New Delhi: The most-talked about movie-star scene this year wasn't Harry Potter getting chosen by the Goblet of Fire. It wasn't the 40-Year-Old Virgin getting his chest hair ripped off. It wasn't Sarah Silverman telling a filthy joke, or Darth Vader getting burned, or George Clooney being tortured. It was Tom Cruise jumping on a couch.
Cruise's action on Oprah Winfrey's talk show, a demonstration of the fervency of his love for girlfriend Katie Holmes, caught even Winfrey off guard.
The clip was so endlessly replayed and Cruise's behavior so endlessly mocked, that it even gave rise to a phrase: 'jumping the couch' as 'a defining moment when you know someone has gone off the deep end,' according to UrbanDictionary.com.
But if Cruise's relationship with Holmes — TomKat, it was quickly labeled — dominated the entertainment world for a time, it was far from the only romance to do so.
Indeed, there were so many of them, and they sucked up so much oxygen, the year felt like one long read of the 1950s gossip magazine Confidential.
The year began with news of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston's separation, news that quickly degenerated into gossip about the role played by Pitt's Mr. & Mrs. Smith co-star, Angelina Jolie (the pair were soon dubbed Brangelina), and then the relationship between Aniston and her Break-Up co-star Vince Vaughn (a duo as yet not dubbed Vaughniston, to my knowledge).
Soap opera-like passion also followed Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey, who announced the breakup of their TV-chronicled marriage around Thanksgiving and Britney Spears and Kevin Federline, who produced a child, Sean Preston.
Others included Renee Zellweger and Kenny Chesney, whose whirlwind romance was followed by an equally whirlwind annulment; Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck, who wed in July and had a child in December; and, of course, the ubiquitous Paris Hilton, who got engaged to a Greek shipping scion (also named Paris) and was un-engaged within six months.
Love it or loathe it, celebrity romance has always been catnip for glossy magazines and pulpy gossip columns, whether it was Gable and Lombard in the '30s or Liz-and-Dick in the '60s or, well, Tom and Nicole in the '90s.
Perhaps the increased exposure says more about the endless list of media outlets — all hungry for attention-getting news — than it does about the relationships themselves. After all, for better or worse, it's a celebrity-driven world nowadays.
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