Anne Hathaway's Oscar campaign is her best performance yet

Anne Hathaway
Anne Hathaway Dan Kitwood/Getty

Ladies and gentleman, take your seats in a hushed and expectant movie theatre. It's time to dim the lights for The Anne Hathaway Oscar Campaign.

The first major staging post will be Sunday's Golden Globes, of course, but the fragrant Miss Hathaway's impression of someone who is just awed to be nominated already looks to be paying off. This week Anne picked up a Desert Palm achievement award for Rachel Getting Married - but apparently lost the audience somewhat when she began talking about "process metaphysics" in her acceptance speech. And this a mere couple of hours after a dispatch from the red-carpet front line, in which she expressed a clipped and studied disappointment in Barack Obama's choice to have his inauguration invocation delivered by a conservative evangelical pastor.

Don't worry about "process metaphysics" - it's something Anne read somewhere and almost certainly doesn't understand - but the question is, what was it doing in her podium speech? And why is she casting herself as a kind of Susan Sarandon for the Twitter generation?

Well, for this awards season, Anne has delivered a career performance as an innocent sweetheart who has to find her inner mettle. I know what you're thinking. That's the only performance she has ever given, be it in Becoming Jane, The Princess Diaries, The Devil Wears Prada, or in the currently playing Bride Wars. (Kate Hudson as a high-powered attorney? Come on, Hollywood! Not even in a comedy. Really.)

So are they giving out Oscars for that stuff now? No. Anne has actually rested this trusted shtick for Rachel Getting Married, the movie for which she has the Oscar-buzz. Instead, she has been working the mettle-finding-sweetheart angle in real life.

And so to a refresher course for our remedial students. Until last June, Anne lived in Manhattan with her long-term boyfriend Raffaello Follieri, in a $37,500-a-month penthouse in Trump Tower. Without wishing to spoil the ending for you, Raffaello now lives in a federal prison in Pennsylvania, having pleaded guilty to a multimillion-dollar fraud, in which he had basically used all the investors' money to enjoy a lavish celebrity lifestyle with Anne. He told her he was, um, "the chief financial officer of the Vatican".

He was also CEO of the Raffaello Follieri Foundation, upon whose board Anne sat, though she never asked to see the tax returns, preferring instead to give frequent keynote addresses on how hot his job made her. "My boyfriend is incredible," ran one of these. "But when it comes to his charity ... one of the most untouted aphrodisiacs in the world is charity work. Seriously, you want a girl to be impressed, vaccinate some kids, build a house."

Yes, get one of your people to stick a needle in some adorable little urchin, and Anne's pupils dilate, her pulse begins to quicken, and she'll stick an "ARTIST GETTING SEEN TO" sign on her trailer door for the afternoon.

Among the many, many hilarities in the federal indictment of Follieri is the detail that our hero also kept various Catholic clergy vestments, including monsignor robes, in the wardrobe.

Anyway, Anne finally broke up with Raffaello two months after he had first been arrested on fraud charges, and a full six hours before he was led away in cuffs by FBI agents. This month, her awards juggernaut docks at American Vogue, where she tells the magazine what went wrong between the pair - and it turns out to have been an irreparable schism over a vase of wilting cherry blossoms.

"They lasted a month and were beautiful even as they died," Anne sighs. "Raffaello always liked things fancier and perfect and told our maid to throw them out. That was when I knew we saw things differently."

Anne! Listen to me! Sorry about the flowers and stuff, but the FBI didn't even depose you. You were effectively deemed so clueless you were a person of no interest to their inquiry, when anyone with your kind of access could be reasonably expected to be the material witness. There were several sets of monsignor robes hanging in the wardrobe. Do you understand? Yes? Monsignor robes? Every time someone in the world types the words "several sets of monsignor robes hanging in the wardrobe", and you persist in lecturing the world on "process metaphysics", a fairy dies, OK?

That said, Lost in Showbiz longs for Anne to get the academy's nod, having a feeling she could even surpass Gwyneth Paltrow's spectacular Oscar acceptance meltdown. Remember that?

"... and Grampa Buster, (sob) you've created (sob), a beautiful family."

Grampa Buster is no longer with us, but let us hope that Anne has her own fruitfully loined paterfamilias, who can be cathartically thanked on the biggest stage there is, perhaps interspersed with archly delivered passages from Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent.