Gilroy and Clooney -- You 'da man. No You da man!

Get people yaking about George Clooney and the swooning and superlatives tend to come out in full force. So it went at the Oscars Nominees luncheon when "Michael Clayton" director Tony Gilroy -- inevitably asked about his Oscar nominated star -- put it like this:

"it’s such a stupid cliché thing, but really he’s better at the job of being a movie star than I think anybody who’s ever done it. Think of what being a movie star used to mean you use to have to go and act and do your job and you were protected. You add to that working these rope lines, maintaining your dignity having a political world view that doesn’t at the same time get too preachy. The things he does and the way he does them and the effortlessness that’s seems to go into it. He really is the Michael Jordan of movie stars"

Praise, indeed. Clooney, whose first response to anything is usually off-the-cuff, informed of Gilroy's words came back saying Gilroy "plays a drunken writer better than anybody."

The Michael Jordan of drunken writers. Talk about superlatives.