The Geeks Get the Prizes, the Hot Guys Get the Girls

As I was talking with Piper last night, she congratulated me on "my guy's" having won. For a minute, I was stumped. Did she mean "my guy" Philip Seymour Hoffman, who won the Best Actor award at this year's Oscars? Or did she mean "my guy" Josh from Beauty and the Geek who won the $250,000 prize (or, more specifically, split it with his partner)? Turns out she was referring to Josh. I'm equally happy for both of my fake boyfriends, as both of them seem to be at the top of their games. Philip Seymour Hoffman was so good in Capote that I wasn't even attracted to him, which is my way of saying that he's quite an actor. Josh's biggest feats on BATG involved getting into a hot tub with beautiful women and throwing the biggest geek-run party in Vegas. Not too shabby, considering he's got some kind of anxiety disorder and carries a man bag, or, as he refers to it, a "murse." Josh writes museum reviews for a national college magazine, and he graduated from the American Film Institute with a degree in filmmaking. And I'm totally in love with him. He's got that "Woody Allen" continual speaking tic which is so adorable and which I could easily stifle by putting parts of my body into his mouth. Sigh.

And, speaking of fake boyfriends, I finally watched Ryan Reynolds' Just Friends which wasn't too bad. If you've seen the trailers, you pretty much know the plot - Ryan and Amy Smart are "just friends" in high school, apparently because he's too fat for her to date. He comes back to New Jersey by freak coincidence and meets up with his old crush. Let me just say that this movie pisses me off because it really could have been better (unlike his other recent movie, Waiting, which was horrid). Stephen Root plays Ryan's boss to hilarous effect as does Julie Hagerty as his mom. While they set the bar in nuance, the rest of the cast—Anna Faris as the Britney-esque pop-star and Chris Klein as Reynolds' romantic rival—bland it up in comparison. Ryan's fine here; he fleshes out his character a bit, but doesn't really make me believe that 1) he was ever psychologically affected by being fat or 2) that Los Angeles and New Jersey have differences other than climatic ones.

Why's this important? He's actually hot as the "fat" Chris who is sweet and incredibly funny. But, apart from one line in which Chris's friend maintains that Amy Smart's character has "matured," the the movie seems to indicate that Chris and Jamie get together because the hot guy automatically gets the girl. But, for me, the "hot" Chris just isn't compelling, perhaps because he doesn't have to work as hard for attention. So, I guess if it came down to a cage match between "hot guys" and "geeks" (would that it did!), I'd have to root for the geeks.