Andrea Peyser: The end could be near for whiny George Clooney

The end could be near for whiny George Clooney

Is the Oscar-winning actor, producer, director, screenwriter and recent bridegroom, a Kentucky-bred hottie who doubles as a liberal activist and world savior, annoyingly whiny, weird and washed up?

The hints that Clooney, 53, had grown as spoiled and culturally irrelevant as a dented can of Spam were evident even before another delectable man, the Welsh-born, Oscar-winning actor Christian Bale, 40, articulated something that many admirers of high-end beefcake had already suspected: Clooney, a guy whom men have long wanted to be and women have wanted to love - heck, some gals craved to be him and some guys were desperate to love him - is actually a girly man.

What? The next things you'll hear are that global warming isn't real and that Clooney's Batman was just an average guy in a tight rubber costume! (“Sorry about the nipples on the suit," Clooney said in October at New York Comic Con, where he promoted his coming movie “Tomorrowland," thus apologizing, 17 years too late, about his cringe-worthy star turn in the 1997 flick “Batman & Robin.")

This was the devastating pronouncement about Clooney made by Bale, who played a far less embarrassing Caped Crusader in subsequent movies:

“Boring," Bale said about him in a cover story in WSJ Magazine's December/January issue.

Bale was turned off, as many of us have become, by Clooney's incessant complaining about the paparazzi. He whinges about the persistent shutterbugs the way one might expect a pampered celebutard to moan about being forced to fly in business class.

“It doesn't matter that he talks about it. It's like, ‘Come on, guys, just shut up and live your lives and stop whining about it.' I prefer not to whine about it," said Bale, who plays Moses in the movie “Exodus: Gods and Kings," due out next week.

Bale, who's kept the spotlight away from his personal life - he's been married for more than 14 years and has two kids with Sibi Blazic, 44, an American former model, makeup artist and personal assistant to actress Winona Ryder. It's not that photographers haven't tempted him to get rough. He described being in Italy on a film shoot when a man stood outside his hotel hurling obscenities at his wife. “Am I able to say I'm not gonna give him the satisfaction of angry Christian Bale coming after this man?" he said. “But equally, he's killing my humanity and my dignity as a husband if I do not, and he knows this. So you've got a choice."

Before his September wedding to British-Lebanese human-rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin, 36, Clooney persuaded the mayor of Laglio, Italy - Clooney owns a villa in Laglio, on Lake Como - to enact anti-paparazzi laws, according to The Huffington Post. He secured two protection orders forbidding the paps from getting close to his house, or approaching his mansion by water. The edicts expired Sept. 30.

But Clooney made a spectacle of himself, getting into a sissy fight and storming out of a boozy April dinner in Las Vegas with hotel magnate Steve Wynn, 72. The men argued over Clooney's pal President Obama. The actor has met with the president in the White House, bending his ear over the humanitarian crisis in Sudan.

Wynn “called the president an a-?-hole ... this is a fact," Clooney told the Las Vegas Review Journal newspaper in an email message sent by his publicist. “I said the president was my longtime friend and then he said ‘your friend is an a-?-hole' ... At that point, I told Steve that HE was an a-?-hole and I wasn't going to sit at his table while he was being such a jackass.'' Wynn got in the last word, however, denying on Bloomberg TV that he insulted the president and saying that celebs, including Clooney, “live in a very strange bubble of their own."

“They're molly coddled, they're highly privileged," he said.

But Clooney reserved his greatest contempt for those of us who harbor doubts about the reality of global warming.

“Well, it's just a stupid argument," Clooney told reporters last year. “The idea that we ignore that we are in some way involved in climate change is ridiculous."

And some people are pushing him to run for president of the United States in 2016!

With his good hair and deadpan delivery, George Clooney is guilty of the No. 1 sin of the soon-to-be has-been: He's started to believe his own hype.

Stick a fork in him. He's done.