Oort Cloud Oddities: Celebrity Relationships

By Alexandra Queen

You have to admire the work ethic of celebrities. Their dedication to entertaining the public doesn't end when they leave the set. No, they must spend weeks planning their personal lives to shock and amuse the general public. At least, I can't think of any other explanation for celebrity relationships.

A perfect example is the Demi Moore-Ashton Kutcher affair. If you believe the tabloids -- and you betcha' I do! President Bush should have stopped Saddam when he first learned about the killer dinosaurs -- then Demi has moved in with ol' Ash. I don't have a problem with age differences in relationships generally. When the woman is the older one, I even cheer her on as fighting the contemptible trend in Hollywood that men can mature attractively, but women need to be sent to either the plastic surgeon or the pound as soon as they hit thirty. Demi is a very lovely, semi-accomplished actress. She's a great candidate for getting the young stuff. But... Ashton Kutcher? This is a kid who has sky-rocketed to fame based on his ability to look dumb on camera. He is the new Keanu Reaves, except that he has yet to demonstrate Keanu's ability to look dumb in serious dramatic roles. (Imagine not having the acting range of Keanu Reaves. Wow.)

I don't want to be too judgmental here. Perhaps Ashton is a brilliant actor, and off screen his dinner conversation could fascinate a Nobel laureate, -- he was supposedly a biochemical engineering major at Iowa State. That could mean he's smart. It could also mean he spent most of his time in the Agriculture Department's dairy barn seeing if it was possible to huff methane. Hard to say. The boy certainly has a talent for making burnt toast look clever. I can see him in Dumb & Dumber 4: Harry and Lloyd meet their master. Sure, that sort of thing is fun when you're taking a bag of chicken manure to the movies and you don't want it to feel intellectually inferior, but would you really want to move in with someone like that? If you're a lovely actress with some serious film credits to her name?

Demi Moore could probably attend any Ivy League alumni meeting and say, "Have you ever seen Striptease?" Within moments, she would have at least several offers to be taken out to dinner, to be treated to a romantic evening of ballroom dancing or to have a newly discovered strain of bacteria named after her. If that didn't provide the excitement she craved, she could easily have some wealthy drug czar wrapped around her little finger. ("Querida, allow me to present you with this small token of mi amor." "Bolivia! How sweet!")

On the other hand, maybe she's so accustomed to men becoming drooling idiots in her presence that Ashton's persona seems normal. At least he's a practiced drooling idiot -- maybe so much so that he seems suave in comparison to everyone but Keanu Reeves and the occasional tree stump.

Bruce and Demi appeared to have a moderately amicable split, and all indications seem to be that Demi and Ashton have something meaningful going on, so this doesn't seem to be about vengeance. Because it would be terribly easy to turn to Bruce and say airily, "Oh, he's just so much like you, except younger." (Translation: You may be dating something younger and firmer, but now the whole world thinks you're old AND stupid.) If that were the case, then we'd probably see Bruce Willis dating Brittney Spears in retaliation. In a mad rush to find someone even younger and more stupid than that, Demi would start appearing in public with the dancing baby from Ally McBeal. Bruce would be stymied unless he could find a time machine and begin dating a fetal Anna Nicole Smith.

I'm sure Ashton Kutcher isn't as dumb as he looks on screen. And I'm sure that whatever is going on between him and Demi isn't just some petty "let's get even" thing. However I am worried about the effect that this relationship might have on impressionable minds. I'm not talking about our children -- they're all smarter than that. I'm talking about Nicole Kidman. She hasn't been the same since the split with Tom Cruise, and I'm worried she's going to see this Ashton-Demi thing in the tabloids and think it's a good idea. I can just see her agent having intervention counselors staking out the house of Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe and spending a lot of time with Nicole on the phone. ("Honey, Macauley Caulkin is in his twenties by now. You're not going over there, either.") Yep, I guess I'm not smart enough to understand this one, but I'm not worried. My bag of chicken manure took me to see "My Boss's Daughter" yesterday. I'm feelin' pretty fine.