"Americans can be strange about aging," said French actress Jeanne Moreau, in a brief interview she gave me back in 2005. She was then at the tail end of her 70s and had just co-starred with French heartthrob Melvil Poupaud in "Le Temps Qui Reste," as his sympathetic but alluring grandmother. As the interview went on, the whole room went quiet and the other women stopped what they were doing to listen to Moreau.

"Americans think aging is something to be pitied, or ignored," she continued. "The French know that the good things in life get better with age!"

Moreau, now 86 — still playing the femme fatale — must be feeling some competition from the very country she once accused of strangeness. Surely she got a kick out of Cate Blanchett's recent Oscar-acceptance speech (for best actress in Woody Allen's "Blue Jasmine"), in which Blanchett challenged "those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the center, are niche experiences." She continued: "They are not. Audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money."