President Barack Obama is featured on the cover and in pages of the new issue of Vanity Fair magazine, which is all well and good …

… but, the mag used a photo (that was shot by Annie Leibovitz) that has already been published on a previous issue of VF that went to press back in 2007 — clearly they do not believe in Change:

Barack Obama is on the cover of the new Vanity Fair as part of the magazine’s photo portfolio of his team and supporters taken by Annie Leibovitz. (Not to be confused with The New York Times Magazine’s photo portfolio by Nadav Kander from earlier this month.) If President Obama’s sideways position and stern expression look a little familiar, they should: It’s the same photo that ran on the cover in July 2007 as part of a 20-part celebrity-filled spread devoted to Africa, albeit with some small differences. A call to the magazine’s spokesperson confirmed that the two covers use the same photo and that the credit inside the new issue acknowledges that Ms. Leibovitz took the portrait of then-Senator Obama in 2007. We’re just excited to play “Check… and Double Check,” which we hadn’t done since our subscription to Highlights ran out in the fourth grade.

LOL! Clearly the new president didn’t have the time to sit for a photoshoot with Leibovitz since taking office … must be all that runnin’ the country that he’s real bizzy with these days. While I think it might’ve been more prudent to wait for a time when the president could pose for a new photo, I guess VF didn’t want to wait. In any regard, it’s a nice photo … I liked it the first time I saw it. At least we now know that Vanity Fair magazine is into recycling.

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The amazing actress Cate Blanchett is featured on the cover and in the pages of the new issue of Vanity Fair magazine wherein in her coverstory interview she talks about how disinterested she is in resorting to cosmetic surgery under any circumstances. In the accompanying photospread, shot by Annie Leibovitz, Cate looks so absolutely stunning that I cannot believe that anyone would even think that she would need to resort to any cosmetic surgery of any kind. Here is Cate‘s beautiful coverphoto and a portion of her VF coverstory interview:

Cate Blanchett says her marriage of 11 years could be over if she goes under the knife. The actress — who currently stars in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Brad Pitt — tells Vanity Fair: “I haven’t done anything, but who knows. Andrew [Upton] said he’d divorce me if I did anything.” But that doesn’t mean she’d never mess with her famous face. “I’m not a spokesperson against the world of injectables,” The 39-year-old actress says. “If you grow up in an environment where your mother gets you a boob job when you turn 18, what hope is there? But I didn’t grow up in that world. The reason I went to train as an actor was that I was interested in it for the long haul,” she adds. “You can become very self-obsessed, but you’ve got to keep looking outward.” Blanchett says her body isn’t the same after the birth of their three sons: Dashiell, 7; Roman, 3 and Ignatius, 7 months. “When you’ve had children, your body changes; there’s history to it. I like the evolution of that history; I’m fortunate to be with somebody who likes the evolution of that history.” “I think it’s important to not eradicate it. I look at someone’s face and I see the work before I see the person….” she adds. Plus, Blanchett says plastic surgery doesn’t stave “off the inventible” aging process. “If you’re doing it out of fear, that fear’s still going to be seen through your eyes,” she says. “The windows to your soul, they say.” Upton, a playwright, doesn’t mind his wife’s looks, Blanchett says, although he doesn’t focus on them. “I’m not a trophy. He likes the vessel, but he also wants to make sure the vessel is full.” Blanchett says she wouldn’t rule out having more children either. “Who knows? Don’t close those doors. The world is very overpopulated, but we do make nice ones,” she says. “They all look like Andrew. To say he has dominant genes would be an understatement.” In addition to expanding her brood, Blanchett also has a retirement plan. “I think I just want to garden — or kill some plants, in my case,” she says.

Cate Blanchett is one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood these days and, IMHO, prolly the best actress alive right now … I don’t think she needs to change a single thing about the way she lives her life. She seems very happily married, the kids keep on comin’ and she turns in amazing performance after amazing performance in film after film. She will surely live on as one of the great acting icons of our time, I’m utterly convinced. After the jump, check out the collection of stunning photographs that Leibovitz shot for this issue of Vanity Fair, which are simply not to be missed …

Funnylady Tina Fey is featured on the cover and in the pages of the new issue of Vanity Fair magazine (where she belongs). Here is our first look at Tina‘s amazingly patriotic VF coverphoto and a portion of her coverstory interview:

