EVERYONE is shallow. To be honest, what my flatmates have taught me is that girls are pretty likely to "objectify" each other as well, so to speak. The boys were complaining that we always go on about male actors and things (which we do) but then my brother and I also had a chat where we agreed that Emilia Clarke (aka Danaerys from Game of Thrones) is really hot. My friends and I are just as likely to point out if a girl is hot as a guy, we're just generally shallow. To paraphrase Scrubs "We appreciate hot, regardless of gender". And guys are the same, they just tend not to talk about it as much in front of girls (in my experience) because a hardcore feminist will start getting angry about how shallow they're being. At the same time though, if we know someone and they're nice and/or clever then we'll usually bring that up too. Eg. "I met such-and-such on the bus" "Aww, they're really nice, I like such-and-such" I think the reason people talk about appearance more is because that's what we see first. If you see someone on the street you're not going to be like "Oh my god he was so intelligent". Because you literally just saw him, you didn't speak to him, there was no interaction.
Edit: To reiterate this point, I left my room to discover my flatmates have decided we need to come up with a Top 25 hottest guys list, then we realised there were too many girls we wanted to include so now we have a top 25 girls as well. And both of my parents have a celebrity that the other one teases them about, which resulted in me being forced to watch Van Helsing thanks to my mum's love of Hugh Jackman and my dad's fondness for Kate Beckinsale. There was nobody for me. :/