Salon.com > Our 2011 Celebrity Crushes

Kristen Wiig’s very good year

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 01:00:00 +0000

This was a pretty good year for Kristen Wiig. She remained one of the few funny, or even tolerable, cast members on “Saturday Night Live.” She was described by producer Lorne Michaels as being among the “top three or four” "SNL" performers ever. She co-wrote and starred in the movie “Bridesmaids.” Directed by Paul Feig, it was a spectacular success, earning rave reviews and taking in more than $280 million worldwide. (That figure doesn’t include $47 million in domestic DVD sales.) Wiig also scored two Golden Globe nominations (Best Actress and Best Comedy) — and, however far-fetched — she got some Oscar buzz, too. If all that weren’t enough, Wiig recently joined the pantheon of uni-named celebrity couples such as TomKat and Brangelina. “FOTOGS FOILED BY WIIGETTI,” reported the New York Post, after she was allegedly caught —what else? — canoodling with Strokes drummer Fabrizio Moretti.

Ryan Gosling: A fantasy for the Internet age

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Hey, Girl: In case you hadn’t noticed, Ryan Gosling may be this year’s king of pop culture. He’s certainly this year’s king of the Internet meme: Ryan Gosling is a feminist, works in publishing, teaches rhetoric and composition, works as a librarian, studies public history, goes to law school, and still finds time to be romantic. In real life, he fights crime, hangs out with Eva Mendes, and has very nice abs. It’s no wonder Gosling was recently named Time magazine’s Coolest Person of the Year, an honor that may appease the people who were so aggrieved by Gosling’s failure to be named People’s Sexiest Man Alive this year that they held a protest.

The year Claire Danes won our hearts, again

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Back in 1994, when my female and gay-male friends longed to gaze into the beautiful, vacant eyes of Jared Leto’s TV alter-ego, Jordan Catalano, from the short-lived ABC series "My So-Called Life," my 23-year-old self was admittedly crushed out on its star, Claire Danes. OK, maybe “crushed out” is not the right word (though not untrue) — I was awestruck by 15-year-old Danes’ portrait of Angela Chase, a gawkily pretty sophomore eager to strike out on her own, or at least wedge some distance from her overbearing parents and swap her smart, nerdy childhood friends for an edgier crew. Maybe it wasn’t a stretch for this intelligent adolescent to depict another. But it was no less bold to play her angsty doppelgänger so faithfully, with such honesty and rawness — her lip quivering, her voice teetering on the edge of whine, her tear-swollen eyes twittering, searching for Jordan and then cowering, avoiding direct eye contact. She let Angela be irritating, sometimes infuriating, because, well, the character’s 15. But even at that young age, Danes had the instincts to do the near impossible: elicit a viewer’s sympathy for an unsympathetic character. She rendered Angela so vivid, so familiar — but not familiar like you’d seen this person on TV before, because you hadn’t — that you’d cringe, laugh, cry and cringe some more because you either personally identified with the kid, and were mortified by watching a chapter of your life unfold before your eyes, or you identified her as someone you knew.

The one musician we all agree on

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 22:00:00 +0000

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins is an unusual pop icon for 2011. Of course, she styles herself as a pop icon circa 1968, invoking the lacquered hairdos and modestly glamorous attire of Dusty Springfield or Jackie DeShannon, but it wasn’t Adele’s retro fashion sense that distinguished her this year, especially as the vogue for soul revival is quickly fading. Not only does she not have the conventional body type for a pop star, but she has been wholly unapologetic about it: “I make music to be a musician, not to be on the cover of Playboy,” she told the Mirror back in 2008, and she hasn’t relented. Nor does she dance or work with popular producers or invite rappers to provide the bridge for her next single.