Tina Fey has rules. They’ve guided the 38-year-old writer-comedian through marriage, motherhood, and a career that went into hyperdrive this fall, when her Sarah Palin impression convulsed the nation, boosting the ratings of both Saturday Night Live and her own NBC show, 30 Rock. Backstage at S.N.L., where “Palin” met Palin, and at the home Fey shares with her husband and daughter, the author reports on how a tweezer, cream rinse, a diet, and a Teutonic will transformed a mousy brain into a brainy glamour-puss. Tina Fey has never dated a bad boy. She didn’t even let boys she dated do anything bad. “I remember the biggest trouble I ever got into—” says her husband, Jeff Richmond, a short, puckish man of 48 in jeans and a T-shirt, cutting himself off mid-thought at the mere memory of Tina’s wrath. “Oh, my God.” (He calls himself “the Joe Biden of husbands” because he’s prone to “drop the bomb” in interviews.) Fey is sitting across from Richmond in their comfy, vintage-y Upper West Side apartment, where a lavender exercise ball lolls next to the flat-screen TV, a pink tricycle is parked under a black grand piano, and golden award statuettes abound. When I arrived, at 9:30 p.m., Fey had already put her three-year-old daughter, Alice, to bed and was tapping away on a silver Mac laptop at the kitchen counter on a script for 30 Rock, her slyly hilarious NBC comedy about an NBC comedy. She’ll return to the script when I leave, near midnight. Fey shoots Richmond a warning look. It’s undercut by the fact that she’s wedged into her daughter’s miniature red armchair, joking about squeezing her butt in and looking like Alice in Wonderland grown big in navy velour sweatpants and pink slippers. The 38-year-old Fey sips a glass of white wine and eats some cheese and crackers—all her food-obsessed doppelgänger on 30 Rock, Liz Lemon, longs to do is go home and eat a big block of cheese—while Richmond and I drink vodka martinis he has made. “What are you gonna tell?” she teases her husband. “Think this through.” Richmond wades in. “When we were first dating,” he says, harking back to Chicago in 1994, “some of the guys at Second City said, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be a hoot if we go over—”’ ”’—over to the Doll House,”’ Fey finishes. “ ‘We’ll go to this strip club ironically.’ I was like, ‘The fuck you will.”’ Their conversation is woven with intimacy, the easy banter of a couple who knew each other long before fame hit. They fell in love quickly, soon after a Sunday afternoon spent together at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. (“We walked into a model of the human heart,” Fey deadpans.) The writer-comedian and the musician-director dated for seven years, have been married for another seven, and have worked together in improv theater in Chicago, on Saturday Night Live, and on 30 Rock. (He composed the bouncy retro theme music.) Richmond still reassures her, all these years later: “Nothing happened. We were there for like an hour. We ate chicken, really good pasta.” And Fey still recoils. “It didn’t go great when you came back, did it? I was very angry. It was disrespectful” … I love to play strippers and to imitate them,” says Fey. “I love using that idea for comedy, but the idea of actually going there? I feel like we all need to be better than that. That industry needs to die, by all of us being a little bit better than that.” There’s a reason her former S.N.L. pal Colin Quinn dubbed Tina Fey “Herman the German.” She’s a sprite with a Rommel battle plan. Elizabeth Stamatina Fey started as a writer and performer with a bad short haircut in Chicago improv. Then she retreated backstage at S.N.L., wore a ski hat, and gained weight writing sharp, funny jokes and eating junk food. Then she lost 30 pounds, fixed her hair, put on a pair of hot-teacher glasses, and made her name throwing lightning-bolt zingers on “Weekend Update.” Speeding through the comedy galaxy, she wrote the hit Mean Girls and created her own show based on an S.N.L.-type show: 30 Rock. The comedy struggled in the ratings for two years but was a critical success, winning seven Emmys last fall and catapulting Fey into red-hot territory. Before she even had a chance to take a breath, a freakish twist of fate turned her from red- to white-hot, and enabled her, at long last, to boost the ratings of 30 Rock: Fey was a ringer for another hot-teacher-in-glasses, Sarah Palin, the comely but woefully unprepared Alaska governor, who bounded out of the woods with her own special language to become not only the first Republican woman to run on a national ticket but also God’s gift to comedy and journalism. So where does Fey go from white-hot?

Hopefully she goes on to become even White Hotter! I’ve always felt that Tina Fey was the biggest unsung hero of SNL in recent years and it took return guest spots on the show for people to realize what we have in her. This Vanity Fair piece continues on HERE and offers new insight into this absolutely underappreciated comic genius. After the jump, check out a few more hawt pics of Tina that are featured in this issue of VF mag …

Last Friday we got our first look at the new Twilight photos that are published in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair magazine … and today we get to check out a whole slew of outtake photos that didn’t make the magazine cut but have been published online at Vanity Fair‘s official website. Most of the photos feature just Robert Pattinson (Edward Cullen) and Kristen Stewart (Bella Swan) but I threw in a photo of R. Pattz, Kristen and vamp villain Cam Gigandet (James) for hawtness sake:

From VF.com: We’ve been bitten! By the Twilight bug, that is. After posting three images of Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, and the rest of the upcoming film’s young cast last week, VF.com went back to photographer Peggy Sirota and asked for nine more images from the shoot, at California’s Ventura Farms. Feast your eyes!

