Barbara Walters has announced her list of the Top 10 Most Fascinating People of 2008 and these are the people that she thinks make us claw at the computer screen:

1) Barack Obama
2) Tom Cruise
3) Sarah Palin
4) Frank Langella
5) Thomas Beatie
6) Rush Limbaugh
7) Tina Fey
8) Miley Cyrus
9) Michael Phelps
10) Will Smith

Barack Obama: obvious. Sarah Palin: doggone obvious. But Frank Langella? I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I thought of Frank Langella once over the past year. And it was when I looked at Barbara Walters’ list.

Of course Daddy Scientologist had to be on the list too, and the pregnant man was, like, an automatic reflex. No surprises with Rush Limbaugh either, since the AM radio personality is offensive enough to give him the appearance of being interesting to average people, though he’s really not all that scintillating since you can always expect him to say some blowhard hyper-conservative crap about Feminazis, his term for progressive, politically active women.

Then there’s Tina Fey, and you’d think with her doppelganger Sarah Palin also on the list, it might just explode! But it didn’t. Thank God, because she’s really the best thing about SNL these days.

 Miley Cyrus, isn’t really interesting, but she did have that Vanity Fair cover and is super rich for a little girl, so I guess that’s enough. She and Michael Phelps are kind of on the list for similar reasons; neither are all that interesting, but they both have a lot of one particular substance, that being prepubescent fans for Cyrus and Olympic gold medals for Phelps. Of course now that he has a cocktail waitress girlfriend with big boobs, people are starting to almost care what he does.

Probably the most puzzling decision for the Barbara Walters list, however, was the inclusion of Will Smith, as in that guy who has made a living out of inane songs with white-ified urban vernacular and lame movies trying to take a stab at seriousness like the Legend of Bagger Vance and The Pursuit of Happyness. This year he played in another silly movie, Hancock, and Babs knows how fascinated America was with that movie. Or something. Come on now, Barbara, it’s not 1997! Sure it can be fun being oblivious, but when you work in television, it’s not quite as fun as NOT being oblivious, so let’s try reading a magazine or something.