Though she's had limited success retaining acting jobs or remarking about our nation's first "colored" president, it's comforting to know that Lindsay Lohan still has one thing left she can excel at: penning Myspace blogs. Still, even Lohan is aware that Myspace is so 2006, and thus, she's attempted to join the mass migration to Facebook. Sadly, Facebook promptly deleted her account, prompting Lohan to flee back to Myspace for an anti-Facebook rant (which, like any anti-Facebook rant, would not be complete without a complaint about the site's new redesign):

· Shia LaBeouf will star in an adaptation of John Grisham's The Associate, which is about a Yale Law School undergrad who takes a job at a shady law firm, gets in over his head, then ends up getting chased down a long stretch of abandoned highway by a single car for some reason. We understand they are writing his mangled pinkie nail into the plot, the result of a gavel mishap in moot court. [Variety]
· Courtney B. Vance and Jack Davenport will star in Flash Forward, the ABC pilot in which the world blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds, and slowly learns it slept with the cankled girl from accounts receivable in the parking garage after the Christmas party. [THR]
· What if you threw a big, sweeping, historical epic and not even the people it's about bothered to show up? We hate to say this, but we're beginning to think Baz Lurhmann should have added Australian pop classics and made it a musical. The whole thing is based on that Men at Work song, anyway. ("I met a strange lady, she made me nervous / She took me in and gave me breakfast" etc...) [Variety]

The co-writer and producer of last summer's X Files: I Want to Believe has a theory about why the film flopped with $21 million — one you might expect from someone who writes about aliens, but which surprises nevertheless.

As the Oscar derby reaches its Winslet-duelling, Australia-gutting heights, there are only a handful of films that can survive. We've had a look at the current conventional wisdom, and here are three rising Oscar contenders that could stand to have a few holes poked in them. (Some spoilers for the synopsis-averse may ensue.)

Because when it comes to melodramatic Lost promos set to the essential catalogue of The Fray—the soundtrack of our lives, really—too much is never enough, we bring you the seventh Lost trailer, featuring some rearranged footage you've already seen and that song you love so much! (This one doesn't actually feature the band, though fret not: We understand they do crash land on the magically reappearing island, where they are swiftly put to work putting out a subpar Nickelback single every 108 minutes—or everything will explode!) In case you've forgotten where we've left off last season, giant, swooshing intertitles helpfully remind us that "6 WERE RESCUED...THE REST...WE HAVE NO F&*%@ING CLUE BUT HOPEFULLY WE'LL GET THAT SORTED OUT." Needless to say, we're so there—hairy-chested Jack or not. [Lost]

Awards season's most reliably confusing nominations broke this morning, with the 2008 Independent Spirit Award nods recognizing everything and everyone from Anne Hathaway to Towelhead to Woody Allen and self-distributed Sundance darlings.

With just a little over a month before Fox parts the 200-foot-high bamboo gates of Karaoke Island and unleashes their gargantuan ratings beast upon an eager-to-be-trampled public, the American Idol publicity machine is in full swing.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, we suppose: Sneak celebrities' medical records to the National Enquirer, collect $4,700 and quietly go back to your day job knowing you helped a venerable journalistic institution uphold its mission of transparency and insight into the fraught conditions of Britney Spears, Farrah Fawcett and others. But that was then, and this — a guilty plea and a possible 10-year prison sentence for tabloid source Lawanda Jackson — is now.

· We think we have the perfect actor to play Gordon Gekko in the Wall Street remake: recession-proof market tycoon Josh Brolin.
· So we have an almost complete list of Barbara Walters's 10 Most Fascinating People of 2008: Two scientos, two redneck sex symbols, a Vanity Fair covergirl, a pregnant man, and Frank Langella. Simply...*spoken in an urgent whisper* fascinating.
· Tom Cruise is "building a replica of the LA Lakers’ Staples Centre basketball court in the Beckhams’ garden for the soccer ace and his sons Brooklyn, nine, Romeo, six, and Cruz, three," says unsourced internet report.
· LOL! You've got your cross on upside down! Silly.
· We killed a lot of time playing with this Lego Miniman web app. Enjoy the fruits of our labors here, or make one of your own.
· As Chinese Democracy has shown us, rock criticism is in dire need of a synonym for "banshee."

