Ryan Gosling Is The 'Coolest Person Of The Year'
After robbed of his rightful title as People's 2011 Sexiest Man Alive, Ryan Gosling has received a gracious nod from TIME magazine. Columnist Joel Stein created a personal side-honor category for RyGo, dubbing him "Coolest Person of the Year."
FishbowlLA describes how Stein made his acute selection while saving the "magazine from dorkdom."
After careful consideration, Stein decided that the combined impact of four very different movies and bravura personal behavior outweighed such troublesome downsides as Canadian origins, a Mouseketeer connection and some homeschooling. As a result, Ryan Gosling is his choice for “Coolest Person of the Year:”
Stein describes RyGo in a lengthy paragraph in his essay "Crazy, Stupid, Cool," and below is a revealing snippet.
So the 2011 Coolest Person of the Year is a man who is tough but emotional. A movie star who broke up a fight on the streets of Manhattan and was also caught walking down a Manhattan street playing a Strumstick, which is like a ukulele only ukulelier. An Oscar nominee who also smokes, tags graffiti and has a predilection for posing with a fist to the camera but makes dioramas and takes public ballet classes alongside little girls too. He's the only actor since Andy Kaufman to work as a waiter after making it in show business. One who has a rock band that spent a month accompanying a children's marionette show in Los Angeles.
Gosling is apparently so cool that, according to Stein, he refused to talk to the TIME writer about the honor. But Stein maintains his revering stance on the actor, summing up his recent film characters each in one word. "In Blue Valentine he was desperate, in Drive he was scary, in The Ides of March he was slimy, and in Crazy, Stupid, Love he was six-packy," wrote Stein.
While TIME's Coolest Person Committee thinks Gosling might celebrate the honor with a tattoo, we think he'll pay his buddy Bradley Cooper a visit to ask him how his "Sexiest Man Alive" status is treating him.
