Christina's Whirl By: Kristen Baldwin

Now that she's won the Grammy for Best New Artist, Christina Aguilera is ready to prove herself in some new ways. The 19-year-old recently sat down with EW Online and chatted about her plans for her second album, a possible film project, and... life as a college coed? So where's your Grammy? It is still being shipped -- probably in the mail. They totally trick you; you walk off stage and they're like, ''OK, thank you very much!'' [and take it away]. I'm like, ''Rip off!'' When I get it, though, it's going to be amazing, it's going to go on my mommy's mantle... When my manager, Steve Kurtz, first took me on, he was going to the Grammys that year. I was like 15 or 16 years old and he came back and he framed his Grammy ticket and it was like ''Wow!'' to me. On the ticket he wrote, ''One day you'll be holding the same ticket as a nominee for Best New Artist.'' We're going to put that right next to my Grammy for Best New Artist. You've sure come up in the world. I hear there are two different Christina Aguilera dolls in stores now. I just crack up about it. It's a trip for me. I cringe a little bit when I see [one of them], because it's not that cute. We're going to try to get it to look a little bit more like me because I'm kind of unhappy about it right now. But I thought it was something cool that young girls and collectors could get into. Is there anything else you want to do in your life besides singing? I don't know, I'm so focused. Even in my off time I'm writing or I'm being creative in another way. I thrive on creativity, so I'd probably do something artistic. I've considered psychology actually, as a college major. It always fascinated me how the mind works. I kind of studied it the last two years of high school. Do you want to go to college? Possibly. It could be cool just to see what it's like. I'm not sure. People go to college basically to do what they want to do with their lives, and I'm doing it [already]. Speaking of that, what are your ideas for your second album? I definitely want to take it to the next level and just have it be really experimental, [using] a lot of different musical styles. I want to do duets with people maybe the public wouldn't expect me to. I definitely want rap artists to appear on it -- I love Eve as a rapper, I love Jay-Z -- there are so many out there... I [also] wanna hit a little harder with the R&B thing. The next album will have a cover of my favorite Etta James song, ''At Last,'' that'll be a hidden track. And I want to touch on blues a bit, which is my biggest influence. [I want to] really go off and belt it out and be as soulful as I want to be. How about branching out into film? You're already getting lots of offers -- what types of characters are they? A couple have come in for singers -- movies about [someone] who's bartended her whole life and has a dream of becoming a singer. It might be cool to play sort of a biography part like that, something that I could relate to, that would be a lot like my life story. But I also want to play a really intricate character, a character with depth -- probably the furthest thing from a teen pop artist. Unless it was like a biographical [story] -- because some teen pop artists can be very intricate. [laughs] To Top