Friday
· Music round-up: 400 Blows and The Bronx play Safari Sams, Minutes to Midnight are at Spaceland,
and Federation X at the Echo.
· Avant garde fashion photographer Wolfgang Tillmans is throwing a free bash at the Hammer Museum to celebrate the closing of his show. Don't overdo it, though, or you could find yourself passed out in a thong, looking heroin chic on the cover of his next book.
· Doug Benson (yes—THE Doug Benson) is doing stand-up at The Improv. Go shout things at him just like you do whenever Best Week Ever is on.
Saturday
· Blake Snyder, screenwriter/producer and author of Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need, will speak at the Alameda Writers Group in Glendale, where you can ask him anything you want about your third act cat-saving problems.
· Saturday night music: My Morning Jacket are at the Wiltern, Stephen Malkmus at the El Rey, and B.B. King is at the Kodak Theater.
Sunday
· Downhill Derby at the Rose Bowl is an old fashioned boxcar race like the kind you used to have when you hung out with Spanky, Alfalfa, and the rest. All proceeds make benefit glorious Boys & Girls Club of LA.
· Get a head start on Martin Luther King Jr. day (it's next Monday) with a Musical Tribute In Honor of Dr. MLK, featuring the Southeast Symphony Orchestra and a choir of over 60. And no, they don't take requests, no matter how many times you yell "JESUS WAAALKS!!!" at the stage.

We had a feeling that the latest image hit (for the sake of argument, let's pretend that there is still some kind of image to be hit) that Britney Spears suffered in the wake of her New Year's Eve Effen-induced nap-collapse would require that the stay-at-club mom once again communicate directly (and by "directly," we of course mean "through a carefully worded publicist statement that vaguely sounds like it might have been dictated by a developmentally stunted onetime pop star") with her fans through her website, letting them know that any fears they might have about her being on the verge of an "emergency appendectomy" are the fault of the sleep-suspicious false tabloids. Reassureth Britney:

· Rejoice! The results for the first round of the British Academy Film Awards, in which preliminary voting narrows down each category to a mere 15 nominees, have arrived. Look deeply into these scattered tea leaves and you shall surely foretell Oscar future. The Queen and Casino Royale lead the pack with 14 nominations each. [The Envelope]
· Director Bill Condon's Dreamgirls may have been somehow left off the BAFTA's best picture list, but how many of those 15 other directors can say they are the winners of this year's Santa Barbara Intl. Film Festival Montecito Award? None, that's how many! [Variety]
· The Scientific and Technical Academy Awards recognized 15 for their contribution to the technical advances that allowed Johnny Depp to overact opposite a face full of writhing calamari, including FX vets Ray Feeney and Richard Edlund. [Variety]
· Guilds and critics don't always agree, but if you're looking for Oscar predictions, best to ignore the opinions of those four-eyed, snot-nosed stuffed shirts, and stick to what the Hollywood working class has to say. [THR]

PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are posted several times a week, so send them in at least as often as you eat. Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and let everyone know about how you ran into Michael Chiklis at your annual mammogram.

Perhaps the thing that we were most looking forward to in the New Year was our first opportunity to anthropomorphize this week's sponsors into a form with which we can make sweet, sweet love. [Pause for imagined advertiser love-making.] If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and receive the same kind of pampering, see this page.

Var's Peter Bart attempts to explain the paradox of CBS Corp CEO Les Moonves: He's part ruthless Old Hollywood, power-crazed mogul, part new media and corporate player. We can't think of a candidate who's better qualified to one day enslave us all. [Variety]
MTV Films picks up the Bob Odenkirk/Rainn Wilson comedy Kanan Rhodes: Unkillable Servant of Justice, about "a man who serves subpoenas with the suaveness, intensity and conviction of James Bond." Odenkirk explains that the project languished for seven years "because we couldn't find anyone who could pull it off. Until we got Rainn in our brain! A lot of actors would come off as dicks, but when he does it, it's sweet and kind of sad." We'd never really been able to put our finger on it, but Wilson really does have that sweet/sad/dicky thing going on. [THR]
After a two-and-a-half month lockout while 20th Century Fox TV and series creator Seth McFarlane worked on a new deal, Family Guy's writers have finally been allowed to get back to the important work of brainstorming non-sequitur gags to randomly insert into the show's sixth season stories. [Variety]
· CSI's Marg Helgenberger's husband announces that he'll seek a second two-year term as head of SAG. [THR]
In other SAG news, the Guild awaits Monday's arrival of new national executive director Doug Allen, the former NFL linebacker they hope will soon lead them to a collective bargaining championship over the studios. [Variety]

While the birth father of Madonna's catalog-ordered Malawi orphan may have recently expressed frustration that, since parting with his son, he has received not so much as a postcard of Big Ben reading, "Dear Ex-Daddy: My new daddy Guy can play bagpipes and drives an Aston Martin! Love, David," he may be comforted by the findings of the Malawian child welfare ministry, whose initial assessment of Madonna during her 18-month trial period came back with a gold star:

We know how much you love to hear about our misadventures with internet access (why do we always believe Time Warner when they say they won't hit us again? We really need to take Courtney Love's New Year's resolutions to heart and stop being their doormat), so we thought we'd let you know that six eastside cafes later, we've finally found a place where we can get online and get some work done. Our normally scheduled stream of nonsense will commence shortly. As always, thanks for your love, support, and saintlike patience in these troubling times.

