Actor Jean Dujardin go that gray in just 12 months? He would look more distinguished and less old without the beard. Maybe he's still going for the French George Clooney thing.

17. I hope this is the second of many years of Jennifer Lawrence at the Oscars. She's so unpretentious and age-appropriate -- the opposite of Kristen Stewart. That she seems so young and awkward accepting her Best Actress Oscar makes her poise in Silver Linings Playbook all the more impressive. And I like that she acknowledged that Oscar day is also Emmanuelle Riva's 86th birthday (though it's too bad that the cameras didn't seem fit to pan to the octogenarian Best Actress nominee to show her response). Jessica Chastain so wouldn't have done that in her Best Actress acceptance speech.

18. I just remembered that when Daniel Day-Lewis won his second Oscar for There Will Be Blood in 2008, presenter Helen Mirren mock knighted him when he arrived on stage to retrieve his honor from the previous year's winner for The Queen. This time, he gets to accept from America's screen queen Meryl Streep, who last year won for playing another British leader (former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady). His joke about their switching Oscar-winning roles is cute, but I wonder why no one has ever thought to cast them both in the same film.

19. Best Picture: Argo, of course! Presented to two of People magazine's previous Sexiest Men Alive -- Ben Affleck and George Clooney, both bearded, as are ex-Sexiest Men Alive/Best Actor nominees Hugh Jackman and Bradley Cooper. Thank you, ex-Sexiest Man Alive/Best Actor nominee Denzel Washington and current Sexiest Man Alive/Oscar presenter/Charlize Theron dance partner Channing Tatum, for proving that you both deserve to be called Sexiest Man Alive by taking the time to shave.

20. Can they get Best Picture co-presenter (along with a very bloated, odd-looking Jack Nicholson, wearing what appears to be a homeless guy's tux) First Lady Michelle Obama to host next year?

And the Academy Award Goes To...: Will Oscar Surprise Us in 2013?

For several Oscar seasons and counting, there have been loud complaints from bloggers and pundits about how the Academy Awards have become way too predictable, and for the most part, I'm going to have to side with the gripes. Going into the February 24 ceremony, Oscar's shock value might be at an all-time low.

Although there have been a few instances of suspense among recent races (last year's Best Actress contest, for example, was The Help's Viola Davis vs. The Iron Lady's Meryl Streep, with My Week with Marilyn's Michelle Williams as a possible spoiler, right up to the moment when 2011's oh-so-predictable Best Actor winner Colin Firth opened the envelope and announced Streep's name), there hasn't been a truly WTF Oscar moment in the acting categories since 2003. That was the year in which The Pianist's Adrien Brody snatched Best Actor from the medium-tight grips of Gangs of New York's Daniel Day-Lewis and About Schmidt's Jack Nicholson (an upset I began anticipating somewhere between the showing of Brody's clip and Halle Berry's opening of the envelope).

This year might seem to be business as usual as usual, but look closely. Some of the major categories are more too-close-to-call than you might think. We've become so accustomed to hearing the acceptance speeches of Les Misérables' Anne Hathaway and Lincoln's Daniel Day-Lewis all Oscar season long, that the other categories have begun to seem like foregone conclusions, too. (Oh, if only The Master's Joaquin Phoenix would pull an Adrien Brody, but that's about as likely to happen as Barbra Streisand hitting a bum note in her first Oscar singing performance since the '70s.)

With Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress all but wrapped up, there's still a surprise or two -- and possibly at least one upset -- waiting to happen in the other major categories.

Best Actress: Zero Dark Thirty's Jessica Chastain Vs. Silver Linings Playbook's Jennifer Lawrence Vs. Amour's Emmanuelle Riva

For most of this Oscar season, it's appeared to be a two-woman race between Chastain (who won the Critics Choice Award and the Golden Globe in the drama category) and Lawrence (who won a Critics Choice Award in the lesser comedy category, the Comedy/Musical Globe and the SAG Award). Then Riva came along and grabbed the BAFTA from their whippersnapper grips. Suddenly, the Oscar is looking like it could be any of theirs to lose.

I've been predicting an upset all season in the form of The Impossible's Naomi Watts, and I still haven't completely given up that, um, near-impossible, dream. But if the Academy, for the first time since Charlize Theron's Monster win in 2004, decides to send the Best Actress Oscar home with the contender who deserves it most, there'll be no stopping Beasts of the Southern Wild's Quvenzhané Wallis.

