TIFF 2011 Roundup: Has Ryan Gosling officially overtaken George Clooney? (Also, Madonna vs. Bono)
Every time we mentioned George Clooney on this site during TIFF, our web traffic spiked. And every time we mentioned Ryan Gosling, same thing. Which led us to wonder, has the young Breaker High upstart finally caught up to the ageless perpetual bachelor in our readers’ hearts? We dove into our statistics to find out (don’t worry, there’s no tricky math ahead):
By one arbitrary and entirely unscientific measure, it seems the answer is yes: during TIFF, posts that mentioned Gosling’s name in the headline got about 35 per cent more hits than posts that mentioned Clooney. So there you have it: as this picture suggests, the baton has officially been passed from one generation’s leading man to the next’s.
We also wondered how Madonna would fare against the fest’s other big-name musician, Bono. Would the Queen of Pop’s notorious alleged treatment of TIFF volunteers attract eyeballs? Or would they turn away in disgust?
Bono wins this one, but only by a hair. While TIFF is more than just a popularity contest—there are distribution rights to be bought and sold after all—we’d be lying if we said we didn’t care at least a little bit about who the cool kids were this year.
(Images: Christopher Drost)
