ACADEMY AWARD STYLE: Annette Benning is sure this year’s Academy Award nominees will get along just as well as they did when she was nominated for American Beauty. At that time, all the girls in the category met in the green room and pledged that whomever won would take all the others to lunch. Whoopie won for Girl, Interrupted and Annette’s engraved luncheon invitation came a few days later. The View commentator gave all the girls a chocolate Oscar and a rose and they all decided the lunch was more fun than the awards ceremony had been.

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WATCH OUT DADDY: Sixty-one year old Lionel Richie is in a peculiar position. While his eyes still stray towards younger female possibilities, he is finding it harder and harder to date any of them. Any why? He says, “I’ll be walking down the street with my daughter Nicole and she notices me glancing and says, ‘Dad, that girl’s eighteen-years old.’ And, I think, ‘No way.’” Nicole told him a long time ago, “I won’t date anyone your age and you don’t date anyone my age.” Needless to say the two enjoy each other immensely. More >

AIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW: Nothing lasts forever, at least that’s what the philosophers tell us. And now no less a philosopher than Willie Nelson has provided us with an object lesson. Known for decades for his trademark below the waist braided hair, Texas’ own balladeer has shorn his locks and now is only sporting a collar length do. More >

FAIR IS FAIR: We’ve got not one but two big celebrity cheating scandals and in each it’s the husband who has strayed. Is it just me or do they both seem too much of a sameness? Each wife is almost indescribably gorgeous, each husband’s ‘girlfriends’ just keep surfacing – at one point at a minimum of one a week, each husband, once caught, suddenly sees the light and now wants to save the marriage. More >

PAUL’S PAINS: Super Hunk Paul Bettany hates going through all the gym work required to turn his body into the kind of “every woman’s dream” he achieved in his hit Legion. The British transplant, who now lives in New York, wants all his admirers to know how hard he worked for them. “My job for six months was to go to the gym for at least two hours a day, every day. But, I promise you the moment we wrapped, it was over and my abs no longer look like that. More >

MICKEY GUSHES: For Mickey Rourke success and happiness have come really only recently. The fifty-seven year-old former Oscar nominee admits that he feels he’s been touched by an angel. He recently accompanied girlfriend Anastassija Makarenko to Germany to meet her parents and says, “Anastassija is a gift from heaven More >

If you grew up on classic horror movies, you must be as baffled and appalled as I am by the recent avalanche of films, TV shows and airplane-terminal beach books about lovesick vampires turning into goony-eyed romance-novel sweethearts who buy their daily blood supply at Walgreens. To Hillary Clinton, it may take a village, but to what remains of the American countryside gone to hell in Stake Land, all it takes is a stake through the heart. Despite the violence and mayhem, I actually liked this one More >

Beverly Hills [213]’s beloved columnist and longtime Hollywood newsman passes away.

James Bacon, who spent six decades chronicling the exploits of Hollywood’s biggest stars, died recently in his home at the age of 96.

The Beverly Hills [213] columnist, author and reporter began his career at The Associated Press in the 1940s, where he was a reporter for 23 years before becoming a columnist for the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

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