TMZ quickly corrected a brief e-mail blast mix-up about the identity of the actress who lost a home in last night's Malibu fire, but the tragic conflagration did seem to have an evil sentience that targeted fellow performers who reached the height of their popularity in the late 70s and early 80s, claiming the oceanfront house of Three's Company star and Thighmaster mogul Suzanne Somers, and singeing the property of Dallas' Victoria Principal. In the interest of maintaining the kind of admirable positivity displayed by Somers in the wake of her property loss, we note that as of the time of this post, the nefarious blaze seems to have not affected any of the original cast of Charlie's Angels, a fact in which fans of the biggest TV hits of decades past can take some comfort.

We honestly thought that yesterday's epic post updating the latest developments in the Rosie vs. Donald feud (her kids are upset/he only called her a fat pig a couple of times/his ratings are in the toilet) would be the last words we'd have to type on the subject for a while, which we now admit was a naïve presumption, especially so long as the editorship of Page Six is still walking among us. Today's lead story brings us deep into the trenches—The View's hair and makeup room—where Trump's deep-seated distaste for not-very-smart, degenerate fat pigs is tearing Rosie and Barbara Walters apart:

Mere hours after Fox shocked the world by announcing that director James Cameron had ended a decade of well-publicized indecision by choosing a project called Avatar as his long-awaited follow-up to Titanic, Paramount proudly revealed that it was getting into the M. Night Shyamalan business by hiring the master of gotcha! cinema to adapt a Nickelodeon TV series into a possible movie franchise. The name of this high-profile undertaking? You probably already see where this is going: Avatar: The Last Airbender. The projects have nothing in common except the small matter of their nearly identical titles, but both studios are already claiming sole ownership of the name, according to Var:

While Academy voters undoubtedly enjoyed watching Sacha Baron Cohen carry out his Borat junket responsibilities entirely in character, inquiring about the sexual availability of the siblings of any reporter willing to point a microphone in his direction and making the occasional straight-faced statement of solidarity with noted "anti-Jew warrior, Melvin Gibson," they probably won't be inclined to write in the name "Borat Sagdiyev" on their Oscar ballots. Realizing that Cohen would need to do some interviews as himself if he's serious about a landing a nomination, his publicists have finally convinced him to doff Borat's trademark gray suit and put aside canned references to his alter ego's proud rapist lineage and take some time to spotlight an actorly transformation so complete that even his bowel movements became prisoners of his process. Reports the LAT's Patrick Goldstein:

· A fan from the Something Awful forums donates some free Oscar stumping to Universal on behalf of Children of Men. Warning: The video contains some spoilers, so watch at your own peril. [via Risky Bix]
· Mel Gibson's beachside kingdom is currently on fire. (Well, probably not his house specifically, just the parts of Malibu he claims to own when he gets liquored up and confronts a mouthy, sugar-titted cop.)
· A TV critic apologizes to Courtney Cox after reversing his position on whether or not she's spankworthy.
· As it turns out, Angelina Jolie is totally fine with Madonna's purchase of Malawian children.
· Our blogging siblings over at Gizmodo and Kotaku are busy nerding it up at CES, while Jalopnik is covering the Detroit Auto Show. Meanwhile, as we previously hinted, we're watching The 'Bu smolder on the local news.

As of posting time, the fates of multiple feature film productions and beloved TV series—as well as Little Mosque On The Prairie and Ha!ifax Comedy Fest—hang in the balance, as ACTRA has decided to go on strike:

Actress Hilary Swank, who memorably landed an Oscar for her stirring portrayal of a woman cruelly murdered after trying to infiltrate the world of men's boxing in Million Dollar Baby Boys Don't Cry, today received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, an honor reserved for those performers with an established body of work and a studio willing to cut a $15,000 check to promote a struggling film in need of a publicity boost. Swank, never one to pass up a chance to remind the world about her meteoric rise from humble, my-trailer-wasn't-even-on-the- 'nice'-end-of-the-trailer-park beginnings to Tinseltown royalty, shared one of her cherished memories with the throng of Hollywood Boulevard tourists passing by the presentation ceremony on their way to pay five dollars to have a Polaroid taken with Skinny Spider-Man and Dirty Tickle Me Elmo:

· Music round-up: The Submarines at the Echo; Pigeon John at Safari Sam's; NOFX at House of Blues; The Broken West at Spaceland.
· Think that Goths don't like to lace up their rollerblades and spend a few hours skating in circles? Wumpskate at World of Wheels will prove you very wrong you are.
· Howard Kremer, Aziz Ansari, Greg Proops, and "To Do" Hall of Fame inductee Patton Oswalt join forces at Largo for an enchanting evening of comedy.

