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

By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Most of the buzz about Vanity Fair's hyper-hyped photo essay "Tom Ford's Hollywood" focuses on the cover picture, which features actress Scarlett Johansson's doughy, cherubic keister, white as a fish belly.

But personally I prefer the surrealistically goofy photo inside that shows a bosom the size of a zeppelin perched on a golf course, threatening Garth Fisher, MD, who is not only a hotshot Hollywood plastic surgeon but also a guy who played a hotshot Hollywood plastic surgeon on ABC's "Extreme Makeover."

But that's just one man's opinion. You may prefer the shot of Angelina Jolie lying in a bathtub in what looks like lime Jell-O, displaying the various tattoos on her back, one of which inexplicably says "Know Your Rights," although that's hardly the most interesting part of her. Or maybe you'd prefer . . .

But wait a minute. First, a little background info: What we're talking about is Vanity Fair's annual Hollywood issue. For 12 years, the magazine's March issue has celebrated Oscar month with a gallery of glossy photos of Hollywood stars. Last year, VF's editor, Graydon Carter, was dining with famous designer Tom Ford, the former creative director of Gucci. After a few martinis, Ford told Carter that the magazine's Hollywood photos were getting boring.

"Why don't you come in and do it next year?" Carter replied.

And Ford agreed to do just that.

Which is apparently a very big deal. Judging by the heaping helpings of gushing prose about Ford in the mag, getting this dude to supervise your Hollywood photo shoot is like getting Michelangelo to paint your rec room ceiling. Not only is Ford "the man who rescued Gucci from oblivion," he's also a former model and "a glamorous throwback figure who keeps his crisp white shirts unbuttoned down to here."

The shirt thing is true, as proven by the many photos of Ford in the mag, including the cover shot, which shows him perched next to the naked Johansson while nuzzling the ear of the naked Keira Knightley. (Nice work if you can get it.) With his long sideburns, his facial stubble and his acres of chest hair, Ford definitely has style. Unfortunately, it's the style of a cheeseball disco-era lounge lizard.

But that's irrelevant to the question at hand, which is: Did Ford succeed in pepping up the moribund Hollywood issue?

The answer is: Yes. And he did it the old-fashioned way -- by persuading the stars to get naked and/or do weird things on camera.

So we get a photo of actor Viggo Mortensen kneeling by a bed, twiddling the red-painted toes of an unidentified woman.

And a Helmut Newtonesque photo of actress Sienna Miller, sprawled across a white leather chair wearing nothing but a thong, high heels and some bling.

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."