Do stars sing their own songs in movies?

By: Emily Sanabria, Jersey City, New Jersey

A.B. Replies: Yes, Natalie Wood mouthed her barrio ballads in West Side Story. But before we get any further into this, just give me a minute to pad my ass in bubble wrap. When this B!tch gets her butt perpendicularly booted up into the ozone, she likes to be comfortable. And believe me, some outraged, sanctimonious fan will be aiming his Converse All Star-shod flipper right at my fundament when I reveal this:

Jamie Foxx. Lip-synched. For Ray.

Hey, here I go, up in the sky. I can see hell from here!

Now, before you burn me alive for blaspheming St. Raymond of Histrionica, I hear the young man toiled like a roofer for that part and took pains to keep the extras in high spirits and received piano lessons bestowed upon him by Charles himself and even tried gluing his eyes shut to bond with his character. This B!tch also understands that Foxx did lend his vocals to some of the biopic's music, particularly the early songs in which Charles channeled Nat King Cole. But the more raucous stuff about nighttime being the right time, hey, hey, Mary Ann, oh baby, lawdy, lawdy, that wasn't Foxx.

To be fair, even stars who do lend their own pipes to movie songs are usually, technically, lip-synching when you see them onscreen. Unless you see a mike right up in their pancake-packed face, chances are the actor had to lay down the vocal separately and mouth along to the camera. Then, probably, some mole man in headphones crawled out of his cubby in the Paramount catacombs and worked overnight to make everything look authentic.

Other notable lip-synchers: George Clooney (my brothers over at Megaplex grilled him this week, did you see?), who was way too busy thinking about his eyebrows to do any singing for O Brother, Where Art Thou?; and Lou Diamond Phillips in La Bamba. Angela Bassett also did no singing for What's Love Got to Do With It, though she did have to wear 35 different wigs and perfect the snarl of the abused all by herself. (Laurence Fishburne did his own singing.)

Let's talk about Chicago for a second. That faint leaking sound you heard on occasion, like helium escaping from a blow-up doll to the tune of "Funny Honey"? That really was Renée Zellwegger. And in his homage to Bobby Darin in Beyond the Sea, Kevin Spacey sang his own tunes, if, indeed, that's the descriptive we're agreeing to use.

Wait--please, please, don't blast me into the cruel skies again. I'm not alone in my thinking. As Ellen Kim put it in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Spacey's rendition of "Mack the Knife" is "more about showmanship than vocal flair."

Not enough showmanship to win an Oscar nomination, though. But Spacey should get some praise; he managed to convince us that a man can have a face like a latke and still sleep with Kate Bosworth. Blow that man a kiss.