By RUTHE STEIN, San Francisco Chronicle

Jorma Taccone has spent his career tethered to Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer.

Adrien Brody is attempting to get comfortable in an uncomfortable straight-back chair. He folds his legs underneath him and sits on them. Although that position looks torturous, he swears it feels great.

Johnny Depp and director Michael Mann circled around John Dillinger for decades. Independently, each imagined the infamous Depression-era bank robber filling the big screen. Good-looking, sexy and charismatic, Dillinger is a role Depp was destined to play.

Summer movies inevitably are about blockbusters. This season, "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian," "Terminator Salvation" and "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" have the makings of becoming gargantuan hits.

After listening to Billy Bob Thornton go on about his neuroses, it's tempting to send him a bill for psychological services rendered. Then again, he is much more amusing than an average neurotic. Maybe he is the one who ought to be paid.

Emma Roberts just turned 18. She's no longer the adorable kid audiences remember from her Nickelodeon TV show "Unfabulous" and as the eagle-eyed sleuth in "Nancy Drew."

Every movie John Cazale appeared in was nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture, and three of them -- "The Godfather," "The Godfather: Part II" and "The Deer Hunter" -- won the top prize. Collectively, his five films earned 40 Academy Award nominations.

When Kristen Stewart was making "Adventureland," she was just another young actress whom most people had never heard of. Then "Twilight" came out and changed all of that. In this creepy romantic tale, based on a popular teen novel, she plays a high-school student who falls truly, madly, deeply in love with a vampire.

The Oscar nominations reveal the 5,750 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to be in a feisty mood -- voting their hearts and minds and not taking orders from Hollywood studios.

We'll always have "Casablanca" and "Gone With the Wind," too. But other movies -- multitudes of them -- also serve up love affairs to remember. After all, romantic comedies and dramas have been a mainstay of Hollywood as long as there's been a Hollywood.