· "So tell me, Brandy-girl. Did you watch your brother's sex tape?" "Ew! Tyra! No! Did you?!" "No! Well, some of it." It's funnier when you watch it.
· The woman who walked around El Coyote refilling your water glasses has left the restaurant for donating $150 to Prop 8, making the business safe for your gay-wedding-reception dollars once again. Justice is served! We're so glad the person holding this tasteful sign spoke up for all of us.
· Bettie Page is in intensive care following a heart attack.
· Catherine Hardwicke's been having a bad day, so we suppose we don't want to pile on by informing you she's also the person responsible for this monstrosity. Oops—we just did.
· The Academy reversed its The Dark Knight best original score consideration disqualification: A TDK sweep is again a possibility!
· How did they make this toy monster truck rally look so much like real life? Probably because this is real life made to look like a toy monster truck rally.

This weekend's John Malkovich-hosted SNL featured a great many virable moments, if you'll indulge us the coinage of an incredibly annoying e-jective (make that two incredibly annoying coinages), but we'll set aside the toe-tapping pleasures of interslack ejaculation for a moment to focus instead on the work of Fred Armisen. Always a strong SNL soldier, Armisen's star has dimmed of late for what has been deemed a substandard Obama impression—indeed, by Obama himself.

Anne Hathaway's "type," as it were, is something of a going concern around the Defamer office these days. One man is doing hard time for essentially stealing a jet-setting lifestyle they could share, and yet another made his big gossip-page debut smeared as little more than a skirt-chasing social-climber. And in between are the principled ones who just come out and ask her: "Will you take $12,000?"

With the chance of a frostbite in LA only slightly less likely than Brian Grazer getting his hair relaxed, we pay tribute tonight to one of the great winter cities, Boston, MA. Though the "Athens of America" is known for being somewhat racist, many of our top minds (Barack Obama, Natalie Portman, Craig Bierko) studied there. Lets's take a walk down snow-covered Newbury Street, dodge some slugs and say goodbye to an old caustic friend.

With its beloved mascot swirling 'round the toilet, letting out a meager peacock "yorp" as its exhausted claws scratch helplessly at its porcelain confines, there truly was nothing left to come out of NBC HQ today we thought could possibly shock us. We were, of course, hopelessly wrong, as it is now emerging that Jay Leno—the longtime poster boy for NBC mismanagement for the way he was being forced out of his Tonight Show spot at the top of his ratings game—is being given the 10 p.m. slot on the network. Every night of the week.

Sad news: on a day that has already seen the ignominious shitcanning of Hollywood's best "cyborg dinosaurs rescue kidnapped children" franchise, word has emerged that screenwriter Eric Roth has quietly buried his unnecessary script for Forrest Gump 2 out by the old oak tree. While promoting The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Roth told Slashfilm that the sequel just didn't seem the same after 9/11 happened (what, those scenes of a digital Tom Hanks outrunning smoke and debris in Manhattan felt too soon?). The news reminded us that several years ago, we attended a talk where Roth revealed the Gump sequel's surprise twist, which he told us not to tell. Guess it doesn't matter now! Here's your before-the-jump SPOILER ALERT...

So Friday afternoon we threw together a little post trying to make sense of a power shakeup at NBC that saw Katherine Pope and a number of other NBC executives nudged out. In our typical, lightly inflammatory reporting-fashion, we headlined it, "Jeff Zucker Sends Out 'You're Fired Unless Your Name Is Ben Silverman' All-Staff NBC Memo." As of today, however, that headline is more or less accurate.

It's been far too long since we last checked in with flack-to-the-nobodies/frequent Page Six source Hal Lifson, who last showed up on our radar for pushing the absurd "scoop" that Sarah Palin would be joining Desperate Housewives (like Marcia Cross would ever let that happen!), which he somehow got into a major newspaper. Imagine our delight, then, when Lifson appeared in today's Page Six with his newest outlandish story:

The Writers Guild unveiled its 2009 TV nominees this afternoon, revealing a radical shift in taste that rotated only one new drama and two new comedies into the year's Best Series nominations — all replacing old nominees that weren't on the air this year. Let's hear it for attrition!

When we asked you which difficult doc on Grey's Anatomy doc was being punished with less screen time, you resoundingly guessed, "T.R. Knight" (with just one dissenter answering "Boo-urns"). Now, rumors are flying that Knight himself has reduced his screen time to zero by walking off the show entirely.

