Ben Foster vs. Devon Sawa
Battle of the Gawky Dorks

As entertainment consumers, we are frequently called upon to believe that average-looking guys can date very hot girls. Take Seinfeld, for example. Off the top of my head, I can tell you that short, stocky, bald George dated beauties Rena Sofer, Charlotte Lewis, Katy Selverstone, Christa Miller, Michelle Forbes, Tracy Nelson...well, you get the gist. Fictional men are wont to date pretty far out of their league, compared to those in real life, but some suspensions of disbelief are more difficult than others.

Like, Devon Sawa and Ben Foster are both romantic leads for the teen set? Really?

I must confess that I am mystified as to what said contemporary teen girls find attractive in their celebrity crushes. I find N Sync to be, boy for boy, just about the ugliest band I've ever seen, but they're tremendously popular, so there must be something there that is invisible to people of my generation.

But...Ben Foster and Devon Sawa? Really?

To be fair to Foster, he seems like a perfectly nice young man, and a fairly thoughtful and daring actor. A kid his age has got to have a lot of self-confidence and some pretty big balls to play a mentally challenged character (as he did on Freaks and Geeks). And whatever you might think of Barry Levinson's most recent (sentimental, mawkish) movies, he does have an eye for casting and tends to work with talented people, so Foster's having starred in Levinson's Liberty Heights is a credit to his chops. (No Joe Pesci/Jimmy Hollywood jokes, please!) Talent (or perceived talent) aside...he's just not what springs to mind when one thinks of a Hollywood heartthrob. Right? Can we roll with him as a character actor? Sure. Should he be starring in Get Over It opposite the luminous Kirsten Dunst? No. Do the underbite and Jughead nose put him in a league with Ashton Kutcher or Josh Hartnett? Hell, no.

We would say that Foster is in the same league as Devon Sawa, though. They have similar (not great) box-office track records, culminating in their headlining teensploitation movies opposite improbably attractive young women. Sawa's trajectory has him starting with such forgettable pap as Now and Then, Casper, and Wild Ameria, and then vaulting to the sub-Joshua Jackson/Rachael Leigh Cook tier with Idle Hands (opposite Jessica Alba) and Final Destination (opposite Ali Larter). Like Foster, Sawa is not blessed (or cursed, if you take Johnny Depp's view) with classic teen-boy looks. He's dull-eyed and gap-toothed and -- as those few and not proud who saw Destination can attest -- kind of crater-faced. Again, this is not to diminish his talent as an actor or to denigrate him as a person -- merely to point out that Ali Larter was several degrees of magnitude prettier than he, and we're not sure he should be taking work away from, say, a Jesse Bradford (of Bring It On fame) or even an Adrian Grenier (largely unseen since Drive Me Crazy).

We will concede that Sawa does have one credit to break the deadlock with Foster: he starred as the eponymous "Stan" in the video of the controversial Eminem single. With his hair dyed platinum to match that of his hero/beloved, Sawa was convincingly unhinged as the rapper's stalker. Truly, with eyes as dead as his, Stan is practically the part Sawa was born to play, and suggests a path his career could take the next time he gets turned down for a romantic lead opposite Katie Holmes or some such WB chippy.

Advantage: Sawa, with the street cred