The only way to say it is to just say it...from Page Six:

Now that reality TV has enabled previously untelevised occupations like "extreme carpenter," "Top Model finder," and "Donald Trump" to regularly score their own shows, the overall fame-whoring level in town (already the fame-whoring capital of the world) has been elevated to even more ludicrous levels. If there's a camera nearby, you're not even safe when you're going under the knife. From blogging,la:

· Will someone just please pick a new fucking James Bond already so we don't have to read yet another "Who will be the next Bond?" piece, especially one that cheekily evaluates the supposed candidacies of Bill Murray and Christopher Walken? [sound of self-inflicted gunshot]
· Leonardo DiCaprio may or may not have picked up a touch of the Tubbies from Tobey "The Corpulent Spider" Maguire, but this item features one of the cuter publicist denials we've read in a while.
· Hey, fat Haim!
· Ben Affleck: shepherding a new generation of actors into premature career immolation. [via dude.Man.phat.]

· Amoeba’s Home Grown Showcase at the Mint features music by unsigned artists personally picked by the people gracious enough to only occasionally laugh at you when you ask them where the Coldplay section is. If that's not enough of a reason to turn up, tonight's show will also benefit musician Dax Pierson, who was recently paralyzed in a bus accident while touring.
· Loveline host/Adam Carolla enabler Dr. Drew Pinsky lectures about Understanding Work Addictions at Le Meridien. For the record, it's not technically a "work addiction" if your evil Hungarian blogmaster chains you to the computer and barks that you "Produce! Produce!" for 10 hours a day. Just sayin'.
· Have absolutely no desire to see the gawdawful remake of The Amityville Horror? The New Beverly is playing the original's sequel, Amityville II: The Possession, which is assuredly ten times more enjoyable (though decidedly less abtastic), as part of the Grindhouse Film Festival.

Yes, we know that the "honor" of a star on the Walk of Fame is essentially meaningless and available to anyone willing to write a check (they may even accept payment directly in crack rocks at this point), but that realization doesn't stop the burning, the horrible burning:

Defamer apologizes for agreeing with yesterday's NYT headline for their profile of acclaimed actor Dustin Hoffman. Clearly, Hoffman is displaying an acceptable amount of effort late in his career, as evidenced in the DVD outtakes for Meet the Fockers:

We present the latest in our continuing series of reports on the nutritional and/or dining habits of Hollywood's preternaturally gifted, moppet-flavor-of-the-minute, Dakota Fanning:

Following agent Steve Dontanville's "abdication of the queen's throne" (queen imagery his, not ours) at William Morris last week, perky superstar Reese Witherspoon has canned the agency. (It must be such a relief for the WMA gang to have someone fire them for non-magazine related reasons! Do you think they had cake?) Witherspoon's on the cutting edge of the new, agent-dumping hotness, in which stars dismiss their reps without lacerating themselves and submerging their bloody bodies into another ten-percent shark tank. Trailblazing daredevils such as Bruce Willis (CAA), Ice Cube (same), and Halle Berry (WMA) have all recently jettisoned their extraneous agent cargo, bravely making a go of their careers with a tiny support system of managers, lawyers, and publicists. They are heroes for a new era—at least until they give up and sign with ICM or Endeavor...or go running back to their old shops for some sloppy make-up sex.

During promotion for the looming cinematic disaster that will be A Lot Like Love, Ashton Kutcher unburdens himself of the the tale of his half-assed, failed attempt to join the Mile High Club:

· The Cannes line-up features established directors such as David Cronenberg, Wim Wenders, Atom Egoyan, Jim Jarmusch, Gus Van Sant, and Lars Von Trier. Von Trier will be shunned at the opening night gala, when he kills a donkey just to show off for his peers. [Variety]
· Breaking! Actors still love easy voiceover paychecks! Nick Nolte, William Shatner, Steve Carell, Avril Lavigne,
Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Wanda Sykes and Allison Janney sign on to voice the DreamWorks animated feature Over the Hedge. [THR]
· The NFL goes feces-flinging insane, moving Monday Night Football to ESPN, while giving the Sunday night game to sports-starved NBC. [Variety]
· The Parents Television Council finds more to complain about, bitching that broadcasters do a bad job of properly labeling the violence and smut content (i.e., the good parts) of their shows. [THR]
· Disney makes up the absolutely darling title of "Chief Creative Officer" for marketing exec Oren Aviv. We love it when marketing people start thinking they're creative! It's so darn cute! [Variety]
· Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, and Jake Gyllenhaal sign up for David Fincher's Zodiac, a serial killer flick for Paramount and Warner Brothers. Beware: the entire film could collapse from its critical mass of hunky dreaminess. [Variety]

OK, maybe we're a little bit caught up in the excitement of today's Popeapalooza, but berproducer Scott Rudin admitted to the LAT that he'll be exiting the New Paramount™ to help revitalize the Weinstein-Free Miramax™ (and make movies for Disney's other studios, Touchstone and Walt Disney Pictures, as well). Perhaps it's fitting that this story broke today; Disney really needed to find someone who puts the fear of God in his sheep the way that Harvey Weinstein did for years at The 'Max.