Most Likely to Win: Jennifer Lawrence
But Look Out for: Emmanuelle Riva

Best Supporting Actor: Lincoln's Tommy Lee Jones Vs. Django Unchained's Christoph Waltz

Who would have thought it possible? What is traditionally the most predictable and least exciting acting category, this year might actually be the second-most interesting one. Jones, Waltz and The Master's Phillip Seymour Hoffman have pretty much split the spoils this season (a SAG Award for Jones, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for Waltz, a Critics Choice Award for Hoffman), and it feels like a contest mainly between them (give or take Hoffman, who I'm taking out of the likely showdown scenario). Both Jones and Waltz are in it to win it, and either would be deserving. But I wouldn't completely count out Robert DeNiro.

The Academy's acting branch obviously loves Silver Linings Playbook, or it wouldn't have nominated it in every acting category, and at least one of its four contenders will win. If Best Actress goes to Riva (an outcome I think is more likely than Chastain winning), the movie's consolation acting prize just might go to DeNiro (making him possibly one of two newly minted three-time winners), and why not? His performance might have looked easy on paper, but he made what could have been a throwaway dad role a pivotal one, finding and accentuating both the vinegar and the sweetness in the character. Bonus points for finally coming of age onscreen, too, fully embracing his patriarchal status, wearing his 69 years proudly and never once giving in to youthful vanity, in much the same way Jack Nicholson did in About Schmidt a decade ago.

Most Likely to Win: Christoph Waltz
But Look Out for: Robert DeNiro

Best Picture: Argo Vs. Silver Linings Playbook Vs. Lincoln

I know, I know. It's Argo's too lose. That's probably true. But don't underestimate the Academy's inclination to throw the occasional curve ball and upset the apples and oranges cart. The Best Picture wins of Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan and Crash over Brokeback Mountain, both among the biggest Oscar gaffes since 1990, according to my friend and Us Weekly critic Mara Reinstein (see the rest of her list here), were hardly upsets to me since I could see them coming from at least a few weeks away. They are, however, proof that Oscar likes to occasionally mess with our minds.

I'm expecting a repeat of 1999 when a Steven Spielberg film (Saving Private Ryan that year, Lincoln tomorrow) won him Best Director but not Best Picture. As acclaimed and successful as Lincoln has been (it's a movie that was pretty much made for Oscar glory, and the year's most-nominated film, with 12 nods), it seems to inspire more solemn reverence than the passionate enthusiasm that Silver Linings Playbook incites in its still-growing fan base. And a Best Picture win for indie SLP would make the Academy seem hipper than it has in decades while striking down those accusations of chronic predictability and stodginess.

But considering what The King's Speech did to The Social Network a few years ago, is that even an Oscar aspiration? If, for once, it is, and if Argo isn't indestructible by now, SLP might be the one contender that can still take the wind out of its sails.

Most Likely to Win: Argo
But Look Out for: Silver Linings Playbook

Why I Sort of Hope "Argo" Doesn't Win the Best Picture Oscar

Of all the Oscar predictions I've heard that ended up coming true, the most impressive one was probably the one my friend Mara (now Us Weekly's film critic) made in September of 2004, shortly after Vanity Fair flopped at the box office.

For those who don't remember (and there must be a lot of you out there), Vanity Fair was a period drama that lined up all the Oscar-bait elements: based on a beloved novel, overseen by a well-respected director (Mira Nair), and starring Reese Witherspoon, a popular actress who'd been cheated out of an Oscar nomination for her breakthrough performance five years earlier in Election. I was certain that 2004 would be her year.

Then the bomb dropped. "Don't worry," Mara assured me after Vanity Fair opened to lukewarm reviews and a mere $4.8 million in its first weekend. "She'll definitely get her Oscar next year for playing June Carter Cash." I wasn't 100 percent convinced, not until after Mara went to a pre-release screening of Walk the Line and afterwards declared, "Reese Witherspoon is June Carter Cash." Mara didn't call herself "The Oscar Queen" for nothing. A few months later, Witherspoon had a little naked gold man to call her own.