Citing an "unexpected breakthrough" in auteurial decision-making technology that finally allowed director James Cameron to end nearly a decade of a crippling reluctance to name his big-screen follow-up to all-time box office record holder Titanic, Fox this afternoon announced that Cameron had chosen live-action/motion capture animation hybrid Avatar as his next project, now slated for release in the summer of 2009. "But," jointly cautioned Fox Filmed Entertainment Chairmen Jim Gianopulos and Tom Rothman in a press release, "we're just happy that he made up his fucking mind and picked out a movie. Do you have any idea how long we've been waiting around for him to stop dicking around with Entourage cameos and IMAX nonsense about bioluminscent shrimp and get back to making us some money? If he delivers Avatar sometime before 2012, all will be forgiven."

We'd hoped that by last night's premiere of The Apprentice: LA we'd have already seen an end to the ugly feud between notoriously media-shy and soft-spoken nemeses Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell, allowing us to fully devote our rapt attentions upon the West Coast adventures of the Manhattan land baron and his Slovenian trophy succubus. Sadly, however, the fat jokes and combover cracks continue to be lobbed from either side (best single development: In Touch Weekly's probably fictitious report of Trump frenemy Martha Stewart sending O'Donnell a bouquet of roses with a note attached reading, "Be careful of pricks"), with nary an olive branch offering in sight. On The View today, O'Donnell had this to say about Trump's merciless jabs at her weight (video available courtesy of BestWeekEver.tv):

Prompted by TMZ.com's late Friday afternoon posting of a video documenting Lindsay Lohan's speedy release from the hospital just a day after undergoing surgery to remove a superfluous internal organ (i.e., any one not involved in the metabolizing of alcoholic beverages), we wondered aloud about the customary recovery time for an imaginary appendectomy. But based on this trio of Lohan sightings submitted by our readers, the actress bested even the most optimistic fake-surgery prognosis, hitting the town as early as Friday night in a display of rapid healing that would make the impervious cheerleader from Heroes jealous:

· The National Society of Film Critics have a few surprises, including naming Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth as their best picture, and awarding best supporting actor to Mark Wahlberg for The Departed—rendering that creepy thing with eyeballs on his palms crushed for being overlooked once again. [Backstage]
· The Visual Effects Society Awards announced their nominees, with Best Single Visual Effect of the Year category going to sequences from Children of Men, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Poseidon, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Borat's nude wrestling scene, which, suprisingly, was accomplished by placing thousands of mapping nodes all over Sacha Baron Cohen and actor Ken Davitian's naked bodies, then later adding folds of hairy, lifelike manflesh through cutting-edge CGI techniques. [THR]
· The Palm Springs International Film Festival cannily presented an "ensemble" award to the cast of Babel, meaning for the price of one award, they got a Brad Pitt, a Cate Blanchett, and a Rinko Kikuchi and Adriana Barraza thrown in free of charge. [Desert Sun]
· The Online Film Critics Society named United 93 best picture, Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker best actors, and Little Children's Jackie Earle Haley and Little Miss Sunshine's Abigail Breslin rounding out the supporting categories for their pedophile/pageant-princess-pedophile-bait roles. [Variety]
· The National Board of Review will award Deepa Mehta their vaguely named Freedom of Expression Award tomorrow for her film Water. [CBC.ca]

With Steven Spielberg pushing back his plans for Lincoln in order to get Indiana Jones 4 done before arthritis finally robs Harrison Ford of his whip-cracking abilities, Liam "Honest Abe" Neeson ceases his beard-fittings, freed up to take a job starring in Luc Besson's kidnapping drama Taken. [Variety]
Foreigners love Ben Stiller! Night at the Museum leads the international box office for a second straight weekend with $29.8 million. [THR]
Buoyed by a brief cameo appearance by a convincingly lifelike animatronic version of the show's superannuated namesake, the Ryan Seacrest-hosted Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve trounces Carson Daly, MTV, and Fox's ball-dropping offerings. [Variety]
Eight-year-old Bindi Irwin, precocious offspring of recently deceased Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin, will kick off her American TV career this week, appearing on The Ellen Degeneres Show and The Late Show, where she will grapple with a variety of tiny (but deadly) reptiles to promote her new show, Bindi, the Jungle Girl. [THR]
NBC Universal TV lures Without a Trace creator Hank Steinberg away from Warner Bros. TV with a "pricey" (read: "fuckload of money") overall deal. [THR]

