Yesterday I saw a preview for the new movie “Next,” and based on the short trailer I have to guarantee it at least four Oscars. This includes one for costume design to whomever decided Nicolas Cage should wear the same semi-mullet as the guy in the FedEx commercials. In case you don’t know, the plot of this Philip K. Dick adaptation involves Cage running around in a suede jacket, narrowly avoiding death as he gets punched in the face by visions of the near future. One scene involves Cage and a train racing toward a railway crossing when Cage has a premonition of his car being smashed by the train. What does he do? He drives faster and avoids the train. This is a brilliant use of superpower; I never would have thought of that.

While I was watching this preview I came to the sick realization that Cage is currently the biggest action movie star in America. Not only does he already have two blockbusters released in 2007, but also he has several other projects on the horizon including a sequel to “National Treasure” and a movie called “Bangkok Dangerous” (every morning when I wake up I pray that this is not pornography). How did this happen? How does a lanky 40-something balding man get to capture audiences by driving fast and blowing things up? Where is the muscle-bound foreign action star that likes bicep curls more than sex?

This is a rhetorical question. He lives in a mansion in Sacramento and rules California.

Unfortunately all of my favorite childhood movie stars are too old to do action movies or have moved on to other things. Stallone was good, but now his old man muscles look so unnatural that they should be locked in an undersea vault so that they stop giving small children nightmares. Tom Cruise carried the torch for a while, but then his body got pod-snatched. Wesley Snipes made “Blade,” one of my all-time favorite movies, but then he made “Blade Trinity.”

Somehow Cage has outlasted these people. Could it be because he made hit movies like “The Wicker Man,” “Matchstick Men” or “The Weather Man”? Could it be because every third movie he makes has “man” or “men” in the title? My theory is every time he acts in a hit movie, he gets carried by someone else. Sean Connery was in “The Rock”; “Con Air” had an all-star cast; “Snake Eyes” had Gary Sinise, and “Face/Off” co-starred John Travolta (a stretch, I know). Cage is the Tony Kucoc of Hollywood. He’s an excellent sixth man playing behind Jordan and Pippen, but when it comes time for him to start he’ll make a movie like “The Family Man” (another creative title).

Yet Cage persists, and he’ll be here for a while. All that being said, I would like to leave you with a few pearls of business wisdom that Governor Schwarzenegger gave the contestants of “The Apprentice”:

“Pain is only temporary, but what is on that film is permanent.”