At the beginning of 2013, Ben Affleck seemed to be another one of those annual Oscar certainties, though not necessarily as much of one as Reese Witherspoon in 2005/2006, or Lincoln's Daniel Day-Lewis for Best Actor or Les Misérables' Anne Hathaway for Best Supporting Actress in 2012/2013. Still, pre-Oscar nominations, he was the closest thing we had to a Best Director shoo-in. Then, surprise! (Yes, Oscar is still capable of delivering them now and then.) He didn't even get nominated in the category.

I won't attempt to get into Oscar's head to try to determine why Affleck was overlooked because I wouldn't know where to begin. It can't be his relative youth (he's 40) and his newness to the director's chair (Argo is his third directorial enterprise). After all, Beasts of the Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlin, scored a nomination his first time out at age 30. And it's not as if Oscar doesn't have a history of honoring actors-turned-directors. And since Affleck won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Good Will Hunting, it's not as if he and Oscar don't have history.

His continued dominance in the Best Director field in the precursors even after the snubbing (he just won the BAFTA for Best Director on February 10) makes his exclusion from the Oscar race even more puzzling. Well, not total exclusion, since as one of Argo's producers, he still stands to gain his second shared Oscar if (scratch that -- when) Argo wins Best Picture. But it won't be the same as a Best Director Oscar solely for the man whose creative vision made Argo possibly the most entertaining film of 2012, if not necessarily the best one.

Normally, I'm not as interested in the Best Director contest as I am in the acting races, but the Affleck snub hit me particularly hard. Perhaps it's because I still think of him as an actor first and foremost -- though he clearly excels more at his other job -- and thus feel more protective of him. Or maybe it's because I've been there nearly from the beginning, from his first blush of headlining success for Chasing Amy in 1997, to winning his first Oscar for Good Will Hunting in 1998, and the following year, a Best Actress (Shakespeare in Love's Gwyneth Paltrow, his first A-list Hollywood paramour) to go with it.

Or perhaps it's because I was a senior editor at Us Weekly during his Jennifer Lopez era, and I edited so many cover stories documenting their every public and private move as a couple. At the time, I sometimes felt like a third wheel in their turbulent, ostentatious romance. Or it could be that his resurgence as a respectable film director ticks all of the boxes of against-all-odds success stories that I love: the stunning comeback, the triumph of the underdog, the undeniable talent, the masterful reinvention. If he was previously Kelly Rowland to Matt Damon's Beyoncé in a two-man Destiny's Child, this is what it would be like if Miss Kelly suddenly pulled out in front of Queen B. If I could be anyone in Hollywood right now, it would be Affleck.

Since his Best Director Oscar snub, I've been viewing Affleck's future the way Mara saw Reese Witherspoon's after the Vanity Fair failure: At least now he's almost guaranteed to win the grand prize for his next film (reportedly the 1920s-set mobster drama Live By Night). But with Argo now on a sure path to the Best Picture Oscar, I'm starting to wonder about Oscar certainties -- and not just because I just remembered the example of Annette Bening circa the summer of 2010 release of The Kids Are All Right. She seemed all but certain to finally score her Oscar on her fourth try, after losing twice to Hillary Swank, until Natalie Portman rode in on her Black Swan.

Affleck's kryptonite might not be one of his peers but the very film for which he was snubbed. If the Academy ends up naming Argo as the Best Picture of 2012, maybe the members will feel as if they've done their duty and honored Affleck by honoring his film. No need to give him another Oscar so soon. Why not wait another 15 years? Even if he ends up in the Best Director mix for Live By Night, I can't imagine that the Academy would want to name another Affleck-directed film Best Picture so soon after Argo, which might kill Affleck's shot at Best Director.

Historically, when actors win Best Director, the film they win for gets Best Picture, too. Such was the case with Robert Redford and Ordinary People, Clint Eastwood and Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby, Kevin Costner and Dances with Wolves, Mel Gibson and Braveheart and Ron Howard and A Beautiful Mind (look how long Howard, who had been similarly snubbed for 1995's Apollo 13, had to wait for his Oscar). In the last 32 years, only Warren Beatty, who won Best Director for 1981's Reds, which lost Best Picture to Chariots of Fire, didn't triumph in both categories.

