Forbes magazine has crunched the numbers and concluded that the most overpaid star in Hollywood — literally, in terms of how much she’s paid as it compares to how much good her presence onscreen seems to do her movies at the box office—-is Nicole Kidman. What’s that, you say? The talented and discerning star of Cold Mountain, The Human Stain, Eyes Wide Shut, Bewitched, The Interpreter, Fur, The Invasion, Birth, The Stepford Wives, overpaid? David Thomson can’t imagine how anyone could entertain such a churlish notion, but apparently if you run the numbers by someone who can count, it turns out that Big Red’s movies have been earning the studios a return of about eight bucks for every dollar she’s been getting paid--and Kidman got paid fifteen million dollars for her most recent release, The Golden Compass, a fantastically expensive movie intended to serve as the platform for a franchise, though it's proven such a disappointment that it may be lucky to inspire a direct-to-video sequel. She does show a better return than her countryman Russell Crowe, who earned the studios five dollars for every dollar he was paid on such ironically titled duds as Cinderella Man and A Good Year. But Crowe, who maintains a less slavish work schedule than Kidman, has lashed himself to fewer anchors in the last few years, and his current hit, American Gangster, is doing so well, even before the home-video revenues have started rolling in, that much will be forgiven. The usual response to this kind of talk from a star's camp is that a star can only do so much with the material he or she has to work with, and anyway, do you think that a movie like Fur would have done kickass business if it hadn't had Kidman's frosty mug on the poster? In the meantime, as Forbes notes, the golden boy of the moment in Hollywood is Judd Apatow, who’s been behind two modestly budgeted major hits (Knocked Up and Superbad) that didn’t have any stars at all and may have a third before the year is over if Walk Hard with John C. Reilly opens big. Of course, one reason that Apatow’s starless pictures make so much money, even after being subjected to the surreal rigors of Hollywood accounting, is that his budgets aren’t inflated from having to pay one actor fifteen to twenty million dollars right off the bat.