Celebrity scene

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/04/2013 (4875 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Pretty as a picture

SELENA Gomez got a little anxious when she met Brad Pitt at the MTV Movie Awards show the other night, she told Ellen DeGeneres.

“I was in my dressing room and I had just finished performing. They knocked on my door and they said Brad Pitt would like to come in and I was like, ‘He can come in.’ I was trying to play cool and be really nice… he’s so pretty!”

Brad asked to have his picture taken with her, it seems, because several of his kids are big fans of hers. That was fine with Selena, but “as soon as he walked out I ran and I hide under the craft service table for like two minutes because I couldn’t believe it was happening.” Sounds reasonable.

She’s 20. He’s 49.

Going better without coke

FASHION designer Tom Ford, formerly with two very big houses but operating under his own label since 2005, spoke more bluntly than people sometimes do about his former employer, in an interview with WWD.

“I’m in a totally different place. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke. I’m not the guy who’s designing clothes for someone who is doing lines of coke off the table, like I was when I was at Gucci and Saint Laurent.”

Gucci is certainly trying for a different image now. They’ve signed up many female A-listers for a short video promoting Chime for Change, a big campaign — and June 1 London benefit “global concert event” — about empowering women.

The overall campaign is plain enough, but this little video’s message is a bit murky, despite umpteen zillion candlepower of female celebrity: Salma Hayek Pinault (whose husband runs Gucci), Freida Pinto, Zoe Saldana, Blake Lively, Olivia Wilde, Halle Berry, Katy Perry, Arianna Huffington, Evan Rachel Wood … The token males are John Legend and Ziggy Marley.

The punchline is Beyoncé saying this about little Blue Ivy: “I’m telling my daughter every day ‘you know you can be president? You know it’s possible?’ And I know she has no idea why I’m saying that, but… one year old, I’m like ‘you know you can be president’. “

Just Google “chime for change video.”

Wedding-vow-renewal wow

WONDERING how Matt Damon and Luciana Barroso could afford that wedding-vow-renewal blowout in St. Lucia last weekend? Easy: real estate. They’re selling their Miami Beach mansion on Biscayne Bay, asking $20 million, almost double what they paid in 2005, though they’ve bought some surrounding lots since then.

There’s no word yet on what the party cost, but it can’t have been cheap: They rented the whole of Sugar Beach, a swanky resort. There were 50 guests. Jimmy Kimmel officiated. Matt wore a white suit and sandals. Luciana wore a gown by designer Naeem Khan, and sandals. Their four kids were there. So were Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, Casey Affleck, Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, Stanley Tucci, Robert De Niro, Don Cheadle, Chelsea Clinton, possibly Catherine Zeta-Jones, and assorted spouses and kids.

He’s 42. She’s 36.

How many will ‘like’ on Facebook?

LIFESTYLES of the rich and free-spending: Sean Parker, the early investor in Facebook, will marry his main squeeze Alexandra Lenas on the June 1 weekend.

And there’ll be nothing of the quiet-trip-to-the-registry-office about it, TMZ.com reports: For the weekend Parker has booked the whole Ventana Inn, a swanky resort in Big Sur — cheapest room $565 a night.

But the place isn’t nice enough, so he’s spending $9 million to build a quasi-medieval set for the wedding, saysTMZ: “We’re told Sean hired a landscaping company to build fake ruins, waterfalls, bridges, ponds and a gated cottage in the resort’s surrounding forest.”

The guests “will enter through a $600,000 gate, dance on a $350,000 floor” and he’s spending $1 million on plants and flowers, too. Oh, and custom-made costumes for each guest.

See you there!

He’s 33. She’s not saying.

Heavy words of wisdom

PARENTING tips of the stars: Isla Fisher, married to Sacha Baron Cohen, is trying to get her kids to think the right way about beauty, she tells Fitness mag:

“I don’t even own a scale. I have two young daughters and I wouldn’t want them to see me weighing myself all the time. I don’t think it sends the right message.”

“For me, so much about life is acceptance. You can look in the mirror and find a million things wrong with yourself. Or, you can look in the mirror and think, ‘I feel good, I have my health, and I’m so blessed.’ That’s the way I choose to look at it. I don’t need to be perfect.”

She’s 37. Her daughters are Olive, 5, and Elula, 2.

Money makes everything OK

TODAY’S conversation-starter: Novelist Joanna Trollope is re-writing Sense and Sensibility. I’m not sure why, except of course that she can make money from it. Oddly enough it was money Trollope was talking about when she compared Jane Austen’s 1811 original with, errr, Fifty Shades of Grey:

Sense and Sensibility, she told the Telegraph, is “a fascinating novel, as it’s all about money.” And so, she notes, is Fifty Shades, with its masochism/sadism:

“If you (set that book) in a student bedsit, it would suddenly be about abuse; it’s the money that elevates what the hero does to an erotic level. Jane Austen knew that perfectly well — Mr Darcy would not have any sex appeal without Pemberley and owning half of Derbyshire.”

Paris follows her heart

PARIS Jackson’s future has been the subject of much pushing and pulling within her family: her aunt La Toya reported wanted her to get into show biz in a big way, but her granny Katherine was against that.

Looks like Toyota is out of luck. Paris now tells the Daily Mail’s Sunday magazine that she wants to be a heart surgeon, so she can “help people. That’s it.”

Also, she said she wants to restore Mike’s Neverland ranch to the way it was in his glory days, to make it fun for kids. Unfortunately that’s pretty much what Michael said, too.

Paris is 15.

Santa + glitter Christmas 24/7

THE singer Ke$ha, rarely featured in this column, makes it today, because she has a professional glitter applier. So she told Jimmy Kimmel the other night, anyway.

I am not exactly a habitué of her shows, but everybody knows she is noted for glitter, both onstage and off.

“When I first started I was just young and naïve,” she told Kimmel. “I used to bathe myself in beer and then roll around [in glitter].” But “then I started getting a skin rash … the beer was fermenting my skin, so then I started using baby oil.”

Now, she says, she has this dude named Santa, who “just follows me around and makes sure I’m always covered in glitter, because I feel it would be seriously a disappointment if I was ever seen without it.”

Stop laughing, she’s richer than you.

She’s 26.

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