So if Affleck wants to get that Best Director Oscar sooner (as in for his next directorial effort) rather than later, it might behoove him for Argo not to win Best Picture on February 24. Surely, though, Affleck won't be thinking that far in advance on Oscar night. He'll certainly want to make a trip to the podium for Argo, even if it's to share Best Picture with fellow producers Grant Heslov and George Clooney. I just hope that Oscar still sees fit to eventually shower him -- sooner rather than later -- with the one-on-one love he's got coming.

5 Reasons Why I Want Joaquin Phoenix to Snatch Daniel Day-Lewis's Third Oscar

1. He's weather-beaten and looks about 10 years older than he is (not Lincoln, Joaquin Phoenix, 38), but I still had a hard time taking my eyes off of Phoenix (and by extension, Freddie Quell) whenever he was onscreen in The Master. The way he walked, the way he stood, the way he sat, shoulders perpetually slumped forward, hands awkwardly positioned on the back of his hips, all gave Quell an arch disgracefulness that was nothing short of Masterful. Thanks to Phoenix's specific physical choices, Quell seemed uncomfortable not only in his own skin but in the world as well.

2. The way Phoenix guided Quell from at ease and playful to increasingly uncomfortable to tense and agitated to enraged to wistful to regretful to tearful to jovial during the first processing session with Philip Seymour Hoffman's titular Lancaster Dodd was more powerful than anything I saw Denzel Washington do in Flight, or Bradley Cooper do in Silver Linings Playbook, or Hugh Jackman do in Les Misérables, or, yes, even Daniel Day-Lewis do in Lincoln. Quell was a mix of standout characteristics of at least three of the characters played by Phoenix's Best Actor Oscar competition, a drunk like Washington's Whip Whitaker, cuckoo like Cooper's Pat Solitano (though hardly recovering) and criminal like Jackman's Jean Valjean (again, hardly reformed). If The Master had been set 100 years earlier, circa 1850, I have no doubt that Freddie would have wanted to free the slaves, too.

3. Daniel Day-Lewis name-dropped Phoenix in his SAG acceptance speech, probably partly because The Master director Paul Thomas Anderson's previous directorial effort, There Will Be Blood, won Day-Lewis his second Oscar five years ago, but probably mostly because Phoenix is that good. And how fitting would it be for him to win for a film in which he co-starred with Philip Seymour Hoffman, the guy who beat him last time he was up for an Oscar, in 2006, for resurrecting Johnny Cash without a hint of imitation in Walk the Line.

4. It's the kind of detailed anti-heroic characterization that used to regularly win Jack Nicholson Oscar nominations in the '70s and ultimately the grand Best Actor prize for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Phoenix is like a master '70s thespian dressed for the '50s, a decade that Anderson beautifully recreated for The Master, as an actual decade, not as the set design it seemed to be in On the Road, another 2012 film co-starring Amy Adams, still not quite justifying why she's a four-time Oscar nominee. In Phoenix's hands, Freddie Quell was almost like an extension of the character Phoenix played in his last film (himself), 2010's I'm Still Here, while remaining original and fresh enough to avoid coming across like a self-portrait.

5. Phoenix made you feel for Freddie and want to strangle him at the same time. The character was introduced as an enigma -- it was hard to tell if he was crazy, damaged, crippled, or just always drunk -- and Phoenix maintained those shades of gray while making the man-child specific and distinctive. The performance was a perfectly calibrated blend of internal and physical. He was combative and feral, at times scary, seemingly always on the brink of erupting into violence (and more so as the film went on). At other times, he made Freddie's internal pain so palpable that I wanted to reach through the screen and hug him -- and maybe offer him a healthy meal plan, too. Freddie might not have been the good man that Daniel Day-Lewis's -- and history's -- Lincoln was, but Phoenix made him nearly as indelible.

13 Fun 2013 Academy Awards Facts for the Chronically Oscar-Obsessed

We've all heard the ones about the youngest- and oldest-ever nominees for Best Actress (that would be Beasts of the Southern Wild's Quvenzhané Wallis, 9, and Amour's 85-year-old Emmanuelle Riva, also the two nominees with the most-challenging-to-spell first names -- I keep wanting to give Riva two Ns!), and a Best Supporting Actor race featuring five previous Oscar winners. Now here are 13 more bits of 2013 Oscar trivia that perhaps you haven't already read everywhere else first.

