Warning: this post may contain stereotypes. In the 1980s movie, Betty Blue, the character played by Beatrice Dalle has it all. She's gorgeous, carefree and adorable—until she goes mad. So French. And that's pretty much the trajectory of Marion Cotillard's global fame. A week ago, the star of La Vie En Rose burst onto American TV screens with the most breathlessly charming speech of the Oscars, accepting her Best Actress award. ("Thank you life, thank you love. It is true there is some angels in this city.") So cute! Or she was, until Cotillard shared her conspiracy theories about the attack on the Twin Towers.

After French pixie Marion Cotillard won the best actress Oscar for La Vie En Rose, her emotional acceptance speech became the consensus high point of the whole awards ceremony, but Cotillard thought it was simply not cute or whimsical or French enough, so she went backstage and forced America to adore her even more. Cotillard needed to bury the memory of fictional film goddess Amelie Poulain, whose romantic sincerity and whimsical pranks ruined America on other French actresses for nearly seven years. So first she told reporters she was "overwhelmed with joy and sparkles and fireworks." Then? She sang to them. In French. By request. And yes, goddammit, it was friggin' cute, and friggin' touching, and friggin' whimsical as hell. You win, Marion, c'est bon:

Even though Hollywood's A-List was deprived of a chance to eat and drink on Vanity Fair's dime last night, two fiestas proved that celebrities will not let a little thing like tradition get in the way of a night of free booze and swag. Elton John's Annual AIDS Foundation Oscar Party usually has a strong turnout of power players, but the star wattage at the 16th incarnation of the bash last night was a few standard deviations past the norm, thanks mainly to the absence of Graydon Carter's soiree. Highlights included Tilda Swinton kissing her Oscar in some sort of Buddhist mating ritual, as well as the public debut of Hollywood's newest power couple, Sean Penn and Petra Nemcova. We've got pictures after the jump.

[Academy Award winning actors and goddamned foreigners Daniel Day-Lewis, Tilda Swinton, Marion Cotillard, and Javier Bardem; image via WENN]

The Oscars, overall, kind of sucked. Host Jon Stewart was mostly just tame and friendly rather than biting and fun; there were too many canned clip montages; one poor winner even got rushed off stage without getting to utter a single word (at least they brought her back later). Then came La Vie En Rose star Marion Cotillard's emotional acceptance speech for best actress, and everyone got kind of teary and thankful the Oscars didn't get canceled after all, even though the speech was a little saccharine and melodramatic, just like this year's Oscars themselves. If Cotillard was too dainty and helpless for your taste, there was always ex-stripper Diablo Cody's awesome acceptance for the Juno screenplay, which went from punk rock to total bawl bait and was a close runner-up, lesser only because her win was way more predictable than Cotillard's. Both videos are after the jump.

The question on the minds of the glossy mags isn't who will take home little gold men on Sunday night, but rather who'll make the biggest fashion faux-pas. And there's no shortage of mistakes made by this year's Best Actress nominees in the past. But we aren't hoping for new additions to the Fashion Police Hall of Fame; instead, we went digging through the archives to find the biggest mistake all five actresses tend to make in the style department, and our suggestions for which signature looks they should keep in mind to achieve sartorial success come Sunday.

With news spreading of Sean Young's Schnabel-shushing shenanigans at Saturday night's DGA awards—a story you may have first read about here on Sunday, and that has now achieved critical mass thanks to a lively, first-person retelling by Julie Chen on The Late Show—the spent actress has achieved new rock-bottom depths in the annals of awards season gate-crashing. (Lower even than the time the Blade Runner star sent security on a cat-and-mouse chase throughout the topiaries of the 2006 Vanity Fair Oscar party.) Young has now checked herself into rehab, The Insider is reporting:

· La Vie en Rose Oscar nominee Marion Cotillard tries to parlay some of her awards-season heat into a role alongside Christian Bale and Johnny Depp in Michael Mann's Public Enemies, playing gangster John Dillinger's "torch singer girlfriend." [Variety]
· Meanwhile, (rightly) Academy-ignored Charlie Wilson's War star Julia Roberts hunts for her next chance at awards glory, attaching herself to star in and produce an adaptation of soon-to-be published novel Hothouse Flowers, about a recently divorced NY ad exec who throws it all away to embark on a fabulous post-break-up adventure. [THR]
[After the jump: NBC sues Dick Wolf!; Oscar nominations translate to bigger weekend grosses; the fate of Mary-Kate and Ben Kingsley's Sundance film.]