Global swarming

THE Toronto International Film Festival always used to remind me of a celebrity petting zoo. Stroll down one of the major boulevards in Yorkville during the 10-day festival and you were bound to see someone like Charlize Theron window-shopping or Colin Farrell copping a smoke on a street corner. You'd nod, he or she would smile back, and you'd have an "I was chatting with so-and-so" story for the cousins back in Buffalo.

Not anymore. This year on the streets, sleek cheetahs like Keira Knightley and Brad Pitt were nowhere to be found -- let alone fed by hand. The big stars couldn't saunter around the city as they'd done in years past. And there were more Shrek-sized bodyguards than ever before. It's official: TIFF has become more circus than zoo, as Canadians catch up with us on the celebrity-worship hoopla.

Case in point: Pitt sneaked into the after party for his movie "Burn After Reading" through a back door instead of facing the phalanx of paparazzi. No one -- other than looky-loos flanking the premiere's official red carpet -- had a Pitt sighting to share. At the screening for "Paris, Not France," the documentary about Paris Hilton, the socialite didn't even stick around for the Q&A that followed. Instead, she and beau Benji Madden made a break for it, and festival volunteers had to link hands to prevent her from being mobbed by paparazzi and pedestrians. (It's a sad day indeed when the Paris-fever pandemic spreads to a seemingly sound country like Canada.)

"This is the first year that I have noticed more paparazzi around," says Julianne Moore, in town for her film "Blindness." "They're out on the street now, which is new."

Indeed, the shutterbug quotient was up at the 33rd annual TIFF, where 249 feature films screened. One photographer told me that wire services and tabloids advertised for local lensmen to nab shots of attending talent such as Renee Zellweger and Anne Hathaway.

"They recruited paparazzi this year for candid shots of celebrities," says John Densky, standing poised with his camera outside a hotel. He was shooting for the Associated Press this time around and noted that the ultimate coup was a shot of Jennifer Aniston -- known among the paps this year as "the big JA." (Presumably for the value of a shot, not for her dress size.)