Chick Flick Nabs Best Pic Oscar

Your attention please Misters Ledger, Bale and Nolan - come the Academy Awards presentation in a couple of weeks, 2008 will go down as The Year for the Girls. Sorry gents, but this one is for the ladies. Especially when it comes to Oscar's choice for Best Picture.

This past summer while everyone else was talking about Batman and the Joker, the other half of the movie-going public were flocking to the feel-good hit of the season and grooving to its retro-cool soundtrack while bonding with their 'sistas' to a story of female empowerment about a slightly-older blonde lead character who happens to be a throwback to the Free Love days of the 1970s.

And if they couldn't get in to 'Mama Mia,' they went to their local art-house cinema and saw the same thing but in more cerebral form in a little independent film called 'The House Bunny.'

Starring Anna Faris, it's the story of a downsized Playboy bunny who becomes house-mother to a sorority of 'geeky' college girls. As such, it is a compelling tale of alienation and misfits, the likes of which has not been seen on the cinematic screen since 'Revenge of the Nerds' and 'Animal House.' Or Fellini's 'La Dolce Vita' for that matter.

Faris is Shelley, an unwanted orphan who has no sense of family or belonging until moving into the Playboy Mansion upon becoming of legal age. Living in the apparently sexless version of Hef's personal Shangri-La is one reason she is an eternal optimist. With her sunny California blonde disposition and endearing naivete, Shelley is the most popular of all the resident Bunnies - until she receives her pink slip on her 27th birthday. It's a house rule - "Twenty-seven is like 59 in Bunny years." And she finds herself again without a home or family.

She's a laid-off Playmate in a world where Playboy is no longer relevant. A world that no longer cares about how Hef kick-started the Sexual Revolution almost half a century ago and then rode it to its peak in the mid-1970s. Her career skills include smiling and flirting. That's enough to get her a job as a sorority house-mother to a group of girls who are even bigger social misfits than herself.

In the time-honoured tradition of all great college-rebel cinema, these girls of Zeta House are under a deadline to get more recruits in order to pay their bills or the mean old college Dean will close them down and they will lose their house. Also in keeping with the conventions of the genre is the fact that the rich snooty girls of the Popular Sorority have come up with a scathingly brilliant plan to ensure the Zetas are kicked off campus.

But if the Zetas can somehow become popular themselves - and attract some cute guys, then other girls will want to join their sorority and hence Zeta House will be saved. Yeah, 'hence.'

And that's where Shelley comes in. As a former Bunny, she knows what boys like and she transforms the Zeta 'nerds' into the equivalent of those hot college girls you seen in the four a.m. 'Girls Gone Wild' infomercials. Except they never lift their tops or neck with each other or have nude pillow fights.

You can probably guess what happens next - but you would be wrong.

Oh, sure, the Zetas inevitably learn the moral taught at the end of pioneering chick-flicks like 'Grease' and 'Dirty Dancing' - that if you dress and dance and act like a slut, then you will become popular and get the boy of your dreams.

But 'House Bunny' goes this lesson one step further. Because ironically, in becoming 'hot,' the girls of Zeta now all look the same and have lost the individuality that made them interesting in the first place. Misfits that they were. After Shelley's well-intentioned help, they appear no different from any girls you could see any night of the week in any bar along Richmond Row.

In the end, they do learn that it is possible to be popular and still collect stamps or used chewing-gum as a hobby. That being hot and being uncool can easily co-exist in the same body.

If I remember my own college days correctly, one of those ancient Greek philosopher guys once said, "To thine own self, be true." Over the years that concept has been slim-fasted into "Just be yourself." 'The House Bunny' reinterprets all that into "Be who you are."

That's NOT a message you will hear in 'The Dark Knight' - considered to be House Bunny's only serious competition for Best Picture. For Pete's sake - the two lead protagonists, 'The Batman' and 'Bruce Wayne' both have secret identities. Heath Ledger's 'Joker' character changes his origin story every time he tells it. And the name 'Two-Face' says it all.

And that's why 'The House Bunny' will take home the Best Picture hardware. The fact that it's also a celebration of virginity and Aztec culture doesn't hurt.