It's Joseph Ratzinger! Or, as we like to call him, Benedict XVI.

While we wait for the name of the new pope—and more importantly, a fitting third-act resolution to the Pope John Paull II story so that CBS can finally cast Ben Kingsley as the deceased pontiff and rush the inevitable miniseries into production—we think it goes without saying that Les Moonves would do a bang-up job as the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church. We know, he's a darkhorse candidate, but we have a really good feeling about this one.

We're very, very disappointed that Natasha Lyonne failed to show up on time for a Monday court appearance, resulting in an arrest warrant and a flurry of news stories reminding us how she allegedly "banged on the door of her neighbor, stormed into the apartment and ripped a mirror from the wall," and then supposedly, poetically said, "I'm going to sexually molest your dog." We'd always assumed that if a situation arose where a second-tier American Pie kid was engaging in this sort of questionable, newsmaking behavior (with optional dog-diddling threats), it would involve Tara Reid, a Spider Club bathroom stall, and a baker's dozen of Red Bull and vodka cocktails.

Chris Tucker got popped in Georgia for running his Bentley at a breezy 109 mph, then refusing to pull over immediately when the cops displayed their displeasure with his velocity. Unfortunately, Tucker did only a half-hour of hard time before posting his own bail, long before Rush Hour buddy Brett Ratner could fly in and stage a pointlessly elaborate jail break from the sleepy McDuffie county pokey. Even so, tenacious fauxteur Ratner plans on traveling to the jail, enjoining the local force in a high-speed chase on some dusty Georgia back-roads, then
inducing a handful of squad cars to somersault through the air and needlessly explode.

· Andy Dick whips it out onstage, is ejected from a Canadian club. The funny part: It was a planned part of the act. (The whipping-out, not the throwing-out.)
· At this rate, there will be no remaining Hollywood marriages by the middle of September. Who could've imagined that Britney and K-Fed would become the new standard of marital stability?
· Everyone has his or her own way of dealing with the incredibly slow Pope-selection process.
· This blog is trying to preserve the dying art of giving cute names to common sitcom writing dilemmas.
· Casting for The Long Left Turn: The Jeff Gordon Story just got a whole lot easier.
· When Middle-Management Attacks: Lockhart Steele, Gawker Media's very own version of David Brent, muddles his way through his first day as guest Gawker co-editor in an orgy of self-linking, inside Krucoff baseball, and Spiers-baiting.

· Walter Mosley will read from his new book, Little Scarlet at the Dave Eggers Learning Annex, also known as 826LA. A discussion will follow, but if you fail to make a reservation, you'll never get anywhere near the place.
·The 3rd Monday Film Night at Art Share celebrates its first anniversary with a free film screening of Mulholland Drive. Nothing marks a year of achievement like hot lesbian action needlessly shrouded in Lynchian obscurity. That's what we've always said, anyway.
· Music Monday: Queens of the Stone Age at the Henry Fonda; Hellen Stellar plays the Viper Room; Black Halos encircle the Troubadour.

A picture of David Arquette and Courteney Cox Arquette posing for a friend's camera at baby Coco's christening landed in our inbox, say, a dozen times today, the payoff at the end of an endlessly forwarded e-mail seemingly originating from an interesting source. The internets will be lousy with the image* by the time we finish typing this sentence, but we're far more interested in the person who supposedly started the e-mail chain and the photo leak. Check out the breathless commentary from the e-mail forwards, then continue on after the jump to find out who's supposedly responsible for stimulating the internet's collective tingly parts:

If you were a little apprehensive when you heard that Robin Williams (he of the thousand characters so desperate to burst forth from his hyperactive, improvisational-genius brain that they're willing to disguise themselves as one of the four endlessly recycled, annoying entities that finally emerge from his mouth) was going to portray a retarded janitor in House of D, fear no more. He's not going to go for the Oscar-baiting approach taken by Sean Penn in I Am Sam or Juliette Lewis in The Other Sister. He's got his own ideas about how to do things, and they involve ridiculous make-up:

Defamer is happy to pass along this exciting job notice to our readers: