On why acting skill and political awareness are not shared attributes:

In the interview, given to French TV show Paris Premiere, [Marion] Cotillard appears to suggest the attacks on the World Trade Center were staged to avoid the expense of refurbishing them.

"We see other towers of the same kind being hit by planes, are they burned?" she asks. "There was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which burned for 24 hours.

"It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there [in New York], in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed."

The Twin Towers, she claims, were a "money sucker" that would have cost much more to modernise than to destroy.

The actress goes on to cast doubt on the Moon landing of 1969. "Did a man really walk on the moon?" she asks.

"I saw plenty of documentaries on it and I really wondered. In any case I don't believe all they tell me."

Okay, so this year's Oscar winner for Best Actress is dumber than a bag of hammers. What of it? I'm resigned to expecting my favorite golfer or baseball player to have reactionary political views; what's important is what he does between the lines. Were it to turn out that Phoebe Nicholls is a Trotskyite or a Tory, I'd still scan IMDB every day for updates. Athletes and actors aren't paid to be policy wonks, so anyone who takes their political views seriously is playing a fool's game.