Feast, indeed. I much prefer seeing the Twilight stars primped and glammed up for their photoshoots rather than disheveled and messy. At last, I can see chemistry between these two actors … there’s hope yet. Don’t forget to send in your entries for a chance to win the Twilight Prize Pack that I’m giving away here on the site (click HERE for all the deets). I’ve already received quite a few submissions … keep ‘em comin’!!!

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The cast of Twilight are featured in the new issue of Vanity Fair magazine in a small but very beautiful photospread. Calling the as-yet unreleased film the “Brideshead Revisited of the Fanged and Forever Young” (a description I find mildly appropriate), the cast got all glammed up for the spread. Here are a few pics of the cast, including the two leads Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair:

I gotta say … I don’t think I’ve ever seen Kristen Stewart look so … pretty! She’s usually so glum and miserable looking … I quite like her when she cleans up. R. Pattz, bless his heart, still looks a bit disheveled but at least he doesn’t look as disheveled as he usually does (and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing). Cam Gigandet looks hot as heck. The end. Click HERE to read the VF Q&As with these young stars of tomorrow.

Yesterday we got to see the first of three Twilight collectible magazine covers for this week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly … and today we get to see the other two covers. After the jump, check ‘em out …

In an interview that was broadcast on Good Morning America this morning, while promoting the release of her new album Breakout and her latest Hannah Montana movie, Miley Cyrus addressed (again) the controversy that ensued after she appeared in the June issue of Vanity Fair magazine exposing her bare back. Miley admitted that the photo was a “mistake” and came about as a result of “trying to get things done, and maybe look for an older audience”:

Teen pop sensation Miley Cyrus is stepping back into the spotlight, promoting her new album “Breakout” and calling the provocative photos of her published in June’s Vanity Fair magazine a “mistake.” The revealing photos caused an uproar and threatened to tarnish the 15-year-old’s squeaky-clean image when they were released back in April. “I think I was just in a stage where I was just trying to get things done, and maybe look for an older audience. I was working with a big magazine just trying to go with what they were saying,” Cyrus told “Good Morning America’s” Robin Roberts, speaking in an exclusive interview for the first time since the Vanity Fair photo shoot. Cyrus described the ensuing criticism that she faced as a “hard time,” and said she now “knows what it’s like to have people talk about you like you’re kind of iron. People need to remember that I am young and that I do have feelings, and I’ll do the same thing for them. Anyone who was 15 years old can’t say they haven’t made a mistake. So I think it’s just normal,” she said.

It’s interesting that she would bring up this issue again after it caused her so much pain and embarrassment a couple of months ago … but, when you’re promoting an album, well, I guess you do what you can to get the job done. My criticism of the whole thing wasn’t that Miley was a bad person or even that the photo was too risqué … I have a hard time with the fact that both of her parents were at the photoshoot with her (her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, even appeared in a photo with her), that they had no problem with the pose or the photo when it was shot and then immediately tried to place the blame solely on the magazine and photographer Annie Leibovitz once Miley‘s conservative fanbase became outraged. And now, the Miley Cyrus promo machine has no problem trudging up the controversy for their own promotion. See, the girl may be 15 and she may make mistakes as we all do but she’s also pretty savvy for the Entertainment biz — no publicity is bad publicity. At least she finally took on the blame for the VF photo fallout … it’s convenient that she is doing so now while she’s trying to sell albums, tho.

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The young cast of Gossip Girl is featured in the August issue of Vanity Fair magazine wherein the mag pontificates on the state of Young Hollywood (as it is wont to do from time to time) and names the new members of the next wave of, what they call, Bright Young Hollywood (also on the list Johan Hill, Emma Stone, Josh Peck, the Jonas brothers and more). Here is the mag’s photo of the Gossip gang all decked in in their best designer finery, walking brazenly into the wind:

