Sookie!

Happy 28th Birthday to actress Anna Paquin, who plays everybody's favorite fang-banger, Sookie Stackhouse, on HBO's "True Blood. It seems like only yesterday that Paquin was collecting a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1994 at age 11 for "The Piano". But now she's all grown up, slinging drinks at Merlotte's in her skechers and daisy-dukes, and doing battle with the packs of vampires, werewolves and bull monsters that seem to breed like rabbits in the woods around Bon Temps. Good god, what is in the water of Bon Temps, Louisiana, anyway? It makes Bourbon Street in New Orleans look like a Sunday School meeting for born again nuns.

When Paquin won her Oscar, she became the second youngest actor to ever win the coveted golden statue; Tatum O'Neal was 10 when she won for "Paper Moon". Paquin was probably helped by the fact that her movie that year, "The Piano" really should have won Best Picture, but the instead the Academy gave it to Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List", out of guilt for never having awarded him Best Director for his many previous, superior films, and as the Academy often does, it made it up to "The Piano" by awarding its two stars, Paquin and Holly Hunter, the top acting awards. Sounds crazy, right? Not that the winning movie that year wasn't great and the actors that year weren't deserving, it's just that the Oscars are often voted on as if they're some sort of adult version of a junior high popularity contest. But luckily, Paquin has gone on to prove that her Oscar win wasn't a fluke; she's a very talented and interesting actress, and we're hoping that "True Blood" is only the first of many projects she does that amaze us. Paquin recently "came out" as a bisexual, and is reportedly dating her current co-star, Stephen Moyer, who plays her vampire lover, Bill Compton on "True Blood".


And speaking of "True Blood", it was announced this week that Joe Manganiello, who plays the incredibly sexy Alcide the Werewolf, has been added as a full cast member for the fourth season of the popular series. Thank you, Alan Ball! It's good to see that our shameless, unrelenting promotion of the guy paid off. Now if we could just see some scenes of man-on-man love on the show, we mean, we are grown-ups here, right? And it is HBO, where you can say the word "fuck", and nobody cares. But instead of just saying "fuck"... well, as our eighth grade writing teacher told us, "Don't say it, show it." Not that we didn't enjoy that scene of a naked Mehcad Brooks lying naked on top of Tara, grinding away, but how much sweeter would that scene have been if, instead of Tara, that would have been Eric or Sam rolling his eyes in the back of his head? Or Cooter. Oh my.