(CNN) -- Charlize Theron won an Oscar for covering up her beauty and finding grains of sympathy, as well as revulsion, for the serial killer Aileen Wuornos in "Monster." 

She deserves to win a second nomination for playing the sexy, unmoored, utterly reprehensible Mavis Gary in "Young Adult." Mavis is one of those people blessed with good looks, talent and brains, but whose sense of entitlement far outstrips any civilized social boundaries. She's a pure narcissist, oblivious to other people's feelings and contemptuous of any experience that doesn't feed her own ego. In other words, Mavis is another monster, but a monster who can pass for beautiful with only a couple of hours in the salon. 

As we know (you see it spread all over the supermarket tabloids every week), there's a perverse thrill in watching one of the beautiful people fall apart. And there's some of that same schadenfreude in play while watching the new black comedy from the "Juno" combo, writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman. 

Mavis is a ghostwriter for a successful young adult book series, and even that minor claim to fame is soon to be extinguished: The series is played out and the novel she is working on will be the last of them. Perhaps that's why she feels compelled to head back home when she receives an e-mail from an ex-boyfriend, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), announcing the birth of his first child. Figuring, very, very, wrongly, that this message must be some kind of coded cry for help, Mavis hops into her Mini and heads straight to Mercury, Minnesota, where she grew up, and where she means to reconnect with Buddy and free him from his domesticated servitude. 
What was Aileen known for
as well as revulsion, for the serial killer Aileen Wuornos 