For what it’s worth, this column humbly salutes War of the Worlds director Steven Spielberg for donating $1.5 million to the post-tsunami humanitarian effort, and Sandra Bullock for putting $1 million into the same bucket. Spielberg announced it because he’d like other moneybags to follow suit.

Has everyone heard? After two and a half decades of being a Grand Technological Poobah whose interest in ars gratia artis was totally nil, George Lucas now wants to be Gregg Araki. In the new Hollywood-Oscar issue of Vanity Fair, next to a big photo of the Star Wars cast members, Lucas is quoted as saying that the finishing of Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith marks the end of an era in his career, and that he now plans to stop making overtly commercial films, which has been his basic program since the mid ’70s. Lucas tells the magazine, “I’m going to make movies nobody wants to see. I’ve earned the right to fail.” It’s encouraging to hear Darth Vader say he wants to be Annakin Skywalker again, but it sure took him a while. Lucas had earned the “right to fail” 22 years ago after the completion of the first trilogy.