We're already a year old, and we still look fabulous.

PL debuted last year in our first college issue, and what a year it's been.

We noted, listed and ranted about all kinds of pop culture fodder. On this, our big day, we thought it would be fun to look back and see how the landscape has changed. We discovered that pop culture is like a soap opera. Jump in anytime and you can pick up on the story line.

Our evidence:

Top song 2007: Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls"

Today: Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl"

Top new film 2007:

Judd Apatow- produced "Superbad"

2008: Judd Apatow- produced "Pineapple Express"

And as MTV's Video Music Awards approach, we're again wondering whether Britney will perform. Sigh.

Documenting the wild kingdom of the teenager

When filmmaker Nanette Burstein ("The Kid Stays in the Picture") attended this year's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in April, she showed off two things: her new movie "American Teen" (opening today, see review on Page 27) and her baby bump.

"It was right before Thanksgiving," she said (about the pregnancy, not the movie). Burstein dropped the little bundle of joy, a girl, last month. "It wasn't really planned, actually. But, you know, I decided to go for it."

With Burstein, 38, now heading into the beautiful, unpredictable world of parenting, one can only suspect that, after making a movie where she follows several very different high school kids, she greets this endeavor with equal parts joy and fear.

Pop Life spoke to Burstein in April about making the movie, as well as her newest project: motherhood.

PL: So you chose Warsaw, Indiana for the movie. You didn't pick this place because it has the same name as a certain Polish town, where young kids also dealt with hellish situations at a major point in world history?

NB: No, this was just a total coincidence. I wanted to be in a place with only one high school. And I wanted it to be economically mixed. And I was trying to find small towns in the Midwest that were racially mixed, and it was tough to find.

And then we would just call. We had four states, and we would call all these high schools. We needed the school to give us unfettered access. So that was the hardest part. We found 10 schools like that. And we went down and visited all these schools and interviewed the seniors that were interested. And Warsaw happened to have the best stories, and it had a couple of good restaurants, which helped. [Laughs] Since I was going to live there for the year.

PL: You noted the lack of minority faces in your movie by having a voice-over teen say at the beginning that Warsaw is "very white, very Christian, very suburban and very conservative." But it's likely there will be audience members going, "Where are the black people? Where are the Latino people?"

NB: Well, I did look in the Midwest, which is just a very white place, I discovered. And I didn't fully comprehend -- I mean, not in the big cities, but in the smaller towns. Because that has a timelessness, like you don't have to worry about major problems like you get in urban areas.

I did a movie about young people in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn ["On the Ropes"], which had just a set of its own problems. In urban areas, you get more drug use and more alcohol use and the sexuality is more prevalent.

This was like a lower-paced life, a little bit. There were actually Latin populations. But they're illegal, the Mexicans. And they don't want to be on camera. And no convincing them otherwise. I did have a main character who was African-American, but the story didn't work out.

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