Strawberry Saroyan gives Adam Rich (above) prior billing over Dakota Fanning for probably the first--and last--time ever

Who would have thought it? My favorite freelance writer boasting the name of both a fruit and an Oscar-winning literary icon had a great showing in Sunday's New York Times. Strawberry Saroyan took a closer look at the evolution of child stardom in Hollywood, from careful cultivation to agents to requisite then-and-now photos of Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff.

And although I am still wondering how Saroyan got through an entire story headlined "Is Child Stardom No Longer a Life Sentence?" without a single mention of Macaulay Culkin or his famously meddlesome father Kit, I have to say I was amused to read that Shia LaBeouf's manager looks like the "white Don King" and is eager to make his own myopic, late-November Oscar predictions:

"Would I want to win an Oscar before I'm 40?" asked Mr. LaBeouf, at the moment perhaps best known for starring on the Disney Channel series Even Stevens. "Maybe. Would I want to win one before I'm 25? No."

"He wants me to," he said and gestured toward (manager John) Crosby ...

"I don't want you to, Shia," Mr. Crosby replied. "I think you are."

"I just don't want to win it before I'm 25," Mr. LaBeouf, who has been in the business since he was 11, continued, "because then I have nothing to follow it up with for the next 50 years of my career."

OK, well, one thing at a time there, tough guy.

Anyway, Saroyan scores bonus points for invoking ex-con Adam Rich and the late Dana Plato before getting to Dakota Fanning, who really does have her shit together, no matter what the Post's mean-spirited old Lou Lumenick wrote last week about her being 2005's "gap-toothed" "Most Annoying Child Star." Lou! She is 11! I know you were pre-pubescent Tiger Beat fodder while growing up in Astoria, but still.