1. If Daniel Day-Lewis or Denzel Washington win Best Actor for Lincoln and Flight, respectively, it will be the third Oscar for each. Both won their first Oscars -- Best Actor for Day-Lewis for My Left Foot, Best Supporting Actor for Denzel Washington for Glory -- in 1990.

2. That year also was the last time the Best Picture winner -- which was Driving Miss Daisy -- didn't also score a Best Director nomination. If Argo win Best Picture (as expected), it will be the first since Driving Miss Daisy to do so without a Best Director nomination.

3. Another Driving Miss Daisy/1990 connection: Before Emmanuelle Riva became the oldest-ever Best Actress nominee, the record was held by Jessica Tandy, who was 80 when she won Best Actress for Driving Miss Daisy.

4. He's not a nominee, but John Goodman might be Hollywood's best supporting actor. Last year, he appeared in two Best Picture nominees, The Artist (which won) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This year, he turned up in Best Picture nominee Argo as a Hollywood make-up artist and in Flight as Best Actor nominee Denzel Washington's drug dealer. If Argo takes Best Picture, it will be his second-straight year costarring in the grand-prize winner. And Goodman has still yet to score his first Oscar nomination (or his first Emmy -- but that's a sore subject for another post).

5. Best Actor nominees Hugh Jackman (Les Misérables) and Joaquin Phoenix (The Master) have both scored Oscar nods acting opposite non-2013 nominee Russell Crowe (Jackman, this year in Les Miz, Phoenix, in 2000's Gladiator, for which he received the first of his three nominations and for which Crowe won his Best Actor Oscar). Neither Crowe nor Denzel Washington were nominated for 2007's American Gangster, but their costar Ruby Dee did score a Best Supporting Actress citation.

6. Four-time Best Supporting Actress nominee Amy Adams now has been nominated for two films (Doubt and The Master) for which Phillip Seymour Hoffman received Best Supporting Actor nominations. She's also been nominated once for co-starring opposite Mark Wahlberg and once for co-starring opposite Joaquin Phoenix -- the guys, in turn, being costars twice previously (in 2000's The Yards and 2007's We Own the Night) -- in films with three syllables and the article "the" in the title (The Fighter and The Master, respectively). (Fun fact extras: Adams has never been nominated for a film with more than two words in the title, and she and fellow Best Supporting Actress nominee Anne Hathaway both have co-starred in films with Meryl Streep -- Doubt and Julie and Julia, and The Devil Wears Prada, respectively -- for which Streep was nominated for Best Actress. Her last three nominations came for films that earned at least two other acting nominations, and, like Doubt, The Master was left out of the Best Picture contest.)

7. This year the acting nominees span many consecutive decades. At least one was born in each of the last nine, pre-the 2010s (1 in the '20s, 1 in the '30s, 4 in the '40s, 3 in the '50s, 4 in the '60s, 4 in the '70s, 1 in the '80s, 1 in the '90s, 1 in the '00s).

8. The Best Actor line-up might be the most attractive one ever. Three of the nominees (Denzel Washington, Hugh Jackman and Bradley Cooper) have been named Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine. Daniel Day-Lewis was one of People's 50 Most Beautiful People in 1990, and Joaquin Phoenix once denounced his good looks by growing a beard and becoming a rapper (a bewildering phase documented in 2010's I'm Still Here). 

9. While Best Supporting Actor includes all previous Academy Award winners, Best Supporting Actress might have that category's best Oscar pedigree ever. Two of the nominees (Sally Field and Helen Hunt) are former Best Actress winners, Anne Hathaway is a former Best Actress nominee, and both Jacki Weaver and Amy Adams have been previous invitees to the Best Supporting Actress circle. It's a highly pedigreed Oscar contest all-around: Four of this year's nominated previous winners (Daniel Day-Lewis, Denzel Washington, Robert DeNiro and Field) are two-timers, and only four nominees (Hugh Jackman, Bradley Cooper, Quvenzhané Wallis and Emmanuelle Riva) are first-timers.