Union Breakers: As alluded to here by commenters on the town's latest labor strife, SAG president Alan Rosenberg and CSI star Marg Helgenberger have announced their split after 19 years of marriage. "They love and respect each other and remain committed to their family," their spokesman said in statement released over the weekend; the couple have an 18-year-old son named Hugh and are expecting their first strike together some time this winter. [People]

Now that Meryl Streep's career renaissance has been buffeted by a pair of blockbuster chick flicks, the actress has begun feeling her oats, readying Hollywood for a new reign of Meryl (all agents are required to learn at least two foreign accents) and punishing the dissenters. In a new LAT profile, the actress mocks both Universal ("The smart guys banked on Hellboy to carry them throughout the year. The Mamma Mia! wagon is pulling all those movies that didn't have any problem getting made") and Fox head Tom Rothman, whose nasal voice Streep nails. Still, the empowered star's boldest move is perhaps her most terrifying, as Female First reveals:

We're not sure which of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief we've hit in our consideration of Beverly Hills Cop 4. Denial and anger seem ages ago, as does bargaining. And a script review appearing online today has us skipping depression altogether for what we suppose is something akin to acceptance — if you call "believing there is actually a studio cynical enough to greenlight this with Brett Ratner behind the camera" acceptance, or if that just throws us back to the beginning again. Help us sort it out, will you?

CBS's comedy power block (The Big Bang Theory through Worst Week) is all repeats tonight, so that leaves an opening for Britney Spears and Christina Applegate to attempt to reconnect with their pasts. Look for lots of mid-season cliff-hangers, series conclusions (Pushing Daisies, Boston Legal), and holiday specials this month. Also, begin the loin-girding process for a spring of American Idol.

· The Movies play Spaceland, big band awesomeness The Herbaliser plays the Echoplex, while The Hanson Brothers are upstairs at the Echo! (The Canadian punk band, not the "Mmbop" ones.)
· Denis Leary answers all your questions regarding his new book, Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid, at Book Soup. Hopefully nothing in that sentence will earn the commenting ire of a nation of fierce Learyites.
· Colleen Dunn Bates and a cast of foodie thousands guide you through their brand new L.A. restaurant atlas, EAT: Los Angeles. At Vroman's.

Holding Out for a Hero: Sure, Transporter 3 features a scene where Jason Statham takes off his clothes so he can hit bad guys with his shirt, but is that gay? Yes! says series mastermind Louis Letterier. "If you watch the movie and you know he's gay, it becomes so much more fun," Leterrier told the LAT. "Action fans in general are pretty homophobic. You see these tough guys who say, 'The Transporter, that's such a great movie!' If they only knew they're really cheering for a new kind of action hero." Sadly, Letterier handed off the Transporter 3 reins to the amazingly named Olivier Megaton, who added a very heterosexual make-out scene for Statham. "Haha, I haven’t seen it," Letterier said in response. "I can’t wait." [LAT]

Courting Controversy. When the question is, "How long is long enough before it isn't considered too insensitive to present the side-by-side you've been dying to post since William Balfour was first identified as a person of interest in the nightmarish Jennifer Hudson family killings?" we're afraid the answer is, "There exists no sufficient length of time." With news that Hudson's estranged brother-in-law was finally arrested today, however, we could resist no longer. [Yahoo/AP]

Back when Arianna Huffington founded the Huffington Post, she promised a blogging free-for-all where Washington D.C.'s best and brightest would rub virtual shoulders with megawatt Hollywood movie stars. Three years later, the site's political promise has been fulfilled, but HuffPo can boast little in the way of celebrities aside from ponderings written by the other brother on Wings, pre-emptive "I Didn't Do the Nanny" missives from Rob Lowe, and the occasional drop-in by Charlotte's husband from Sex and the City. And then, for some reason, there is Candy Spelling.

Nottingham Lives: Mere days after we moved our old Nottingham files to the basement, leave it to Brian Grazer to revive talk of his presumed-dead Robin Hood retelling for another round of casting speculation. To wit: It'll make everything easier if Russell Crowe just plays all the roles himself. "[W]hat Robin Hood does is he sees Nottingham in battle very early in the movie and Nottingham dies," Grazer told MTV News. "And Robin Hood takes over the identity of Nottingham. That's how it plays out." Call it a spoiler alert, if films opening 10 years from now can have such things. [MTV]

Just days after we learned the kinda-sorta true details of a secret summit called by SAG president Alan Rosenberg and attended by the A-list dons of Hollywood's acting Cosa Nostra, tensions between the union and producers have reached a rolling boil. With 120,000 strike-authorization ballots being readied for mailing—each sealed individually by the scarred, arid tongue of Rosenberg himself—both sides have issued blistering written attacks accusing the other of the kind of selfishness typically associated with junket reporters asking innocuous questions of Philip Seymour Hoffman. First came a Rosenberg-penned missive on Thanksgiving eve, in which the blustery thespians' rights crusader rebuked producers for relying on that old "there's a gigantic recession coming" excuse:

The Oscar-blog circus officially opened its third, classiest ring today at the NY Times, where David Carr returned for a fourth go-around as The Carpetbagger. Not to be outdone, resident Envelope clown Tom O' Neil honked out a new batch of hype, followed by another cluster of animals trotting around the tent with prognostication tricks of their own. It's a loud, occasionally aromatic free-for-all, but we'll show you where best to watch after the jump.