Then one by one, the stars would all go out...

For Oscars weekend, I had a look at the fading star system for the Irish Independent's Review section.
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/film-cinema/star-wars---its-the-final--showdown-2090776.html

Actors will battle with computer-animated sprites for tomorrow's Oscars as technology threatens the big names, writes Susan Daly

PICTURE three A-lister actors in a room together. Sandra Bullock, the star whose movies made most money in 2009; Morgan Freeman, the actor who has just crowned a career of playing wise, dignified men by playing wise, dignified Nelson Mandela; and Jeff Bridges, hotly tipped to take the Best Actor Oscar for A Crazy Heart.

They are gathered for Newsweek magazine’s annual Oscar nomination shortlist discussion. And they are not entirely happy. They have just been asked what they think of motion-capture acting, the method used in the blockbuster Avatar to capture actors’ facial expressions and map them onto computer-generated images.

Avatar, the most commercially successful and technologically advanced film in
cinematic history, has been nominated for nine Academy Awards.
Not one of those nominations is for an actor.

Freeman looks stern. “I think it’s a bit faddish,” he says. “Because it’s really cartoons.” Bullock maintains she hasn’t seen it yet. Jeff Bridges plays the diplomatic card. “It was a little uncomfortable,” he says, “but there’s something exciting about it too. It’s where it’s all going.”

Mind you, Bridges would say that – he had his face animated by the same technique for the upcoming sequel to his 1982 science fiction hit Tron.

Their unease is understandable. Avatar suggests that a film can make actors a secondary concern and still be nominated for Best Picture. It may even win – Hollywood does like a movie that shows the industry can still churn out $2 billion-dollar blockbusters.

It’s clear that motion-capture still requires an actor to emote the incredibly accurate range of expression that appears on screen – they just don’t need to be big name stars. Sam Robinson and Zoe Saldana are the actors behind the blue-skinned ‘avatars’ of the movie. If you haven’t heard of them, you are in excellent company.

The Avatar outcry is interesting because this technology has been making inroads at the box office for a few years now. The hideous Gollum creature in Lord of the Rings was created through motion-capture (dubbed MoCap by the industry, don’t you know). The actor he was based on was the very excellent but not at all well-known character actor Andy Serkis. Serkis was also the face emoting the tantrums of King Kong in the 2005 CGI remake of that movie. At least that’s one actor making a few bob out of the new technology.

The hugely successful Pixar animation films started off using stars to voice their movies. Toy Story in 1995 had Tom Hanks and Monsters, Inc (2001) had Billy Crystal, John Goodman and Steve Buscemi. As time went on, the stellar line-ups largely disappeared but success continued. No Pixar film has ever made a loss. Its latest – and also a runner for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars – is Up. The voice actor with the highest profile attached to the project is probably Ed Asner, best known for playing TV’s Lou Grant.

By contrast, a huge star doesn’t guarantee big box office. Last summer’s record for star-cast movies was bad enough: Julia Roberts, the first Hollywood actress to be able to command a $20m cheque for her ability to lead movies to box office receipts of $100m or more, had a deflated return to the screen with the loss-making Duplicity. Denzel Washington and John Travolta made a disappointing profit of about $50m with The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. Even Eddie Murphy, the so-called critic-proof star, saw his fans turn their nose up at his comedy, Imagine That. It cost around $55m to make and took in around $22m. Imagine that.

The bigger picture looks no better. The lead actors in the highest-grossing movies of the decade included Elijah Wood (the Lord of the Rings trilogy), Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Tobey Maguire and Christian Bale (Spider-man and Batman), Shia LaBeouf (Transformers). Johnny Depp also gets a look-in based mainly on his participation in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Mike Myers is there mostly in voice alone, for the animated Shrek series. In fact, you have to go to No.25 to find a bona fide star, Tom Hanks, with The Da Vinci Code – and that film arguably traded off the bestselling book it was based on.

We speak of George Clooney as the successor to Cary Grant. Clooney, however, has only just tasted what it is to be the lead of a $100m film as Up In The Air has nudged over that mark. (The Oceans series made over the $100m, but he was sharing the limelight with Brad Pitt and Matt Damon.) Tom Cruise, formerly the actor with the longest consecutive runs of $100m opening weekends, only managed a $22m opening weekend with Valkyrie – although it has taken over $200m since its Christmas 2008 launch.

