Nicole Kidman had got people nicely warmed up with “Sunday Rose” for her recently-arrived daughter, who, incidentally, was born on a Monday.

The Daily Telegraph caught the mood with a tongue-in-cheek commentary saying Jolie had “failed the name game”, calling her choices “shockingly conventional.”

Celebrity baby name lists remind us of glories past, for which many of us secretly pine. Remember Princess Tiaamii (daughter of model Jordan and Peter Andre)? Or Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily (Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence) and Jermajesty (Jermaine Jackson and Alejandra Genevieve Oaziaza)? Angelina, we deserved better.

Pinsky, who hosts the nationally syndicated radio program “Loveline” and appears on cable TV on the VH1 reality show “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew,” was interviewed for the July issue of Playboy, and wondered aloud why Cruise was ”drawn into a cultish kind of environment like Scientology.”

“To me, that’s a function of a very deep emptiness and suggests serious neglect in childhood — maybe some abuse, but mostly neglect,” Pinsky said.

That did not please Cruise, and the actor’s lawyer, Bert Fields, told the New York Post that Pinsky sounded like a Nazi.  

“This unqualified television performer, who is obviously just looking for notoriety, is so grotesquely unprofessional as to pretend to diagnose Tom and others without ever meeting them,” Fields told the Post. ”He seems to be spewing the absurdity that all Scientologists are mentally ill. The last time we heard garbage like this was from Joseph Goebbels.”

On Thursday, Pinsky’s publicist, Valerie Allen, said in a statement that the doctor ”apologizes if his comments were hurtful.”

She added that Pinsky, who among other jobs is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Keck University of Southern California School of Medicine, was not making a “blanket diagnosis” about Scientology or Cruise, the star of the movies “Mission: Impossible” and “Minority Report.”

As the world’s media ponders who Obama will pick as his vice presidential candidate, we’d like to throw the 67-year-old singer/songwriter/poet into the ring. He has a name that travels across borders, is a cultural icon (surely that overused word is justified in this case) and he could come up with a mean campaign song to rally the followers.

Dylan recently praised Obama for redrawing the U.S. political map. “Poverty is demoralising. You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we’ve got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up…Barack Obama,” Dylan told the Times newspaper in a recent interview. ”He’s redefining what a politician is, so we’ll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.”

Returning to the theme of that campaign song, how about something along the lines of “The Times, They Are A-Changin’”? Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

In a blog on her Web site shortly after the event, the singer of 2006 hit “Smile” who has a reputation for partying hard admitted she had gone too far.

“Last time I wrote here, I was defending my honor and dignity, explaining my innocence and also outrage at the press for insinuating my behaviour was embarrassing,” she wrote. “This time I’m putting my hands up, I got very drunk last night, too drunk. It’s not cool getting that drunk, I feel awful and I have to thank my little brother Alf for getting me home safely.”

She had a few words of advice for fans and peers: “Kids, drink responsibly or you’ll end up looking like this, not pretty!” But Allen concluded the blog post with the words: ”Was quite fun though, from what I can remember. Need fry up now.”

While Britain cannot claim to be in the same league as the United States when it comes to troubled young starlets, if you consider Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton to name but a few, Allen and troubled jazz singer Amy Winehouse are giving the London-based paparazzi a run for their money.

There was a scramble to get into the packed press screening, with reporters waiting up to two hours to ensure a spot, and reviewers were sending out their opinions on the internet within an hour of it finishing.

OK, there was warm applause at the end of the screening, which for Cannes’ fussy reporters and critics is good going for a family blockbuster. But it also has to be said that the cheers at the start of the movie were far louder than those at the end.

This makes me think that once the euphoria and hype in Cannes settles down, and more considered opinions are printed, we are actually going to get a much more mixed reaction that at first seemed the case.

Not that this matters much to the movie’s box office prospects. Even critics who were less than impressed expect that the popularity of the original films and the anticipation that has built among movie goers will ensure a huge commercial return.

Angelina is in Cannes and Cannes has gone crazy, well, the media has, and as she graces the red carpet for two films featuring at this year’s festival, the fans will soon get their chance to join them.

Of course, public and press alike all love an A-lister, but the interest has grown along with Jolie’s bump, and she has just confirmed she is expecting twins. Her flowing white dress is a valiant attempt to keep our focus on the films, not the family, but it will be to no avail.

The normally tranquil, albeit crowded Wifi press room in the main festival building predictably descended into chaos as photographers and cameramen clambered over furniture, as well as startled writers peering into their laptops, to get a shot or 50 of Jolie crossing a walkway just outside.

Security guards slid windows shut and journalists slid them open again. Guards slid them shut again … and so on and so on. There was the inevitable tantrum as one man holding a video camera had his shot ruined by the window passing in front of the lens. Swear words were exchanged, the reporter stormed off, Jolie left, so did the snappers, and tranquility was restored.

The stunt, carefully orchestrated and watched by dozens of photographers and camera crews, underlined the importance of the world’s biggest film festival for promoting movies which have nothing to do with the main competition.

Black, who provides the voice of the main character Po, capered about with a series of kung-fu moves and posed with actors who voice the film in French, Portuguese, Japanese and Spanish. “Together, we’re creating an international panda sensation,” he remarked.

The calm won’t last. Reporters are advised to start limbering up for their first scrum. That is likely to be a “media event”, otherwise known as a chaotic stunt, to publicise “Kung Fu Panda“, a Hollywood animation comedy coming to town. Minutes later, there is the press screening of the opening film “Blindness”, which officially gets the 2008 edition of the festival underway.

The list of potential “flashpoints”, when sleep-deprived, highly-strung hacks attempt to get into venues more often than not too small to accommodate them, is endless.

But, as the old saying goes, someone’s got to do it, and few, if any, here in Cannes, would want to give up their place.

That does not stop the speculation. France’s Le Monde newspaper has an interesting point — that Steven Soderbergh’s four-and-a-half-hour epic “Che”, only just completed in time to qualify for the main competition, would not be the first “last-minute” entry to walk away with the main award.

In 1979, Francis Ford Coppola brought an early cut of “Apocalypse Now” to the French Riviera and, although it differed from the version most viewers would have seen, it won. On the festival’s Web site it is listed as “Apocalypse Now (A Work in Progress”). In 1981, Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s “Man of Iron” made it to Cannes despite reluctance on the part of the Communist authorities. It also won the Golden Palm.

There is comfort for those who come away from the glitzy festival empty-handed, however. Last year, the Coen Brothers’ “No Country For Old Men” was overlooked by the jury yet went on to win Best Picture at the Oscars.

Showbiz hacks the world over will be sharpening their pencils (and fingernails), pouring over screening schedules, brushing up on blogging banter and taking plenty of deep breaths before heading for the Riviera resort of Cannes to cover the film festival which kicks off on Wednesday. Someone’s got to do it, I guess.

The first scheduling crunch comes on the first morning, no doubt a sign of things to come. “Kung Fu Panda”, a martial arts animation movie from DreamWorks, plans a stunt outside the swanky Carlton hotel on Wednesday morning at exactly the same time that the festival screens the opening competition film “Blindness”, by Fernando Meirelles of “City of God” fame. One promises to be fun yet silly, the other harrowing yet rewarding, summing up life in Cannes during the 12-day festival perfectly.