These days it's clearer than ever: loyalty and Hollywood go together like boxing gloves and telephones.

Now that we in the Western world are eating fish skeletons out of the garbage like the Heathcliff of world powers, too poor to lavish celebrities with sufficient amounts of money and gifts, our disappointed stars are turning their rhinoplastied noses eastward, to the mysterious, exciting, oil-rich Orient. In Dubai, where oil barons mingle with Russian gangsters in $1,500 shoes, the money flows as plentifully as the region's largest export. And just like that, our celebrities are taking their balls and going to the UAE!

This from Hollywood blogger Sharon Waxman, in today's Daily Beast:

On one recent night at the Emirates Palace Hotel, the ornate, $5 billion edifice around which much of Abu Dhabi's social life revolves, Jeremy Irons presented a musical tour of the world in a plush concert hall below ground…

Meanwhile, Christina Aguilera performed a couple of floors above him, at a packed, if less edifying cultural event. For that single concert, she was paid $700,000, I was told by a cultural official who declined to be identified.
…
The same official told me that Madonna had negotiated $3 million for an upcoming one-night concert.

George Michael is out on a concert tour ahead of retirement, but he added a last-minute date to perform in Abu Dhabi on Dec. 1, lured by a reported $1.7 million fee for the night. That will be, he says, his last concert.

And even Meg Ryan—a former box office darling now regarded as too plastified for the A-list—was able to command $150,000 to show up and host the Abu Dhabi film festival last month.

While the trough is full, the celebrities will feed.

So long, suckers!!!!!