So this week sees the release of Your Highness, the new comedy starring Danny McBride (Eastbound & Down), James Franco (a crazy dude) and... Natalie Portman? Yep, the Oscar-winner for Black Swan is the following that flick up with a 100% improvised stoner fantasy movie that has been absolutely savaged by critics. So what makes actors take roles like this after winning the biggest prize the industry has to offer? Let's take a look at some other post-Oscar choices that boggle the mind.

Jamie Foxx shocked the world when he took home the Best Actor award for Ray - who would have thought that the former stand-up and sitcom star could show dramatic range? - but he quickly eradicated any measure of goodwill Hollywood had for him with the release of next year's Stealth. The flick, also starring Jessica Biel and Josh Lucas, was one of the biggest money-losers in film history, costing $138 million to make and taking in barely half of that worldwide.

Long-time character actor Philip Seymour Hoffman won dozens of awards for his portrayal of the titular writer in Capote, but it's obvious that arthouse movies about fey wordsmiths don't pay the bills, because he was next seen mugging it up as black market arms dealer Owen Davian in Mission: Impossible III. Hitting theaters right after Cruise's insane antics on Oprah didn't help matters much.

Helen Mirren took home an Oscar in 2007 for The Queen, but the next time she was seen on the big screen was in Nicolas Cage sequel National Treasure: Book Of Secrets. This seems like a horrendous step down until you realize that the flick she was in before The Queen was Shadowboxer. Haven't seen it? It was directed by the guy who made Precious and it features lots of banging between Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr. If she can win an Oscar after that, anything is possible.

The youngest dude to ever win a Best Actor Oscar, Adrien Brody dazzled the world in 2002's The Pianist. Unfortunately, his next leading role was anything but dazzling. The Village was the point where the world began to turn on director M. Night Shyalaman, as his hackneyed arsenal of twist endings began to get a little threadbare.

Italian actor Roberto Begnini's acceptance speech for Life Is Beautiful is one of the most awkward moments in Oscar history, with the star clambering over seats to reach the stage and take the statue for both Best Actor and Best Director. That didn't help him a few years later, when his atrocious Pinnochio hit screens. Miramax released the flick with no press screenings on Christmas day, a vote of no confidence if we've ever heard one, and the movie was savaged by critics and audiences alike.

Amid the scientific questions raised by considering a duplicate, parallel Earth with mirror images of ourselves, the film exudes raw emotions of joy, rage, sorrow, regret and love.

What is it that makes us human?

What if we had made different choices here and there?

Rhoda Williams, played by screenplay co-writer Brit Marling, is a smart young woman growing up in Connecticut who has been accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's astrophysics program.

But she doesn't make it there.

The night the duplicate Earth is discovered, Williams makes what she calls her "unforgivable mistake" -- she drives drunk, collides with another vehicle and kills a pregnant woman and a young child.

The pregnant woman's husband, John Burroughs, is a talented music composer and college professor.

He survives the crash, but spirals downward into an alcohol- and pill-induced haze.

When Williams is released from prison four years later, she goes to Burroughs' home to apologize, but she loses her nerve and pretends she's there to clean his house as a trial offer for a cleaning company.

Williams keeps returning to put the shattered widower's house in order and nurse him, as well as herself, back to health.

She does not reveal her true identity and each week the two become closer and eventually fall in love.

It's then that Williams is notified she has won a contest to travel to the duplicate Earth.

Williams and people around the world had already watched and listened as a scientist established communication with her duplicate, also a scientist, on Earth II.

In her contest essay, Williams had reflected on the very first explorers, who were sometimes criminals and others seeking a new beginning.

"As a felon, I'm an unlikely candidate for most things ... (but for this) ... perhaps I'm the most likely," she wrote.

When Williams excitedly tells Burroughs that she is going to Earth II, he pleads with her to stay.

"We're so close to something here," he says.

It's then Williams tells Burroughs that she needs to share a story with him and, after hearing it, if he wants her to stay with him, she will.

Williams reveals that she was the drunk driver who killed his family and tells him that she kept cleaning for him because "in the smallest ways" she thought it made his life a little bit better.

The final scenes of "Another Earth" provide more questions that answers, including, "What would we like to see if we could stand outside ourselves and look at ourselves?"

Pigeons recognise friendly feeders - birds remember hostile people

The fluttering pigeons outside Gateway of India are as much a part of the tourists’ must-do lists as the coin throw at Rome’s Trevi Fountain.

But behind the light-hearted amusement of feeding pigeons may lie deep biological underpinnings that explain why the practice, as symbolised by Indian kabutarkhanas, has flourished down the centuries.

Pigeons can discriminate between friendly and hostile humans, an evolutionary advantage that may be one of the factors helping their populations thrive across urban centres at a time sparrows are in decline, scientists say.

Ornithologists have long observed what they believe is a rise in pigeon numbers in urban areas, a trend easy to sense in Indian cities with their traditional kabutarkhanas — public zones where pigeons congregrate to eat grain or other tidbits offered by humans. “Human benevolence is clearly among factors pushing pigeon populations upward,” said Mohammed Dilawar, an ornithologist tracking house sparrows for the Bombay Natural History Society, Mumbai.

“Pigeons also find it easier to bring up their little ones,” he said.

While newborn sparrows require an exclusive diet of insects, Dilawar said, young pigeons can survive on a liquid called “vegetable milk”, regurgitated by adult pigeons that feed on grain or other food that are always abundant from human feeders.

Now scientists in France have identified another facet of pigeon biology that probably help these birds in their search for friendly humans: pigeons appear to recognise individual people despite changes in clothing. In their experiments, Dalila Bovet and her colleagues at University of Paris asked two sets of people wearing different-coloured coats to feed pigeons in a Paris city centre park.

One set ignored the pigeons and allowed them to feed while other group chased the birds away preventing them from feeding. The pigeons appeared to recognise who was friendly and who was hostile, and were able to remember that information later.

The pigeons could recognise the hostile people even when they swapped their coloured coats with the friendly people. Even when hostile people changed stance and became friendly to pigeons, the birds continued to avoid them. “What is important — and surprising — is that the pigeons spontaneously used relevant characteristics of individuals instead of the most salient feature, which was the coloured coats,” said Bovet, associate professor at the laboratory for comparative ethology and cognition at the University of Paris.

“They seem to know that clothes are not a good way to tell humans apart,” Bovet told The Telegraph.

These findings, published earlier this year in the journal Animal Cognition, will be presented at a meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology in Glasgow on Sunday.

The scientists say the ability to discriminate between friendly and hostile humans is ecologically relevant because it could help the birds recognise a safe human feeder faster and save energy and time in gaining food. Overall, it is a combination of an abundance of food and nesting places as well as a decline in the population of natural predator birds that is contributing to rising pigeon populations, said Asad Rahmani, director of the Bombay Natural History Society.

Pigeons are what ornithologists call platform-nesters — birds that can build nests along ledges and corners of buildings.

“The population of predators such as peregrine falcons is low, and that is also helping pigeons,” Rahmani said.

“But any human-driven or unnatural rise in a species population can mean an ecological imbalance,” said Dilawar. “Pigeons are friendly birds, but they may also carry the risk of exacerbating respiratory infections.”