10. If Daniel Day-Lewis and Emmanuelle Riva win Best Actor and Best Actress, it will be the second time Day-Lewis has won in the same year as an 80-something Best Actress (Jessica Tandy in 1990) and the second time he's won in the same year (2008) as a French actress in a French-speaking role (La Vie en rose's Marion Cotillard, his soon-to-be costar in the 2009 flop Nine). (Continuing his French connection, in my favorite Daniel Day-Lewis film, 1988's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he co-starred with French Oscar winner Juliette Binoche, my favorite actress from any country, and he has a 17-year-old son, Gabriel, with French actress Isabel Adjani, a two-time Oscar nominee.)

11. Of the Best Picture nominees, water figures prominently in three (Beasts of the Southern Wild, Life of Pi, Les Misérables), one is in French (Amour), one is based on a French novel (Les Miz), two take place during the era of slavery (Lincoln, Django Unchained -- both of which feature Best Supporting Actor frontrunners playing opponents of slavery), three detail political history (Lincoln, Argo, Zero Dark Thirty), and two (Argo, Zero Dark Thirty) were scored by Alexandre Desplat, who also scored Moonrise Kingdom and Rust and Bone in 2012, and received a Best Original Score nod for Argo. Since 2006, he's scored six Best Picture nominees (The Queen, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The King's Speech, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty), scored five Best Original Score nods, and thus far remains Oscar-less for scoring.

12. Brenda Fricker, 67, who won Best Supporting Actress in 1990 for playing the mother of Daniel Day-Lewis, 55, in My Left Foot, was born only 22 months before Sally Field, 66, nominated this year for playing Daniel Day-Lewis's wife in Lincoln. If Day-Lewis wins, two-time winner Field will have played the mother of one fellow two-time Oscar winner in the role that won him his second (Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump) and the wife of a three-time winner in the role that won him his third. (Fun fact extra: This is the second time that Day-Lewis has been nominated for Best Actor while two of his costars are nominated for Best Supporting Actor/Actress -- before Field and Tommy Lee Jones, the honors went to Pete Postlethwaite and Emma Thompson for In the Name of the Father).

13. The last three Best Original Song Oscar-nominated James Bond themes ("Nobody Does it Better" from The Spy Who Loved Me, "For Your Eyes Only" and "Skyfall") were all Top 10 Billboard Hot 100 singles sung by female Best New Artist Grammy winners (Carly Simon, Sheena Easton and Adele, respectively). Carly Simon went on to win her own Best Original Song Oscar for the Working Girl theme "Let the River Run," and if "Skyfall" wins, Adele will become the latest Best New Artist to also be a Best Original Song Oscar winner. (Fun fact extra: Though you won't hear it anywhere in the movie, "Ho Hey" by The Lumineers, a contender for this year's Best New Artist Grammy, provides the soundtrack to one of the Australian TV ads for Best Picture contender Silver Linings Playbook.)

And the 2013 Oscar Nominees Will Be...

'Tis the season to be... way way behind. But what's an Oscar season without a mad dash to cram a bunch of movies into the home stretch? This year seems to be worse than usual. Maybe it's just that the nominations are being announced too early. Whoever heard of the Academy Award finalists being unveiled on January 10, before the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards are even handed out?

Although there are still a number of key movies I've yet to see (Silver Linings Playbook, Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty, among them), this year's Oscar predicting has the kind of anything-can-happen feel that I love but haven't seen in years, possibly decades. Daniel Day-Lewis's almost guaranteed Best Actor nomination and eventual win for Lincoln aside, there doesn't seem to be any clear consensus among the critics groups, and the precursor nominees have been lined up so near-perfectly, that Oscar is certain to throw us some curve balls just to be spiteful. At least that's what I'm hoping for in a few hours when the latest Oscar race is officially on.

Best Actress
Jessica Chastain for Zero Dark Thirty
Marion Cotillard for Rust and Bone
Jennifer Lawrence for Silver Linings Playbook
Emmanuelle Riva for Amour
Naomi Watts for The Impossible

For your consideration: Rachel Weisz for The Deep Blue Sea A nomination for Weisz is looking far more impossible than a Watts win (which I began predicting weeks ago, even before I saw The Impossible), but I'm still praying that Weisz -- who touched my soul without a single manufactured emotion -- edges out Cotillard (who really should be in the supporting category) and holds off Helen Mirren, who, judging from the Hitchcock trailer, is basically playing her unhappy housewife in The Last Station transported 50 years into the future. We've already seen her do this stuff two nominations before (in The Last Station and The Madness of King George).

