Anne Hathaway vs. Emmy Rossum
Battle of the Golden-Throated Sylphs

Based on all the hype that surrounded Moulin Rouge! in 2001 and Chicago in 2002, by now we should be living in an era in which the classic movie musical is reborn. Each new week should bring us a wealth of celluloid operettas to choose from, characters bursting into ecstatic song and acting as though that's totally normal and not off-putting and queer. Emmy Rossum and Anne Hathaway should be two of the most successful and sought-after young performers in Hollywood.

Unfortunately for the two comely brunettes, the whole musical thing didn't really take off after all. Rent is in the process of flopping in wide theatrical release. That trailer for The Producers looks weird and strained. And, as Rossum knows first-hand, last year's big-screen adaptation of The Phantom Of The Opera didn't quite fill the Academy with The Music Of The Night. Perhaps audiences could only give themselves up to highly contrived entertainments like musicals when they weren't so savvy about pop culture -- when they could just accept a man crooning without remembering what he looked like on the red carpet outside the fraught thriller his character got cuckolded in. (Or maybe we only accept contrived entertainments when they're dressed up to look like reality, even if the work that goes into making Donald Trump look like a businessman who spends his days making real-estate deals and who is also capable of reading a damn TelePrompter requires every bit as much choreography and editing as anything Busby Berkeley ever put his hand to.)

Hathaway and Rossum would have both excelled if the musical had enjoyed the renaissance we were all told it was just about to: both are pretty, with passable acting skills and lovely singing voices, which is just about all MGM could have asked for back in the day. Rossum got a slight jump on Hathaway as a screen chanteuse with her role in Songcatcher (as the awesomely named Deladis Slocumb), but Hathaway managed to remind us all that she was an alumna of the All-Eastern U.S. High School Honors Chorus by sneaking a few '70s classics into Ella Enchanted. If they failed to mesh with the rest of the movie and read like a drama club diva milking her solo, Hathaway must have thought it was worth it: for all she knew, Rob Marshall might be working on a new film version of Cabaret, and she had to prove she had the pipes and pins for Sally Bowles or risk losing the part to Rossum, the big screen's latest Christine.

In the absence of musical opportunities, both Rossum and Hathaway have had to make adjustments to their five-year career plans. So far, all Rossum has lined up is a gig as Kurt Russell's daughter in Poseidon, the big-screen remake of The Poseidon Adventure -- and why not? We know she has experience both in playing veteran actors' progeny (as she did for Sean Penn in Mystic River), and in wading through extremely cold water (as she did in The Day After Tomorrow). Hathaway, for her part, is carrying on with her strategy of starring in book adaptations: it worked when she starred in the movies of The Princess Diaries, and may work again with efforts high-brow (Brokeback Mountain), trashy (The Devil Wears Prada), and probably apocryphal and anachronistic (as a young Jane Austen carrying on with an Irishman in Becoming Jane). At least this new set of challenges will allow Hathaway to confront the question of which is worse: being married to a gay cowboy, or working alongside a skinny, Botoxed, vicious fashionista -- and hey, if Hathaway doesn't feel like doing much research, she could just ask Renée Zellweger.

Advantage: Hathaway. At least none of her movies has already shown up as a TV movie of the week starring Steve Guttenberg.