Readers of a certain age will remember how in the 1970s the toothily lovely singer-songwriter Carly Simon had a succession of hit songs. Of these, the biggest (it went to number one, everywhere) was You're So Vain.

Catchy but bitter (for Carly is singing about a narcissistic, playboyish lover who has done her wrong) it has the singable chorus "You're so vain/You probably think this song is about you."

It was not until 2015 that Carly confirmed the popular suspicion that, yes, ex-lover Warren Beatty had been the subject, the target of the rueful song.

There was something deeply endearing about the Warren Beatty we all saw in the news during his Oscar horrors this week. For me it was that he has had the good grace to allow himself to go grey. Increasingly few men in public life dare let this happen to them.

He is 79 and, allowing the years to paint and sculpt his true portrait, is looking his age, bless him. In his heyday, when he set Carly Simon's heart fluttering, Beatty was famously the most beautiful man in Hollywood. If, as You're So Vain accuses, he was rather in love with himself in those days (seeing his gorgeous self so often in his shaving mirror just as Narcissus saw his own adorable reflection in the waters of a billabong) perhaps we can forgive him.

By contrast Donald Trump, 70, much-mentioned at the Oscars and now tweeting narcissistically about the Oscars blunder, uses the finest embalmings money can buy to try to look like a forty-something spring chicken.

How anyone can ever vote for a man so fake he even has a fraudulent head of hair (and this before one gets a glimpse of the fraudulence going on in his heart) escapes me.

Watching federal parliament's Question Times on TV I note with anguished amusement how many of the male members have suspiciously youthful heads of hair. It is as if politics is a profession that instead of sending men prematurely grey with worry (as it did honest President Obama) sends them deeper, richer shades of polished mahogany and of burnished ebony.

One of the two movies involved in the Oscar confusions imbroglio is the delightful La La Land. It is a sentimental musical, a love story set in a magically enhanced Los Angeles. It is a chick flick and my inner damsel was thrilled by it.

Readers, as you and your inner chicks flock to La La Land, I ask you to imagine (as I have imagined and written elsewhere) a musical movie set in Canberra in the flattering ways in which La La Land is set in Los Angeles.

La La Land has three big stars in Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling and then LA the city itself. The romantic action takes place in famous LA places, and an Australian/Canberran version would make our maligned city look endearing at last by having the lovers canoodling, singing and dancing at famous Canberra spots. They could be, say, waltzing in the elf-infested fern gullies of the Australian National Botanic Gardens. They might play sexually tense mixed doubles together at the famous, picturesque and heritage-listed Reid Tennis Club.

But, perhaps better still, think what wonders might be done for the image of federal parliament (more despised now than at any time since federation) by a heartwarming blockbuster movie musical set in parliament and among politicians!

The film (working title Lib Lab Land) could be a touching love story. It could tell of how a once cold and swinish Liberal minister for Immigration (played by Hugh Jackman and loosely based on Peter Dutton) has his hitherto vile personality transformed by the love of an idealistic and vegan Greens backbencher (played by Cate Blanchett).

Yes, I know it is improbable that anyone could love a Liberal minister but that is the special magic of musicals. Magic happens in them. Unicorns gallop through mists of sparkling stardust.

Shown the error of his ways and made decent at last by the power of love the minister leaps to give Australian Citizenship to the 1250 refugees hitherto imprisoned by him on Manus Island and Nauru. He begs their forgiveness. Will they have the amazing grace to be able to forgive a swine like him? Surely not. Tension builds.

But then, at the reformed man's wedding with his lovely reformer (it is at night outdoors atop Mount Ainslie with the lights of the fairytale federal capital twinkling below them) all of the new Australians emerge from among the mystical gum trees. They form themselves into a choir and sing a glad wedding song of joyful forgiveness.

The cinema's lights go up and the moviegoers, dabbing at their tears, realise that they have been so spellbound that they've not touched their now gently melting Choc Tops.

They stumble tearfully from the cinema, their feelings about their elected representatives romantically transformed (for such is the power of the silver screen) from loathing to affection.