So here’s the situation: franchise movies and movies based on comics, books and video games are hot, hot, hot. Franchise actors are not. In the so-called golden age of Hollywood in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, John Wayne, Bing Crosby or the aforementioned Grant hardly knew what it was to flip-flop between hits and misses. (See the panel for the all-time biggest box office draws). Their names were franchises in the way the new Harry Potter film is now, guaranteeing a sellout opening weekend.

Individual star wattage shone even more brightly in accepted franchise pairings – Tracy and Hepburn, Bogie and Bacall, Astaire and Rogers, Crosby and Hope, Crawford and Gable, Powell and Loy, Garland and Rooney. Certain actor-director combos were also surefire winners – Grant and Hitchcock, Wayne and Ford spring to mind.

Some of the most popular actors did consistently well because they were contained within the studio star system which, when it identified a genre that was working well for their starlets, tended to want them to stay in it. Screwball comedy and westerns produced some of the biggest stars because that’s what the audience wanted to see. If you think about it, genre films continue to be the biggest draw at today’s box office: comedy, action, horror and teen franchises like Twilight or Harry Potter. It’s just that the demographic of the audience has changed to a much younger one and so the genres they prefer have too.

All is not entirely lost for our dwindling pack of A-list stars. It is true that they have had more trouble justifying the $20m pay cheque if their films consistently fail to attract box office heat. But there are still some stars who can do it – after that modest opening weekend, Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie ended up taking $200m worldwide and he’s taking no chances by signing up to Mission Impossible IV.

Either way that one turns out, he can either claim a success based on his brand name, or a failure that shows franchises are not the always a winner. Brad Pitt is acknowledged as a still substantial draw – that’s why the promotion for Inglorious Basterds focused largely on him, even though he’s only in half the movie.

There is also the argument that technology has been threatening to overtake the star system for about, oh, three decades now, from the introduction of CGI in the early 1980s. And what happened there? Actor and CGI managed to peacefully co-exist. In fact, would Titanic have made stars of Leonardo diCaprio and Kate Winslet in 1997 had they been forced to ‘keep it real’ and make it on a ferry?

Morgan Freeman shouldn’t worry too much about being made redundant – but he might want to think about getting fitted for a MoCap face mask.

PANEL:
PULLING POWER – The definitive list of box office stars
The A-list star is not yet extinct but the cold, hard facts of cash show that they don’t have the same wattage at the box office as the stars of yesteryear.
The Quigley Publishing Company has been reliably compiling a list of Hollywood’s top money-making stars every year since 1932. The annual Quigley Poll is based on the revenue a star’s movies generate - but also on the votes of movie theatre owners on who they know will attract an audience.

Last summer, Quigley’s compiled their all-time top 20 of the past 77 years, carefully weighted by the number of annual lists a star appeared on during their career. It is interesting to see how few of this generation’s A-listers appear in the top score. Even the few who do – Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Eddie Murphy, Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson – are all on the wrong side of 40.

And the all-time box office big-hitter? John Wayne, a man who appeared in over 150 films but only won one Academy Award, for True Grit.

Quigley’s All-Time Top Money-Making Stars:
1. John Wayne: He became a star in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and their partnership endured over 20 further successful movies. Wayne was consolidated as an icon of American masculinity, notwithstanding the variety of hairpieces he wore from the late 1940s onwards to hide his balding pate.

2. Clint Eastwood: Eastwood was another star embedded on the public consciousness by the western thanks to his role in the TV series Rawhide from 1959-64. Shortly afterwards he transferred that recognition to the big screen and created an unbeatable niche as the tough guy anti-hero.

3. Tom Cruise: His break with Paramount Pictures in 2006 and his much-mocked interest in Scientology was heralded as the beginning of the end for the star system. That same year, however, he still topped Forbes magazines list of 100 most influential celebrities. News just broke in the past week that he is on board for the fourth installment of Mission Impossible – it can’t hurt these days to stay hitched to a franchise that has raked in $1.4bn worldwide.

4. Gary Cooper: He once said that “The general consensus is that I don’t act at all.” Luckily for ‘Coop’, the strong, silent type proved to be very suitable to the westerns (yes, those again) adored by the vast movie-going audiences of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. It helped that he nearly always played the good guy.

