Natalie Portman, James Franco, Annette Bening, Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, and Michelle Williams Cover Newsweek

For its 14th annual Oscar roundtable issue, Newsweek rounded up Annette Bening, Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman, James Franco and Michelle Williams. The six actors gabbed to the magazine about their enormously successful year and the films that may verywell garner each one of them a nomination.

As always, the famously droll and quotable Franco revealed his thoughts about onscreen love scenes. Nicole Kidman mentioned something about how some directors are “precise” about “big screen kisses” and Franco added:

“I think if anybody who has made a home sex tape knows, what feels best doesn’t always look best [laughter]. I remember when I was 19 doing that, and then watching it back and thinking, oh, that looks horrible. So what Nicole is talking about, yeah, you have a lot of respect for those actors in pornography, because they are really not just doing it, they’re really selling it. It’s the same thing with a kiss. It’s not just the kiss that feels best, it’s an image. Something different is happening if it’s a good kiss.”

Will porn be James Franco’s next creative venture? Honestly, nothing shocks me anymore.

Celebs* (Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis,and Ryan Gosling) +@ 2011 Critics Choice Awards

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W Magazine's 'best performances' photo shoot

Best Performances - The most remarkable moments in film this past year weren’t 3-D action sequences but characters so real they hurt. Here, the actors who made us believe.

Natalie Portman in “Black Swan”
“The movie that I watched the most when I was growing up was Dirty Dancing. I always loved Penny, probably because I was really like Baby. I was a Jewish girl from a Jewish family, so of course I liked the tall, skinny blond girl.”

Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network”


“I started acting to be included in a group, because I felt excluded in school. The final product was out of my control, so it didn’t really matter to me. I just liked being in a group of people that didn’t kick my shin.”

Justin Timberlake & Andrew Garfield in “The Social Network”

“What if Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker suffered from the same insecurity and fear and paranoia? Mark dealt with those feelings by inventing Facebook. And my character, Sean Parker, invented Sean Parker. He created his own persona.”—Justin Timberlake

“I found The Goonies very inspiring. I identified with every character: Mikey, the leader; Mouth, the trickster; Data, the inventor; and Chunk, this lovely, beautiful, sad, misunderstood, slightly larger kid. The Goonies is boys needing to be boys on their path to manhood. It’s a classic.”—Andrew Garfield

Nicole Kidman finally admits it: “I have tried Botox.”

Botox? Not me! That, at least, used to be Nicole Kidman’s response to questions about how she kept her complexion so porcelain perfect. Now, however, she has performed something of an about-face.

The Oscar-winning actress, 43, has finally admitted to having Botox injections. But she insisted she no longer uses it, because she did not like the results. She wasn’t the only one.

In 2008, one cosmetic surgery expert told a medical conference that Miss Kidman was so ‘over-Botoxed’ she was giving the industry a bad name.

Miss Kidman, 43, made her confession to a German magazine interviewer who asked her about keeping wrinkles at bay.

‘I’ve tried a lot of things but apart from working out and a good diet most things don’t help,’ she replied. ‘I even tried Botox but I didn’t like how my face looked afterwards. Now I don’t use it anymore - and I can move my forehead again.’

Her previous declarations on the subject included: ‘I am completely natural. I have nothing in my face or anything.’
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