Advertisement

Clooney takes it to the cleaner

Share via
Special to The Times

Attention, Vogue, In Style and all you other hoity-toity rag mags who keep putting George Clooney on your best-dressed Hollywood men lists. The acclaimed actor-director-producer has been pulling the worsted wool over your eyes for a decade.

“I’ve been wearing the same tuxedo [Armani] for 10 years,” Clooney admitted backstage at the Critics’ Choice Awards on Monday night. “And I won ‘best dressed’ three years in a row for the same tux. What are they gonna do? It’s a tux.”

So how does Clooney feel about Julia Roberts, his old “Ocean’s Eleven” costar who also wore a tux Monday night, presenting his Freedom Award?

Advertisement

“I don’t like her,” he snapped, with a straight face. “I’ll tell you that right now. I’ve never liked her.

“No, seriously,” he said. “I was really surprised when they said Julia wanted to present the award. I was very flattered.”

It’s Huffman’s stage -- get used to it

Felicity Huffman looked fiercely fit in a tight white Randolph Duke dress at the Palm Springs International Film Festival awards gala at the Palm Springs Convention Center on Saturday night.

Advertisement

All eyes were on the actress, in part because of the dress and because she was one of the few Oscar-hopeful honorees who walked the red carpet and spoke to the media, before accepting a breakthrough performance award.

Huffman admitted that all the attention she’d been getting for her disparate roles -- a working wife and mother on ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” and a man having a sex change operation in “Transamerica” -- was a bit overwhelming.

“I just keep waiting for Ashton Kutcher to jump out and yell ‘Punk’d!’ ” she said.

On Monday, Huffman will be at the Golden Globe Awards, where she’s up for three awards: two for “Housewives,” including best ensemble, the other for “Transamerica.” Then she’s set to attend the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Jan. 29, at which she’s again up for both roles and for best ensemble cast.

Advertisement

This has gotta be the most elaborate “Punk’d” Kutcher has ever pulled off.

Sarsgaard starts Gyllenhaal’s party

Peter Sarsgaard presented pal Jake Gyllenhaal with the Desert Palm Achievement Award for an actor at the Palm Springs film festival gala.

“First, I want to say some nice things about Jake,” Sarsgaard said. “Also, Jake is a fantastic singer, and I think it’s only a matter of time before you get to hear him sing. And I will dance,” said Sarsgaard, doing some suave hustle steps. “So you gotta sing, Jake, if I dance. Let’s get this party started!”

With that intro, Gyllenhaal, laughing so hard he could barely speak, came out on stage and sang, in a falsetto voice, “Fever night, fever night, fe-vah! You know how to do it!”

“Listen, I’ve already played a gay cowboy,” the “Brokeback Mountain” star said. “If I do a musical number, people will really start to question me.”

‘Munich,’ straight from the source

In the controversy over Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” one person who hadn’t been heard from is George Jonas, author of the book “Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team,” on which Spielberg’s film is based. Jonas says he was never shown the “Munich” script. Nor did he speak to screenwriters or to Spielberg.

Jonas had planned to see “Munich” at the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. screening on Dec. 6. When producer Barry Mendel heard, he called Jonas to ask if he would consider not going, promising a private showing, Jonas says. Jonas agreed, and Universal Studios set things up in Toronto the following day.

Advertisement

In a piece titled “The Spielberg Massacre” for MacLean’s, a Canadian magazine, he said, “There’s no telling how an author might react to the Hollywood version of his book under the best of circumstances, and here the circumstances may not be the best.”

“ ‘Munich’ follows the letter of my book closely enough,” he writes. “The spirit is almost the opposite. ‘Vengeance’ holds there is a difference between terrorism and counterterrorism; ‘Munich’ suggests there isn’t. The book has no trouble telling an act of war from a war crime; the film finds it difficult. Spielberg’s movie worries about the moral trap of resisting terror; my book worries about the moral trap of not resisting it.”

*

Snead writes “Styles & Scenes” as a blog for the Envelope (TheEnvelope.com), a Times website devoted to Hollywood’s awards season.

Advertisement