· If you hadn't yet heard, Tribune has filed Chapter 11, putting the LAT in serious jeopardy. You know, it just occurred to us—if the LAT folds, we're Los Angeles's #1 news source. Happy to serve you, Southland! [Variety]
· Miramax is developing Arizona, based on the 1976 car-bomb killing of an Arizona Republic reporter snooping into mob ties to state government, as a project for Ben Affleck to direct. Ben—start using the remote ignition. Terrible, we know, but we just feel better having said that. [Variety]
· ABC has ordered a pilot based on DC Comics's Fables, about various fairy tale characters living in New York. "[They'll] keep some of their trademark characteristics. For instance, Prince Charming will be handsome, while Big Bad Wolf will have to shave a four-day shadow from growing back every day." And that's just on his back! [THR]

A momentous power summit accompanied last weekend's Kennedy Center Honors, where Barbra Streisand had her first-ever audience with President George Bush. Video from the event features Streisand — a vicious Bush critic who spent much of the recent election cycle as the Obama campaign's Deputy Director of Fundraising Medleys — welcoming the outgoing president to not only within bitchslap's-length, but actually close enough to share a skin-searing bipartisan kiss.

When Lost first began, it had several things going for it including a strong premise, a diverse cast, and a series of wonderful chests. Sadly, Josh Holloway (tee-vee's "Sawyer") has decided to follow in costar Matthew Fox's lead and mess with his Abbie™-winning torso, and the results became evident this week as he shot an advertisement for Cool Water in Hawaii and revealed this strange new tattoo. Was Holloway trying to one-up Brad Pitt's inscrutable ink, or was he paying tribute to his adopted archipelago in ways that will surely undergo some tectonic shifting over the next decade? A second picture awaits after the jump for those inclined to study the evidence — we're too busy engineering a frantic, preventative letter-writing campaign aimed at Naveen Andrews (no, Sayid, those nipple rings will not look good on camera).

After three little earthquakes over the weekend (sadly not of the Tori Amos variety) left no major damage, we feel confident in saying that the apocalyptic front that moved in offshore has safely exited the Southland and is now wreaking havoc on Scottsdale or Tucson. Let those Snowbirds deal with it, you need to find a new director for your vampire movies. Your astrological B.O. predictions after the jump.

The employees of Tribune Co. have plenty of reasons to be infuriated today—they're the ones who own the company through their Employee Stock Ownership Plan, not Sam Zell, who put just $315 million of his own money into last year's $8 billion deal that gave him control of the company. But the bankruptcy filing contains one detail that stands out as the unkindest cut of all: Tribune still owes $11.2 million to the former CEO of Times-Mirror (which Tribune bought in 2000) Mark Willes—a man most famous for massive layoffs and an ethical scandal of historic proportions:

There are two Paula Abduls: The first, a fierce and focused businesswoman, overseeing a growing multimedia empire bolstered by her stratospheric visibility on American Idol. The other is tanked, and the one we actually care about. You rarely get just one or the other, mind you, but instead a glorious spectrum of increasingly blurry...how do you say...shades of Paula.

There's something about that wily British press that can extract a flat-out mea culpa from interview subjects where hundreds of American journalists have tried and failed. Frost did it with Nixon, and now the Daily Mail does it with Lynne Spears, mother of Britney. No doubt, a ragtag group of journalists and producers got together for months poring over their strategy, and now, finally, they have given Lynne the cross-examination she never had, producing the apology an entire country had been clamoring for:

The last thing we expected on our trip to the Arclight yesterday afternoon to catch a little Frost-on-Nixon action (who knew the most unlikely love story of awards season would be the smoldering, Burns/Smithers combustion going down between Kevin Bacon and Frank Langella? Sheesh—get a room, you two. And don't record it!) was to stumble upon Hermione Granger herself, aka Emma Watson, dressed up like something of a red carpet premierebot in high heels and a posterior-showcasing dress for the debut of The Tale of Despereaux.

Nobody should have to die to stop a bad idea from becoming a reality in Hollywood. Nevertheless, it happens, as producer Frank Marshall alluded Sunday during the junket for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where a long-gestating sequel-of-a-sequel-of-a-sequel rumor was extinguished for good.

John Krasinski is a true renaissance man: in addition to his work on The Office, he can count a Sundance directorial debut and a facility for Muppet arms to his credit. Still, one thing that may need a little more work is his incipient singing career, which he humbly debuted this past weekend in Los Angeles.