5. Clark Gable: Even though he had already been nominated twice for an Oscar before Gone With The Wind came along in 1939, Rhett Butler sent him stratospheric in the same way Titanic would anoint Leonardo diCaprio 60 years later. Gable’s appeal was such that he was second only to Shirley Temple in popularity in the 1930s – and she’s the film star who apparently helped pulled America out of the Depression.

6. Bing Crosby: The ultimate crossover star, Crosby reinforced his movie star status by being one of the most successful recording artist for 20 years from the mid-1930s onwards. He was the person who did most to boost GI morale in World War II, according to Yank magazine. As a multimedia artist, he was almost unprecedented and certainly unrivalled.

7. Paul Newman: How to explain the enduring appeal of Old Blue Eyes? Was it his
beauty, his talent, his contrary choice to play loners and outcasts that played against his looks? Whatever it was, when he died in 2008, Kevin Spacey remarked: “An era just ended.”

8. Tom Hanks (tie): Hanks might be more of a powerhouse producer these days, but as an actor he has brought in $3bn in box office receipts. If ever there was a test of star power, it was his ability to seduce audiences to watch him play with a volleyball on a deserted island for the best part of the huge 2000 hit, Castaway.

Bob Hope (tie): Hope had a mutually beneficial screen partnership with best friend Bing Crosby that yielded the seven hugely successful ‘Road’ movies from 1940 to 1962. At that time he began his 18-time stint as host of the Academy Awards and a career in broadcasting: no wonder his name could sell a film or two.

Mel Gibson (tie): Like Tom Cruise, his off-screen antics have tarnished his personal reputation, but for the 13 years during his career when he was a top ten powerhouse, he’s earned his place in the pantheon.

The top twenty is rounded out by: Burt Reynolds, Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Julia Roberts, Eddie Murphy, Cary Grant, Abbott & Costello, Harrison Ford, Shirley Temple and James Stewart.

How to lose disgracefully

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/columnists/nightwatch-no-fun-at-the-losers-table-2089664.html

By Susan Daly

Friday March 05 2010

The best backhanded compliment I've ever received came from a very drunk RTE personality. "You're a very cheerful person," he slurred, "for someone sitting at the losers' table."

Hell hath no fury like an ego scorned. There we were, guests at the sparkling jewel in the crown of Irish awards ceremonies (at least that's how the IFTA press release may have described it), but this guy wasn't having fun. And if he was going down, he was bringing the rest of us with him.

This is how it really is at awards ceremonies. Painted smiles served with a side of bitter lemon. In my tiny, highly partisan, bit of experience, the best way to enjoy them is from your couch with all the dull bits and tedious bores edited out. I won't be alone in being glued to the Oscars show on Sunday night. The best dresses, the frocky horrors, the glitz, the glamour! But it's a total spectator sport.

Angelina Jolie might look like she's having the time of her life as the bulbs pop on the red carpet, but what she's probably thinking is: "Oh Christ, it's my turn to get up in the morning with the kids." Jeff Bridges is probably wishing he was at home in his underpants. George Clooney is probably wishing Jeff Bridges was at home in his underpants so he could nab his Best Actor award. It's all me, me, me with these people.

Which brings me back to my disgruntled neighbour at the IFTAs a few years back. I've been to the awards a few times, through chance, by association -- but never on talent, let me assure you. The first time I went -- last-minute date of a desperate colleague -- my eyes were on stalks for the first hour. There's Rosanna Davison in the jacks! She's putting on lipstick! There are some people from Corrie! They're having the beef!

It took my colleague's threat to have me removed by security to calm me down.

In any case, subsequent proceedings tore the rosy veil from my eyes. A notoriously grumpy Irish director didn't smile back when I smiled at him (I found out about his notorious grumpiness later). The only bona fide star was Mischa Barton, who sat lonely as a Californian cloud while all the rest of us plebs did that Irish thing and studiously ignored the most famous person in the room lest they think we were uncool or something.

When it came time to take our seats, I got a little lesson in how to tell you're not at a VIP table. You're seated right beside the kitchen. The swinging service doors hit the back of your chair. Repeatedly. You wave and wave and wave every time a camera pans across the room but your mammy, watching patiently at home with her finger on the video record button, doesn't spot you once.

