Thompson on Hollywood

In this week's Oscar Talk, Kris Tapley and I cover the best actress race and the relative chances of long-shots The Town (we both spoke to Jeremy Renner), The Way Back (we both spoke to Peter Weir and Jim Sturgess), Secretariat and Diane Lane, and the Coens' True Grit, which should be screening soon:

While AFI Fest opener Love & Other Drugs (check out its naked stars below) failed to yield much Oscar buzz, the fest's surprise screening of the The Fighter (here's the TOH review) boosted the prospects for Christian Bale's performance as the crackhead brother to Mark Wahlberg's punchy welterweight. It remains to be seen what the impact on Academy voters will be of John H. Richardson's lengthy and entertaining interview in Esquire with the Batman star, entitled "Christian Bale May Kill Someone Yet." From Newsies to The Machinist, this actor--who admits to having never seen Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story or Breakfast at Tiffany's---is as intense in real life as he is on screen. Straddling the line between pulling teeth and Bale's attempts to resist definition, Richardson asks Bale about the risks of being misunderstood:

- Angelina Jolie is Vogue's December cover girl (photos by Mario Testino), which, as usual, coincides with the release of her latest, The Tourist with Johnny Depp, out December 10. The woman doesn't have an agent, and why would she? The mold or model doesn't apply to her, and yet The Tourist's director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others) confirms to Vogue that “she gets every single script that has a female role aged between eighteen and 40—every script. And she just follows her feeling, holds her own counsel. She’s probably the only global megastar that doesn’t even have an agent—she doesn’t even have a publicist.” Vogue's Vicki Woods was taken in and distracted by her famous face but says once you "clear away the craziness and tabloid clatter that swirls around the Jolie-Pitt family (or “brand”)…you find a practical woman with terrific forward-planning skills." Jolie, on playing the role that was originally written for Tom Cruise in Salt:“I felt it was a weird thing that every time you ask for a strong female role, it’s written in this strange way where it uses sexuality far too much. Or it’s all about being a woman and beating a man. So it wasn’t a surprise to me that the only way to do a strong female role properly was to not have originally written for a woman.”

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