KEY POINTS:
TORONTO - Strolling across the red carpet, Scarlett Johansson flashes a smile to adoring fans, poses for photos - and if you were smart enough to draft the actress for your fantasy fashion team, earns you 35 points.
The Fantasy Fashion League, an online contest, is adapted from fantasy sports leagues, in which about 16 million Americans build virtual teams of real athletes who earn points based on their performance in real games.
In the Fashion Fantasy League, celebrities and designers earn points every time they grace the cover of a magazine, walk down the red carpet, or appear at an awards show.
The more exposure your players receive, the more points you earn -- and with awards season well underway, the top celebrity scorers so far are Beyonce with 565 points followed by Jessica Simpson and Nicole Richie with Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld heading the designer category.
British actress Helen Mirren, however, is proving to be a surprisingly good scorer this season with 225 points, having won the Screen Actors Guild Award for best actress for playing Queen Elizabeth II in "The Queen" which has also won her an Oscar nomination.
The founder of the game, Erica Salmon, came up with the idea of the Fantasy Fashion League after playing in her husband's fantasy football league for a season.
"(I realized that) this game would be great if I was following something that I already follow, like fashion," Salmon told Reuters.
"High-end fashion is typically a spectator sport, for people like me, but we've figured out a way to really give all kinds of people access to this world that we typically don't have access to. For me that's success."
Fantasy Fashion League, launched in September 2005, now has almost 18,000 users in over 35 countries.
Most fantasy seasons start off with players getting together to select their teams by drafting players to their roster in a predetermined order, also known as the draft.
The Fashion Fantasy League is no different.
"People love the draft and have parties. These women come in with all of these notes and say: "My husband said I should get Calvin Klein"," Salmon said.
Once a player has selected a team they have to decide who will be on their starting roster and who will sit on the 'bench' with only 10 starting spots open and up to 14 players on your team.
"If you want to, you can change your line-up every day, which 99 per cent of the people do," Salmon said.
By the time of the Academy Awards on Feb 26, the player who has accumulated the most overall points is the winner.
Salmon's husband couldn't be happier about the success of the Fantasy Fashion League.
"My husband is always telling people that the Fantasy Fashion League is saving marriages because now I don't care how much time he is researching on fantasy football," she said.
- REUTERS