By the time of my last foray to the IFTAs -- and after this column is printed, no doubt it will be my very last -- I was wise to the old somebody/nobody ballroom divide. There were award nominees at our table for sure, but we were so far from the stage that if one of our number was to actually win something, they'd have to set a new world record for hurdling to get up to their gong in the allotted time.

Our new pal, the TV personality, clearly hadn't cottoned on to the geographical impossibility of his win. As he slipped into the seat beside me, he was all handshakes and bon mots. It was only after he questioned us all on our credentials and nominations that the truth dawned on him. A table populated by some nice but inoffensive documentary-makers, a few hangers-on and one incredibly dour comedian was clearly not the glamour table.

You could see the chagrin spread across his face like a bad case of the pox. The rest of the night was an arse-numbing blur of endless technical awards and hissed mutterings of "bastards" and "outrageous" from my increasingly wine-soaked table buddy. Kanye West would have thought he was over-reacting.

The next day, he rang into my answering machine and left an apologetic message. He needn't have bothered: I'm quite happy to be a loser if it means I can stick to watching awards show in my pyjamas in future.

Firth Class

Lucky, lucky me - I got to admire Colin Firth in a Tom Ford suit a day before his Oscar nomination for A Single Man was announced...

Here is how that goes (with a bonus side helping of Nicholas Hoult)

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/features/colin-firth-firth-class-2060360.html



By Susan Daly

Friday February 12 2010

Men just don't get Colin Firth. Tell people you are going to interview the star of Bridget Jones's Diary, Mamma Mia! -- and now Tom Ford's A Single Man -- and you get two reactions. The women squeal in excitement and the men sigh with boredom. (One male gay friend squealed and sighed.)

Neither reaction does Firth justice. True, he still cuts a fine dash in a black Tom Ford suit, white shirt opened a few temperature-raising buttons. "Why would I dream of wearing anything else?" he says pithily. "I even put it on for my phone interviews."

It was another white shirt that branded Firth as the quintessential English posh totty. In the BBC's 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice, his Mr Darcy dived into a lake in order to cool his desire for Lizzy Bennett. The image of Firth emerging, linen shirt clinging to his manly torso, was seared into the brains of a generation of women.

But teetering on the edge of 50, his career has progressed beyond the damp-shirt school of acting -- even if both his detractors and his most ardent fans have yet to acknowledge it. Twelve hours after he sits in his sharp suit in a London hotel, animatedly describing his love for the character he plays in A Single Man, he will be shortlisted for Best Actor at this year's Academy Awards.

He deserves it for the intensely moving performance he gives as George, a gay English professor in 60s LA, thrown into suicidal grief by the death of his long-term lover. His particular brand of restraint, which has in the past been read as him being uptight, is pitch-perfect for the neurotic, middle-aged George.

Firth is aged in the movie by his severe dark-rimmed glasses, rigidly Brylcreemed hair and the pallor of grief. Yet he is not strait-jacketed by George's need for order and compulsion for neatness. (In one tragic-comic scene, he lines out all the paraphernalia for his suicide and funeral at perfect right angles on his dining table.)

Designer-cum-director Ford allows his camera to hold steadily on Firth's face because he has such amazing nuance of expression. When George receives the phone call that tells him his lover is dead, the camera stays utterly focused on him long after the call has ended. George doesn't need to punch a wall to convey his distress -- it's all written there in Firth's eyes and the crumpling of his face.

"A lot of people talk about the phonecall," says Firth. "Tom was so courageous and patient about letting that take its course ... I put the phone down, and Tom didn't say, 'Cut'. I stayed there until the magazine ran out and I said, 'Okay, how's that?'" He found Ford and the others in the next room, looking at the monitor and passing around the Kleenex. They shot the scene three times, Ford allowing the magazine of film to run out each time.

The film was shot in 21 days but Firth credits first-time director Ford for giving him plenty of creative space. "Tom creates the illusion that you've got all the time in the world," says Firth.

The sad truth is that Firth has been giving nuanced performances like this -- the type that wins awards -- for a long time, but not always in well-known films. Films such as Tumbledown, as far back as 1988, where he played a Falklands soldier who is brain-damaged by a sniper's bullet; or as poet Blake Morrison in And When Did You Last See Your Father (2007).

He has said that he feels he has "done work I've been proud of in films I'm not particularly proud of". Which might explain his appearances in the St Trinian films or even in Mamma Mia!