It’s been only five years since V.F. took a reading of Hollywood’s youthquake—featuring the likes of Lindsay Lohan, the Olsen twins, and Shia LaBeouf—but the celebrity terrain has gotten rougher … As for the class of 2008 pictured in these pages, they inhabit a far more predatory media-parasite environment, a Grand Theft Auto of “gotcha,” which so far they’re handling with aplomb. Easy to track, hard to trap, they belong to the iGeneration, for whom texting and Twittering are as natural as popping orange Tic Tacs, inhabiting and trailing invisible clouds of information wherever they go in the digital eco-system, where online and off-line, real life and Second Life, overlap. Boundaries dissolve everywhere they turn their pretty heads. It’s a short, sharp hop from the wholesome happy perk of Disney’s Hannah Montana, whose Miley Cyrus can’t show a little bare shoulder without the world flipping its bonnet, to the spite-laced hangovers of the CW’s Gossip Girl, where decadence is in full Baudelairean flower. There, every Coach bag contains wanton secrets. Treachery and bitchery gleam from every compact mirror. Youth and beauty have their privileges, among them being the ability and agility to roll out into the hazy dawn following the squalors of the night before and still possess the throwaway glamour of a Bryan Ferry song. A fan craze and a critical fetish, Gossip Girl has hit the sweet spot of the Zeitgeist, the X mark where sex appeal and pop sociology intersect and the story lines hold an illusion of seamlessness, as if they sprang full-blown from the brow of Entertainment Weekly.

Uh huh. Yeah, this article has a whole lot of big words which, I assume, is meant to take the topic of being young, rich and famous in Hollywood and elevate it to something akin to a post graduate thesis. Under normal circumstances, I’d be down … but I had a hard time getting thru this article (which you can read in full HERE) without kinda wanting to die a little bit. I mean, I get it … you write for Vanity Fair, you can mix and mingle big words with up-to-the-second pop culture references with the best of them. It all reads just a smidge too seriously for me but … whatevs, I get it.

But just to keep the Gossip Girl love going, here are a few photos of the Gossip guys all grouped together in a new photoshoot, styled to within an inch of their lives:

After the jump, more photos of Chace Crawford (who, according to VF mag prefers the iPhone over the Blackberry), Penn Badgley (iPhone) and Ed Westwick (BlackBerry) individually from this same photoshoot …

Late last week we saw Angelina Jolie‘s coverphoto for the July issue of Vanity Fair magazine and today we get to see a few more pics from inside the mag (which were shot many months ago, clearly before she was showing how superpregs she is now):

The coverstory provides a nice look into Brangelina‘s private life revealing that Angelina Jolie isn’t all that different from any other pregnant woman carrying twins … except for the fact that she’s one of the most famous women (pregnant or not) in the world:

It’s an established fact. Some women can’t stand being pregnant, getting big and bloated, and hauling around a giant stomach, and some women, for reasons probably understood by Darwin, love it. That Angelina Jolie is one of the latter can be seen in any of the thousands of pictures of the actress—who was, after all, impregnated by Brad Pitt, which is like being impregnated by a future man or a star child—that began to proliferate in the celebrity weeklies and supermarket tabloids in the spring of 2008, by which time Jolie, who is carrying twins, had bellied out like a sail. “I love it,” she told me, smiled, laughed, then said, “It makes me feel like a woman. It makes me feel that all the things about my body”—she raised her hands as she said this, her fingers as long as those of a point guard, and made the squeezing motion commonly used to suggest fruit that is particularly ripe—”are suddenly there for a reason. It makes you feel round and supple, and to have a little life inside you is amazing. Also,” she continued, dropping her voice, leaning in, “I’m fortunate. I think some women have a different experience depending on their partner. I think that affects it. I happen to be with somebody who finds pregnancy very sexy. So that makes me feel very sexy.” … It’s as if the Jolie-Pitts are pioneering a new genre of family, with children from every global hot spot and parents who are beautiful and famously not married. “People have made a lot out of it that we’re not,” she said, “but we both have been married before, and it’s very easy to get married, but it’s not easy to build a family and be parents together. And maybe we’ve done it backwards, but we certainly feel married.” … “How pregnant are you?,” I asked. “I don’t want to say,” she said, smiling sadly. “A few months. I only know, if I do say, people will start stressing on our due date.”

And the VF piece (which you can read in full HERE) goes on from there. We now know that she claims to be due in August but considering the false alarm that happened last week (where Entertainment Tonight erroneously jumped the gun and reported that she had already given birth in France) I think that she may give birth at any time and will do everything in her power to keep the secret. The coverstory is interesting but doesn’t really shed all that more light on good ol’ Angie. She tends to give the same info in all her interviews … even still, I find her insanely fascinating. I think back to that girl we saw in the 90′s movie Hackers and can hardly believe that she grew up to be Saint Angelina, Savior and Mother of the world. [Source]