Jennifer Lawrence vs Kristen Stewart: Who should win Nicholas Hoult's heart?

Rumour has it that Nicholas Hoult has split from his Oscar-winning girlfriend, and now he’s with R-Patz’s ex. Whose side are you on?
Pick your side: Jennifer Lawrence and Kristen Stewart (Picture: Larry Busacca/Getty)
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TEAM K-STEW

I don't tend to go for the underdog. When you’re as fanatically competitive as I am (#soznotsoz), you can’t shake the prejudice that the underdog has the whiff of loser about them. Life is for winners. Despite what movies preach, most of the time I’m right. Well, obviously.

However, there is seemingly one glaring exception to my despotic principle — and it was revealed in a meeting earlier this week when I stated proudly for the record that I was on Team K-Stew.

A quick summary: Nicholas Hoult (the ugly kid from About a Boy who became the fit one in Skins, and the unexpected one in Hollywood) has parted ways with erstwhile girlfriend Jennifer Lawrence and — allegedly — has since picked up with Kristen Stewart.

Lawrence is the Oscar-winning gorgeous goofball who seduces men and women alike and — unusually — doesn’t seem to inspire the corrosive jealousy that most other women with similar credentials would.

Kristen Stewart is the sullen, taciturn ex-girlfriend of Robert Pattinson — an actor whose bland beauty inspires mystifying fanaticism in tweenagers and twentysomethings alike. She cheated on R-Patz with a married director 20 years her senior. She wears Converse on the red carpet and wields a fearsome Bitchy Resting Face 90 per cent of the time.

And yet it is with K-Stew that I side, triumphantly.

First, there is the issue of natural order — as while Stewart is the underdog on paper, if you think laterally and at length about such things, then you’ll see she makes a lot more sense as a partner. Because Nicholas — you’re a Brit.

Briefly, you may have been seduced by that sunny silliness and golden hair — the girl who gives graphic toilet humour on David Letterman, photobombs on the red carpet and sasses Jack Nicholson. She’s bombastic, bonkers, ebullient — and people like that are totally fascinating. But they’re not for us, Nick.

British people are quiet. Our photo default is an anguished grimace, not a goofy gurn. We don’t sass others, we essentially sass ourselves with introspective, embarrassed, self-deprecating comedy. We’re pissed off a lot. K-Stew is basically British and thus obviously a better match.

Stewart’s refusal to engage with the rigmarole of celebrity is also compelling. In this area the two are quite similar: both girls obviously think it’s all a bit ridiculous. But while Lawrence deals with it by taking the piss out of the circus exhaustively, Stewart is clearly shyer and unsure of how exactly to behave, which is — I imagine — why she looks like she’s sulking all the time. It’s more endearing.

Also: Kristen Stewart wrote a poem. When I was an adolescent, I too wrote poems invoking moonlight and shoehorning unusual words I’d just learned into the verses (“kismetly”).

I also played fast and loose with form, imagining myself to be a pioneer till I did an English degree. So I sympathise with K-Stew’s poetry, even when I went on Facebook and realised everyone else was right and it was actually really bad.

Yet contrary to assumption, one thing she’s not actually bad at is acting. She’s way better than the drippy R-Patz in Twilight and when given a meatier role she is genuinely enthralling. Lawrence: your reign is over. All rise Stewart: a sulky monarch for our times.

Phoebe Luckhurst

TEAM J-LAW

There are many actresses in my Girl Crush Gallery of Awesomeness. Tina Fey. Amy Poehler. Mindy Kaling. Zoe Saldana. In fact, it’s getting awfully crowded in there. But if I ever have to do a clear-out — sending a few of my lady heroes off to Oxfam — there’s one I would never cast out: Jennifer Lawrence.

For the 23-year-old with the ultra GIF-able face is the real deal. Obviously, she was over-blessed at the cradle with talent, beauty and charm. But she’s also managed not to get sucked into Tinseltown pretension.On the red carpet, she gurns, she photobombs, she plays up to fans with a wink and a hoick of her falling-down dress before hyperventilating when she gets to meet Hollywood royalty.

Plus she seems like the ultimate party date: after a night out with Lawrence, you’d wake up with your make-up still on, your contact lenses welded to your eyes and minus a shoe. After all, this is a woman who claims Miley Cyrus — the teddy-humping, foam finger-waving nervous-breakdown-in-waiting — told her to “get it together”.

Now, according to reports, Lawrence is currently dwelling in Dumpsville, after Nicholas Hoult broke up with her. Which shows that something I thought I’d been lying to myself about for years — that even the best of us sometimes get our hearts spat out like cheap Cava at a tasting — is actually true. Apparently, Hoult may now be interested in Kristen Stewart, although that rumour has come from a sleb mag, so it may just mean they had a beer together once.

Now, I’m not anti-Kristen. Given that hundreds of men have built their careers on being miserable (Schopenhauer! Beckett! Morrissey!), I don’t see why there isn’t space for one woman in Hollywood who doesn’t act like Mary Sunshine when she’s papped at a premiere. And I applaud her stance on sensible shoes.

It’s just that my fictitious fanzine will always be devoted to Lawrence, a woman who makes me want to wear a WWJD bracelet (What Would Jennifer Do?). She didn’t play passive, irritating Bella in the Twilight franchise, which taught teenage girls that a relationship between a stalkery, century-old vampire and a 16-year-old girl was romantic, not demonic-clown levels of creepy; she’s kick-ass Katniss in The Hunger Games, who risks her life to save her sister and — spoiler alert —eventually chooses the nice boy who can ice cakes and is an inch shorter than her.

And Lawrence realises her power as a role model, being from the Madeleine Albright school in thinking that women should help one another. So she considers her young fans when she picks roles (“As long as I am Katniss, I do make conscious decisions that way”) and refused to lose weight for The Surprisingly-Well-Fed Games (“Girls see enough of this body that we can’t imitate, that we’ll never be able to obtain”).

So she may be single now, but she’ll never have a shortage of wannabe-BFFs. Jen, if you’re ever in London, I’d happily lose a shoe to hang out with you.

Rosamund Urwin

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