Today's LAT introduces us to Sons of Hollywood, A&E's groundbreaking attempt to have television cameras follow around the spoiled offspring of Los Angeles as they eat at the hottest restaurants, blow rails in the most exclusive nightclub bathroom stalls, and generally engage in any other activities that might lead a person to compare its subjects' lives to the more interesting, fictional ones depicted on Entourage. Meet your Sons: the Fast-Talking Baby Mogul, Rod Stewart's Recovering-Addict Son, and The Kid Aaron Spelling Didn't Love Enough To Give A Hit TV Show, courtesy of a night out at Koi and Area with the Times:

The sands are draining from the hourglass counting down Anna Nicole Smith's last few days before a court-ordered paternity test determines who really fathered Dannielynn, her earmarked-for-doom infant daughter. With feasible options quickly running out—one ill-conceived plan involved rolling Howard K. Stern into the testing center in a giant baby carriage, disguised in a pink onesie with a baseball-sized binky in his mouth—Smith is now resorting to creative accounting to make sure former boyfriend Larry Birkhead gets nowhere near the J. Howard Marshall inheritance money she's still fighting for in court. Reports The Scoop:

In an upcoming interview with the UK edition of Elle, occasional actress and globe-trotting orphan collector Angelina Jolie admits that she has a special fondness for the members of her multicultural brood that she carefully hand-selected from the Third World's finest baby bazaars, telling the magazine that she finds it easier to open her heart to Cambodian Maddox and Ethiopian Zahara than to biological daughter Shiloh, the genetically perfect, still-amorphous baby-blob rendered totally, like, boring by her privileged birth:

Your heaping Monday morning helping of the still-steaming weekend box office results:

· Britney Spears nods off into the New Year, but promises her fans that bigger, vagina-ier things are coming. Adriaaaan!
· Lindsay Lohan's appendix isn't adequite.
· The SAG nominees, and your one-stop, lesser awards shopping.
· Indiana Jones and the Assisted Living Community of Doom is finally a go.
· PGA rules mean Brad Grey's extra-curricular activities might keep him off any too-high podiums this awards season.
· Vanessa Minnillo's solid fucking gold New Year's performance was five seconds too soon.
· Counting backwards with Tara Reid on New Year's Eve is likely to give you some fuzzy math.
· Justin Timberlake and his box-contents need some space.
· Megan Mullally joins Tony Danza in failed former sitcom star talk show heaven.
· Sandy Cohen, we think we'll miss you most of all.
· Courtney Love pledges to have the giant "WELCOME" tattoo across her torso removed in 2007.

· In the grand tradition of the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop, our music-blogging siblings over at Idolator have compiled the truly impressive Jackin' Pop critic's poll. We get tired even thinking about how much work it must have been to count up 500 ballots.
Perhaps a reader with a fake medical background can enlighten us: How long does it take the average actress to recover from an imaginary appendectomy?
Sad: We were sure that Marilyn Manson would be able to make love stay this time.
We really, really want Pubes Aid to be real, but we've been hurt too many times before by anonymous Nigerian e-mailers offering the mounted curlies of the famous to get our hopes up too high. [via Adrants]

We at Defamer love little in life more than when one of our readers goes through the trouble of eroding a famous person's privacy in a trivial way by surreptitiously snapping a blurry cameraphone image while they're in the act of doing something utterly mundane. (Stars, after all, are just like Us! Except with millions more dollars and an entire industry dedicated to documenting their every fart.) Our latest citizen paparazzo caught Shark actor James Woods by an LAX baggage claim on Tuesday; sadly, Woods was not accompanied by age-inappropriate snuggle-buddy/niece-like companion Ashley Madison, robbing us of an opportunity to make a gratuitous joke about how he might have patiently explained the difference between this kind of carousel ("I'm sorry, the horsies are never coming around, baby.") and the one in Griffith Park he used to take her to when she was 5.