Emma Brockes: This Week

The Real Winona Ryder on Channel 4 this week showed us that fame isn't all it's cracked up to be. Poor Winona: insomniac, kleptomaniac, terrified of kidnap. Since getting busted for shoplifting and being splashed across the papers in community service fatigues, she's gone up in the public's estimation. This is partly a matter of gratitude for all the hours of fun she's given us, and partly an indicator that her misery seems genuine. Spoilt and dumb though her spree in Saks Fifth Avenue was, her wan appearance in court restored to Winona a rare thing among the famous - integrity, specifically the integrity of screw-up.

Celebrities are endlessly perplexed by the capriciousness of the press and the public. But really, it's not that difficult to figure out. In OK! magazine this week Michael Douglas puts the UK media's bitchy comments about his wife down to jealousy and "class structure" (in the same interview he claims to be "half-British" because he was born in Bermuda, rather like claiming to be French because you once ate an omelette). Actually, Zeta-Jones was popular enough until she started begging for sympathy over the issue of violated privacy, presumably on the reckoning that the thicko general public would swallow it as a weighty moral issue, rather than movie-star petulance.

We're apparently never happy with a celebrity until they're miserable, but that's because with most celebrities - from J-Lo pretending to be Jenny from the Block, to Geri Halliwell and her cynically timed love affairs - self-destruction is the only measure of sincerity there is.

Even Madonna, who was for years one of the few celebs to scorn her self-pitying peers and declare herself happy with life, has succumbed to a bout of baseless carping. In her charmless rap at the end of American Life - the bit DJs have been fading out in a neat and almost universal piece of unauthorised editing - she promises to deliver an "extreme point of view" on the subject of dissatisfaction. From the publicity material, one might have expected this to have something to do with Iraq, but it turned out to be a list of all the people on her payroll - lawyer, manager, agent, chef, etc... it isn't easy having staff you know. Radical. At least Shirley Bassey, who always dressed in ankle-length white fur and diamonds to sing, I (Who Have Nothing), put a bit of self-parody into it.

It is difficult to be famous in an era when self-reference is everything, especially when the longer you are famous, the more disingenuous all but the blandest expressions of satisfaction with your life start to sound. The stars turn it round and say satisfaction doesn't sell, but Kylie sells pretty well and she's supremely self-satisfied.

What doesn't sell is fake misery. Who can identify with a celebrity who bangs on about how music pirating on the internet is not only damaging her profits but hurting her feelings? Gimme a break. Madonna went to the lengths of putting a bootleg version of her new album, American Life, on the MTV website, which when users tried to download it prompted the recorded message, "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" A hacker retaliated by putting free downloads of the album on Madonna's own website.

Eminem is the only one whose relationship with the public and the press is sufficiently volatile to justify writing a song about it, the only one who can carry off the line "I'm so sick and tired of being admired/ That I wish that I would just die or get fired." The others are just trying it on.

Michael Douglas take note: if you take the mick in this country, it doesn't matter where you were born, it'll come back and bite you.