Best Actor
Bradley Cooper for Silver Linings Playbook
Daniel Day-Lewis for Lincoln
John Hawkes for The Sessions
Hugh Jackman for Les Misérables
Denzel Washington for Flight

For your considerations: Jean-Louis Trintignant for Amour and Matthias Schoenaerts for Rust and Bone Their leading ladies are getting all of the attention, but these guys are the ones who, for the most part, carried their respective French-language films.

Best Supporting Actress
Amy Adams for The Master 
Judi Dench for Skyfall
Sally Field for Lincoln
Anne Hathaway for Les Misérables
Helen Hunt for The Sessions

For your consideration: Ann Dowd for Compliance If anyone snatches Dame Judi's spot, it'll probably be Dame Maggie Smith for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, but Dowd would be so much more deserving. Though I still don't really buy her movie's premise, she made me believe that someone actually could be that dumb in real life.

Best Supporting Actor
Alan Arkin for Argo
Javier Bardem for Skyfall
Phillip Seymour Hoffman for The Master
Tommy Lee Jones for Lincoln
Christoph Waltz for Django Unchained

For your consideration: Matthew McConaughey for Magic Mike I'd love for Les Misérables' Eddie Redmayne to get in instead of Arkin or Hoffman, but the surprise nod really should go to McConaughey for finally living up to all of his early hype 15 years later.

Best Director
Ben Affleck for Argo
Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty
Michael Haneke for Amour
Ang Lee for Life of Pi
Steven Spielberg for Lincoln

For your consideration: Terence Davies for The Deep Blue Sea Water was a major character in so many Oscar-caliber films this year (The Impossible, Life of Pi, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Moonrise Kingdom, Rust and Bone and even Les Misérables, which featured Russell Crowe jumping to his death in it), but ironically, not the one that actually has water in its title. The acting in The Deep Blue Sea was remarkable, but it was Davies who made it the most gorgeous film of the year not to feature a single special effect.

Best Picture
Argo
Les Misérables
Life of Pi
Lincoln
Zero Dark Thirty

For your consideration: Moonrise Kingdom In a year packed with films anchored by child actors/characters, this was so much more artful and essential than the hackneyed religious parable that was Life of Pi.

8 Random Thoughts I Had After Watching "Les Misérables"

1. Before seeing the 2012 movie version of Les Misérables, I'd never read Victor Hugo's novel, nor had I seen the stage musical it inspired, nor any of the film adaptations. I had no idea what the storyline would be and hadn't read any reviews other than Adam Lambert's Twitter-cism of the singing. Maybe I've just been living under a rock for much of my life while an iconic worldwide sensation passed me by, but aside from the Oscar buzz for Anne Hathaway, all I knew about Les Misérables going in were the songs "I Dreamed a Dream" and "On My Own," so I had no expectations and no preconceived notions about what the movie should be. I can't remember the last time I went into a film with such a clean slate (usually, I at least know the general gist of the story), and I'm not sure whether that worked for or against the film. I'm leaning toward the latter because if I had gone in knowing more of the songs, I might have found the musical aspect of the musical more engrossing.

Tveit: "Idol"-ready

2. Or perhaps Adam Lambert was right when he offered the following Les Misérables critique via tweet: "Visually impressive w great Emotional performances. But the score suffered massively with great actors PRETENDING to be singers." If Les Misérables were American Idol's audition round, only about half of its primary cast (Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Samantha Barks and Aaron Tveit) would be sent on to Hollywood. Before seeing the film, I had issues with Lambert's commentary. A movie musical isn't a singing competition. It's the acting that matters most, and I'd rather watch great actors PRETENDING to be singers (and for the record, if having your own rock band qualifies you as a singer, then Russell Crowe, for one great actor, wasn't pretending) than watch great singers pretending to be actors (with the exception of Dreamgirls Oscar winner and former Idol finalist Jennifer Hudson).

