She has been preparing to start work on her new film Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close.

The Paramount Pictures film also stars Tom Hanks and is based on the book by Moneyball and True Grit producer Scott Rudin.

It follows the story of a nine-year-old girl who searches for a lock to match a mysterious key that was left to her by her father when he died in the September 11 attacks.

While preparing for this current film, she is also in pre-production on several other projects including The Abstinence Teacher with Steve Carell and Most Wanted with her Proposal co-star Ryan Reynolds.

Fame

Last night Oscar-winner Sandra Bullock hung out at the legendary gay bar The Abbey in West Hollywood for about three hours. She hung out with Kevin Huvane, friend of the founder of the club. She had a great night, even asking the DJ to play her favorite music, “old-school New Orleans hip hop.”

Bauer Griffin

Speaking to EW last fall, weeks before the opening of a little heart-warmer of a movie called The Blind Side, Sandra Bullock – who had reemerged earlier that year from a two-year hiatus with her biggest hit ever, the romantic comedy The Proposal – predicted that her newly reinvigorated career would soon cool down again. She brushed off The Proposal’s success as a cosmic fluke: “I don’t pump my fist in the air. I don’t want anything karmically crashing down on me.” She dismissed the idea that she might score an Oscar nomination for The Blind Side: “The stuff that I migrate to isn’t the stuff that wins awards.” And she vowed that she would be off the public’s radar again in no time, holed up at home, with Hollywood at a comfortable distance. “Trust me, people are going to be like ’Get her away,’” she said. “And I will go away. I’ll be quiet again after this.”

Studio executives and film producers are courting her for every remotely suitable starring role available, in projects from a Disney family fable called The Odd Life of Timothy Green to Our Wild Life, a drama about an elephant orphanage. “Sandra Bullock is the golden girl,” a top film agent says flatly. “She’s getting offered all the scripts that matter. Everyone is rooting for her. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Whether by design or by accident, Bullock’s choices signaled a new clarity of purpose, and Hollywood was ready to take her back. “Everyone loves a story of someone who redeems themselves from crap,” says one veteran industry exec. “In Hollywood, everyone’s worked on crap, so it’s like, ‘Oh, look! This woman who made all these crappy movies can come back! So even though I swim in a sea of crap, I too can come back!’”

The fact is, thanks to the intangible chemical reaction that creates stardom, Sandra Bullock has always had a knack for making audiences fall in love with her. “From the minute we saw her in Speed, she just had this quality that people want to be around,” says Bradley Cooper, who costarred with Bullock in All About Steve. “It’s like being around a source of light.”

Now, with the Oscar, two big hits, and a massive outpouring of public support buoying her, the question remains where Bullock will go from here. She has stated on many occasions that she doesn’t want to do romantic comedies. As she told EW last fall, she just doesn’t have the stomach for them anymore: “We all know relationships don’t work that way,” she said, laughing. “It’s a lie! It’s a lie!

Speaking to EW last October as, unbeknownst to her, the roller coaster of her life was tick-tick-ticking up the crest of a hill, Bullock sounded philosophical. “You have really high peaks and you have some valleys,” she said. “The nice thing is that something like The Proposal gives you is you get to say, ‘Okay, I’ve done it. Something wonderful happened.’ But you can’t always have wonderful things, one after the other so just be happy with what you’ve got and that’s it.”

More at EW.com!

Sunday marked the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and the destruction it left behind in Louisiana.

Sandra Bullock donated money to rebuild Warren Easton Charter High School, and to open a student health clinic. She appeared at an event to tribute to those who are helping with recovery efforts.

Bullock is a part-time New Orleans resident. “I have seen nothing but unimaginable kindness, perseverance and hope right in this room here,” said Bullock. “It gives me great pleasure to be in the company of these people who have actually made the difference. They did the hard work, they are here sitting before you.”

“These young adults have seen the very worst, and they are committed to the very best,” said Bullock. ” They are our future leaders. I would like to thank the students who step up to the plate and do the hardest work. I didn’t do it in high school, and it makes me so incredibly proud.”

Looking as cute as can be, Bullock helped cut the tape on the new school.

“It was more than her money,” says Easton Foundation board member Arthur Hardy. “She is like our spiritual leader. She is our angel.”

“What do you say about a human being who just pours out their heart and soul, who puts their money where their mouth is, walks the walk, talks the talk,” adds Mayor Mitch Landrieu. “And even if it was just in a movie, she married a New Orleans boy.”

Source

Only miles from where Jesse James dropped off his daughters to their new Austin neighborhood school, Sandra Bullock was busy visiting Bess Bistro on Wednesday.

Though the two seem to be on amicable terms these days, Bullock may have trouble avoiding ex-husband Jesse James now that he has moved his family to Austin, Texas.

Their newly purchased homes are just 13 miles apart and Bullock’s two restaurants (Bess Bistro and Walton’s Fancy & Staple) are situated less than 2 miles from Jesse James‘ own Austin Speed Shop.

The close knit community that Austin is known for may create problems for the former couple, who are bound to cross paths in the city, whether they plan to do so or not.

Fame

Sandra Bullock will sit down with Matt Lauer on the Today Show next week! On Tuesday she will sit down with Matt in New Orleans.

She’s had a heck of a year. She won an Oscar for her performance in The Blind Side – and days later news broke that her husband of five years, Jesse James, had been unfaithful. In April she announced that she had adopted a baby boy from New Orleans, 3 1/2 month old Louis Bardot.

Source

Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks, both Oscar winners, have signed on to star in a movie about a nine-year-old boy who loses his father in the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is adapted from a 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Bullock and Hanks will play the boy’s parents, while the role of the boy, Oskar Schell has not yet been cast.

Bullock and Hanks are in talks to play the boy’s parents, with producers currently searching for a child to play the lead, Oskar Schell, in preparation for a mid-to-late January shoot in New York City. It’s a plum role, as the story orbits around Schell, a precociously intelligent, tambourine-playing vegan, scientist, artist and pacifist, and his search for a lock that matches a mysterious key left behind by his father.

However, Thompson suggests the movie will feature multiple narrators and time frames, and there is also a segue in which the child’s grandparents reveal how they met and married during the second world war. Studios Paramount and Warner Bros are teaming up on the project, with Scott Rudin, the Oscar-winning producer of No Country for Old Men, also in the frame. Together, Daldry and Rudin delivered best actress wins for Nicole Kidman in The Hours and Kate Winslet in The Reader, so the film looks like potent awards season bait.

Source

PICS: Here she is today with her bodyguard shopping at an antique store in Austin, Texas.