It's Oscar Time and the Stars Are Revealed in All Their Glory

And a shot of actor Taye Diggs languishing on a bear rug, wearing nothing but a gold watch with a bathrobe draped strategically across his crotch.

And a photo of Peter Sarsgaard, who played a Marine in "Jarhead," all tied up in what the caption identifies as "Japanese bondage ropes."

And a shot of George Clooney pretending to direct a movie while surrounded by 19 women, all of them clad only in a bra and panties, and most of them wading in deep water. It doesn't make any sense but it does look kind of cool.

Which is, come to think of it, true of this whole photo essay.

Seeing these pictures, veteran Vanity Fair fans immediately turn to the back pages of the magazine, where VF always reveals, in tiny type, what "Beauty and Grooming" products were used to make the stars look so fabulous. For instance: "George Clooney's hair styled with Kérastase Paris Volume Expansion Spray; his face moisturized with Dior HydraAction Deep Hydration Rich Creme; on his face, Diorskin Ultra-Mat in Medium Beige 300. . . ."

And so on. Alas, the mag does not reveal which pancake makeup powdered Johansson's tushie or which rouge brightened the giant bazoomba on the golf course. Come on, Vanity Fair, don't hold back on us. America needs to know.

What's in the Water?

Another thing America needs to know is this: Are all those chemicals in our food, our water and our air poisoning us?

And the answer, according to a long and disturbing article in the winter issue of On Earth magazine, is: probably.

"There are now more than 100,000 synthetic chemicals on the market, and these chemicals are everywhere," writes Gay Daly. "They are in our food supply, so we eat them. They drift on the air, so we breathe them. . . . Ubiquitous in cosmetics, they are absorbed through our skin. Pregnant women pass them to their fetuses; mothers feed them to their newborns when they breastfeed."

What are all these chemicals doing to us?

Well, the final results of this unsupervised experiment on the human species are not in yet. But, as Daly demonstrates, thousands of studies done on animals indicate that many of these chemicals affect the body's endocrine system, possibly causing brain damage, thyroid malfunctions, genital deformities and reproductive failures.

The reproductive problems are potentially the most dangerous. "We need to ask ourselves if we are going to be reproducing as a species or not," says Pat Hunt, a geneticist at Washington State University.

On Earth is published by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a prominent environmental group, so you can say they're just a bunch of crazy tree-huggers and ignore the story if you're so inclined.

But Daly, a former editor at the science magazine Discover, has written an article that is painstaking researched, carefully written and not sensationalized. It's also scarier than hunting with Dick Cheney, particularly if you happen to be one of those sentimental fools who wants the human race to go on propagating itself.

This Is the End

Death is a great career move in rock-and-roll, and Blender, the pop music mag that loves lists, has published "The 50 Most Awesomely Dead Rock Stars."

The good news is that the dead rockers keep cutting albums and making money, sometimes more money than when they were alive. For instance, Bob Marley, rated No. 9, earns about $6 million a year in royalties.

The bad news is that the hassles of stardom don't end when the star's breathing stops. Here's what Blender says about Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, who was ranked No. 7: "Captain Trips was posthumously sued by his personal trainer as well as by an acupuncturist, his office manager and a guy who said he babysat him during bad acid trips."