"That wasn't really your festival nomination film, although it did get some," he says. "And in some ways I think that's just snobbery. We can argue about the qualities of Mamma Mia! but I think it's a superbly made film that's been designed to look like it's been thrown together in an awkward way."

He laughs at the idea that it's one big karaoke hitmaker -- "the boys can't sing, I accept that" -- but defends it to the last. The common perception of him as a gentlemanly type is not unjustified.

He is not, however, all buttoned-up Englishness. We learned that when he agreed to send up his role as the definitive Mr Darcy by playing his parody, Mark Darcy, in Bridget Jones' Diary.

He's also quick to crack a joke, often at his own expense. I wonder if he has adopted some of George's obsessive habits and started ironing his socks. "I wished I could go to a drawer and see all those shirts like that, everything starched and prepared, but it's not me. I just couldn't keep it up," he laughs. When told that Pierce Brosnan has recently said he doesn't think there will be a Mamma Mia! sequel, he feigns surprise and quips: "Oh he nixed it, did he? No, he's going to need the work."

While he might be a fantasy figure for many women -- a scene in A Single Man in which he and young Nicholas Hoult (of About A Boy and Skins) take a skinny dip in the sea will not disappoint -- I'm reminded that he's someone's dad. As I leave to let Firth get ready for the London premiere of the film that night, one of the PR people mentions that his teenage son had just arrived at the suite. "That must be weird," she says, "seeing your dad with the kid from Skins!"

His partners of choice have not been traditional English roses. Although he had a relationship with his Pride and Prejudice co-star Jennifer Ehle for a time, his first son was with the Canadian actress Meg Tilly. He has been married for 14 years now to Italian film producer Livia Giuggioli, with whom he has two more sons. When Firth won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival last year, he made his acceptance speech in the local lingo. The English everyman is actually pretty cosmopolitan.

"Venice was in some ways the best moment," he says, "because there was no buzz, there was no talk about the film at that stage. My wife's Italian, it was a big moment in lots of ways -- and we showed this film for the first time and it got lots of warmth. I remember thinking, 'it can't feel better than this really'. Everything else is just gravy really."

A day later, he was in the running for an Oscar.

Welcome to the feast, Mr Firth.




http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/features/were-so-mad-about-this-boy-2060361.html
Friday February 12 2010

Nicholas Hoult is very young to have already staged a career comeback. In A Single Man, he plays a college student, Kenny, who both intrigues Colin Firth's character and is, in turn, intrigued by him. Tall, tanned and beautiful, Hoult catches the eye from the moment he appears on screen in -- of all things -- a mohair jumper.

He is all but unrecognisable from the last role that required him to pull off a silly jumper. Nine years ago, he played a nerdy 12-year-old who makes an unwilling surrogate dad of Hugh Grant in About A Boy. Back then, he was all bobble hats and unruly hair. Now he's got ridiculously high cheekbones, a full-lipped pout and a proper Hollywood buzz around him.

"It was odd seeing this film for the first time," he says, "because I'm spray-tanned, have Beatles' 60s-ish hair, and dressed in white head to toe a bit like a guardian angel." Today, dressed to attend the London premiere of A Single Man, the tan has worn off, but he's still very impressive in tailored trousers (Tom Ford, of course), shirt and some very shiny cufflinks.

"I suppose I did things in between that weren't commercially successful and people didn't see me, so it might have looked like I came out of nowhere," he says hesitantly. "I think my change in appearance has been part of the reason -- everyone changes a little bit -- but it was like I was making a comeback."

Hoult, just turned 21, might be the fresh new thing in Hollywood -- his next job is a part in Mad Max 4. But his reincarnation from dorky kid to sex symbol came a little earlier for Irish and British audiences. Four years ago, when Hoult was 17, he headed up the cast of Channel 4's edgy teen drama, Skins. Hoult left school early to play Tony Stonem, the brazenly raunchy lead man of the group, for two years.

"He'd been as manipulative and as much of an arsehole as he could be in the first series and then did the most random things ever, then he got hit by a bus, and came back. So I think they had explored everything possible there!" he laughs.

TV drama's loss looks likely to be the big screen's gain. Hoult has been acting since he was three, even though his parents -- a piano teacher mum, a British Airways pilot dad -- had nothing to do with drama. "My older brother wanted to do acting first, my older sister did a lot of singing and dancing -- she's now on tour with Joseph. My younger sister's still in school, bless her. We've all kind of got into it by following my brother's footsteps," he explains with a shrug.