3. After seeing Les Misérables, I concur with Lambert. There was so much singing in the film that the vocal performances needed to be closer to virtuoso. Rather than take the Chicago/Hairspray/Dreamgirls approach to the movie musical, director Tom Hooper, who already used Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A Major to help The King's Speech win a Best Picture Oscar, took the Evita approach by having the cast sing the entire film. That tactic succeeded with Evita because its songs worked as screenplay, as exposition and as songs. You never got the sense that the characters were just singing dialogue to random melodies. Perhaps it was because I was unfamiliar with most of the music, but much of Les Misérables sounded to me like actors singing lines rather than songs. The uneven vocal performances undermined the film's dramatic impact because the movie depended so much on them, and Hugh Jackman, in particular, sometimes looked uncomfortable singing his lines instead of saying them. I'm sure he'll snag a Golden Globe for his efforts, much like Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical winners Johnny Depp and Richard Gere before him, but can you imagine how laughable Gere would have been in Chicago if he'd sung all of his lines?

4. Russell Crowe may not be the world's greatest singer (neither was Rex Harrison, who won both a Tony Award and an Oscar for My Fair Lady), but he remains one of the planet's greatest actors, and he was a towering presence in Les Misérables (and the one actor/character who didn't seem to age over the course of the movie). I couldn't take my eyes off of him whenever he was onscreen, and his was perhaps the acting performance that stayed with me most after the credits rolled. His solo scenes as he walked one foot in front of the other along the edge of the bridge were the film's most indelible for me. The role of Javert is almost the flipside of the one that won Crowe his Oscar (Gladiator's Maximus), and he made a character who I imagine was supposed to be the primary villain of the peace into a multi-dimensional, sympathetic guy who undergoes as much of a spiritual transformation as Jean Valjean in less screen time. "Eyes are the soul," MC Lyte once rapped in one of her best songs, and few actors understand this better than Crowe and Anne Hathaway (more on her in a moment).

5. I'd like to say that Hugh Jackman should give Daniel Day-Lewis hell on Oscar night, but if I did, it would just be because I love a good Academy Award showdown. Jackson is a fine actor and an okay singer, but he just didn't disappear into the role of Jean Valjean the way he had to in order to present any meaningful competition to Daniel Day-Lewis, whose pre-Lincoln performance, interestingly enough, was in the mostly panned musical Nine. I'm not even 100 percent convinced that Jackman earned a Best Actor nomination. Maybe it was his older-gentleman hairstyle, which reminded me a lot of Wolverine's, but during certain action scenes (like the sewer sequences where he dragged Marius's half-dead body while trying to elude capture), I kept having flashbacks to the Marvel superhero that made Jackman a superstar.

6. Anne Hathaway's version of Fantine is what happens when a decent singer and a fantastic actress merge into one for a movie musical. As a vocalist, Hathaway is no Elaine Paige, but she's certainly the equal of Susan Boyle, who rode "I Dreamed a Dream" to reality-show stardom a few years ago, just as Hathaway's rendition is almost guaranteed to earn Hathaway a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. But her singing was secondary, as it should have been: Thanks to those expressive Anne Hathaway eyes (where's her song?), her performance would have been just as affecting had Les Misérables been as silent a movie as The Artist. Like Sally Field (Hathaway's closest Oscar competition) and Lincoln, Les Misérables could have used more of her.

7. I was equally impressed by Samantha Barks, and I wasn't even expecting her before she came out of nowhere to own about 30 or so minutes of the movie. Not only is she a great singer worthy of pop stardom, but she managed to make Éponine the most sympathetic character in the entire film. I was saddest to see her go. Aaron Tveit's Enjolras and the brave little boy were close seconds. (That I didn't shed a tear for Fantine's passing had less to do with Anne Hathaway's performance than this: From her first moment onscreen, it was obvious to me that she had nowhere to go but six feet under.)

8. Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen, with their matching triple names, were the perfect comic relief. I'd actually pay AU$7 (which was the cost of the Monday showing at Palace Kino Cinema on Collins Street in Melbourne) to watch them in their own movie. That said, I'm ready for Bonham Carter, who previously costarred in the Tom Hooper-directed The King's Speech and opposite Johnny Depp in the musical film Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, to give her filmography some more variety by ditching the period costumes and the crazy-lady shtick and playing a semi-normal modern woman. During their brief interaction in Les Misérables, I could have sworn I saw a flicker of a spark between her and Russell Crowe. Someone needs to cast those two as the leads in a The Sessions-style contemporary drama -- one without a single song sung blue or... Red.