Fan Fare

Anthony Hopkins: Chasing Oscar can be a “road to madness”

Anthony Hopkins has done his dance with Oscar. In 1992, he won the first time he was nominated for the award, playing serial killer Hannibal Lecter in thriller “The Silence of the Lambs.” Since then, he was nominated for Oscars three more times but never won.

So he clearly knows a thing or two about Hollywood’s highest awards ceremony, which will happen on March 7, and to hear him describe it, you would say that he’s leery of the whole thing.

“You can’t become the Oscar. You can’t become what you think you have to become when you get the Oscar. If you do that, that’s the road to madness and the movie industry is full of crazy people,” Hopkins told reporters recently. “Hide them from sharp objects, there’s some lunatic people in this business.”

Hopkins made his tongue-in-cheek remarks while discussing his latest film, Gothic horror “The Wolfman”, which opens on Friday.

Aside from winning an Oscar, the Wales-born Hopkins has received a knighthood from Britain’s Queen Elizabeth,  which means that some people, even in the United States, call him “Sir Anthony.” But Hopkins, true to form, downplayed that as well.

“I still have to look in the shaving mirror in the morning, see the same old face, so it doesn’t change your life that much,” Hopkins said.

Women are from Venus, Men are from … Pandora?

In 1992, John Gray’s relationship book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” gave self-help romance seekers everything they wanted to know about the opposite sex. The book became a huge best-seller. But really, all anybody with a desire for romance needed to do was look at who goes to movies on Valentine’s Day, and why, to see just exactly what the opposite sex wanted.

That’s right. This weekend is THE WEEKEND for affairs of the heart, date nights and dinner-and-a-movie outings as V-Day hits calendars on Sunday. And movie ticket seller Fandango.com has polled moviegoers to see just exactly what they will go see in theaters. The results? Forty-two (42) percent of women want to go see the new movie, “Valentine’s Day” while 39 percent of men picked action-packed “Avatar,” which takes place on the faraway moon, Pandora.

In the pool, 92 percent of men say they are “willing to let their dates pick the movie” (Gee, awfully nice fellas), and 94 percent of men say that they do, in fact, actually pay for the trip to the theater (Now, that’s more like it guys).  And while 32 percent of women polled picked Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling in the weepy romance “The Notebook” (2004) as their favorite onscreen couple, 20 percent of men chose Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana in “Avatar.”

We wonder: where does that leave one of the other new movies this week, “The Wolfman“? Well, only 10 percent of men and 7 percent of women want to see that horror show, according to Fandango.  … Maybe a little too much hair. Now, if it were a blue-haired wolfman…