Despite his youthful blasé, he does admit it would be "the most annoying thing in the world" if he was to be typecast as a pretty boy, especially when he feels his new character Kenny is more than the sum of his perfect smile and bare torso. "He's a complex character trying to understand himself and the world around him, but he's a sweet guy," says Hoult. "He's got a powerful predatory side to him at the same time. I think people will see parts of that and not just see a suntanned kid."

Hoult's mum rings. There's some confusion over a car which is to bring his parents -- with whom he still lives in Berkshire -- to the hotel.

"Sorry, sorry," he blushes as he turns off the phone. Later still, he giggles when he says biology was one of his favourite subjects in school.

There's a bit of The Boy in there yet.

Don't let Santa Claus ask Saoirse for her autograph

OSCAR shortlist day brings out the patriot in us all. We love to see an Irish name in the running for an Academy Award. The Sheridans alongside the Scorseses. The Neesons taking on the Nicholsons.

So it was disappointing that Saoirse Ronan was passed over in the Best Actress category yesterday. The supremely talented 15-year-old from Carlow had been tipped for recognition of her performance as a murdered young girl in The Lovely Bones.

I hope she is not too downhearted – but I’m not altogether sorry that she has missed out. That is neither begrudgery nor jealousy speaking. (Although her great success so far does make me wonder what the hell I did with the first 15 years of my life.)

Saoirse, who already had an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress under her belt at 13, has nothing to prove. Since the Lovely Bones, she has shot a movie with Colin Farrell and is about to shoot another with Atonement director Joe Wright. To
say she has a future in film is an understatement.

But the spotlight is an even more intense place for her two years on. She is no longer the child who wore a green dress to the Oscars because she wanted everyone to know she was Irish. At the Dublin premiere of The Lovely Bones last week, she looked every inch the lovely young woman. She wore fabulous Nina Divito high heels and a glittering black dress.

It’s that cusp of teenagehood where she begins to look womanly – but at 15, she is very much still a child. Her parents, Paul and Monica, are protective of her. Under their guidance, Saoirse is unlikely to start drinking the hotel minibar dry or turning into a nightclub-hopper like Lindsay Lohan.

There is, however, only so much Saoirse can be protected from, given the industry she is in. Her friend Sarah Bolger – who starred in Jim Sheridan’s In America as a 10-year-old and whose star is also on the up - has spoken of how she was offered inappropriate scripts when she was still 16. When I interviewed her last year, she explained: “These scripts were coming up for me even two years ago that had stuff in them that would be just a little dodgy.”

And just because she has turned 18, reporters apparently think it’s okay to ask her about sex.
“It's madness,” she said. “This interviewer asked, ‘So who would you like to jump into bed with?’ We had been talking about Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (with whom she stars in The Tudors), so I'm sure he just wanted me to say him.”

Even Saoirse’s acclaimed role in The Lovely Bones could have presented her with a very grown-up dilemma. In the book on which it is based, her character endures a terrible sexual assault before she is killed. Thankfully, the film’s director Peter Jackson decided such graphic detail was not needed for the screen version. As time goes on, will Saoirse confront less understanding directors and producers?

It’s wonderful to see our two lovely girls grow up so beautifully on camera but we can’t forget that they are still fragile teenagers. It’s a tough enough phase of life as it is – without the added pressure of having to cope with adult expectations and pervy interviewers.

We might heed the words of the first real child star, Shirley Temple, and her poignant reminder that fame made her grow up too fast, too soon.
“I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six,” she once said. “Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.”

It’s not as salacious as the cautionary tale of Drew Barrymore, the little girl from ET who was drinking at the age of 9, taking cocaine by 11 and in rehab at 13. The moral of their stories are the same though: being thrust into the public eye at a young age hastens the death of innocence.

If missing out on the Oscars carousel for a year gives Saoirse more time to go home and play with her beloved dog Sassie and hang out with her mates, then it will be time well spent.

THIS is the extended version of the op-ed I had published in yesterday's Evening Herald at http://www.herald.ie/opinion/sorry-saoirse-missed-out-but-let-her-be-a-teenager-a-while-2045703.html