· Tonight on ET and The Insider: Discover the context for the quotes that have been amusingly edited together to make James Brown's widow sound like a lunatic!
· Tonight on Ken Levine's Lost House 24: "6 pm - 7 pm: Kate gets caught in another hanging net. Locke shoots Boone. House correctly diagnoses a gunshot wound... but only after removing Boone's liver. Jack learns that Claire is really his daughter. Ten minutes later she's of course kidnapped."
Chud.com calls out Variety for the paper's uncredited discovery of box office smash Zyzzx Road.
Fishbowl L.A.'s Kate Coe interest in how the LAT underplayed the story of a Halloween hate crime in Long Beach spills over into the L.A. Weekly, and then back onto Fishbowl.
· NBC.com is streaming the first 20 minutes of the new, L.A.-based season of The Apprentice; note that The Donald's infamous combover (the greatest combover in the world!) cannot be stirred even by driving in a convertible with the top down. Impressive.

Every so often, we like to spotlight the work of innovative publicists who aren't afraid to think outside the box—or, in this case, outside the red-and-white-striped bucket full of fried chicken parts—by exploiting a timely Hollywood story for the benefit of their clients, and so we share a pitch that landed in our inbox a couple of hours ago:

We're pretty sure what Britney Spears' manager Larry Rudolph meant by "rocky" was that his client has been navigating the choppy publicity waters that accompany binge partying and unobstructed crotch shots hitting the internets, but we prefer the quote as it appears in this People headline, with an upper-case "R" in Rocky. With America's greatest heavyweight champion underdog once again back in theaters and beating all box office odds, is there any role model after whom to better fashion Spears' increasingly long-shot comeback chances? Her return to former glory is a mere workout montage away, with the singer huffing and puffing up the Beverly Center escalator stairs to the strains of "Gonna Fly Now," and climaxing with her leaping into the air triumphantly at its summit. (Which, less inspirationally, causes Spears to lose her grip on her toddler son and watch in helpless, contorted horror as he bounces down every grooved step to the platform below.)

· As part of their "Overlooked and Underrated" series, the folks at the Egyptian Theatre offer a double-feature of a restored print of the full-length British version of Gone to Earth and aA Matter of Life and Death.
· Music round-up: The Chapin Sisters, Bodies of Water, and Parson Redheads play Spaceland on Ice at the rink in Pershing Square; the Colour at "regular" Spaceland; Unwritten Law at House of Blues.
· The Nuart continues its exclusive engagement of The Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir's 1939 initially shunned, now-embraced upstairs/downstairs comedy of manners. [via LAist]

According to the AP, Paris Hilton has been "fired" by nightclub chain Club Paris for precisely the kind of attention-whoring antics [Ed.note—Oh, the irony!] they'd hoped would attract publicity to their drinking establishments, such as showing up hours late (or not at all) to scheduled public appearances at the bars, unacceptably unprofessional behavior that deprived scores of excited, Hilton-loving patrons of the opportunity to witness America's foremost practitioner of the unearned celebrity arts demonstrate her estimable Vodkatini-chugging abilities in person. Even though the venue's proprietor felt he had to take the difficult step of severing ties with his original endorsementard, he's committed to the overall concept of a nightclub fronted by a bimbo figurehead, and has already announced a planned nationwide search for Hilton's successor:

Prodded perhaps by the electric pink tazer zaps of an increasingly emboldened and networked queer gossip community, a trend has emerged in which noted aspiring-astronaut-boy-band-members and male TV personalities have reluctantly emerged from their anal-retentively organized closets. Not Wentworth Miller, however, who in a recent interview with the Australian AP made it clear that there will be no People magazine covers featuring the Prison Break star under bold yellow letters announcing his enthusiastic appreciation of sex with hot men:

Almost exactly one year after the confetti falling from the ceiling of a Miami nightclub during a New Year's Eve celebration triggered a severe "asthma attack" in the notoriously fragile starlet, Lindsay Lohan again finds herself the victim of another freakish medical emergency, as People, TMZ, and E!'s Marc Malkin all exclusively report that Lohan is being hospitalized today to have her appendix removed. Loyal, embattled rep Leslie Sloane Zelnick, who now has been forced to delete "appendicitis" from the list of excuses that she can use to explain her client's next absence from the set of current project I Know Who Killed Me, assured Malkin that Lohan will "be totally fine" after a couple of days of recuperation, during which the actress's body will adjust to the fresh supply of Grey-Goose-free blood and back-up liver she's having installed during the appendectomy procedure.

· As we mentioned before, the SAG awards nominations announcement pours on the peer-to-peer thespian love, with notable omissions including both Clint Eastwood movies and Jack Nicholson's work in The Departed. On the TV side, recently silenced talk show host Megan Mullally can take a brief break from the tears and nose-blowing knowing her work in Will & Grace's final season was singled out for recognition. [Fox News][Variety]
· Enjoy this photo gallery of SAG's film and TV nominees, suitable for browsing or framing. [The Envelope]
· The Kansas City Film Critics Circle decided on the year's best at their weekly poker game. The winners are: United 93, Forest Whitaker, Helen Mirren, and Paul Greengrass for the Robert Altman Award for Directing, renamed from Best Director this year for the Kansas City native's death. [LJWorld.com]
· "Who's Won What So Far." This Oscar tracker lists every major award and nomination won by the major contenders thus far. This would be better laid out in a chart, which true awards nerds might want to set aside some time to make as a craft project. [AP]

The CW tries to make Josh Schwartz feel a little better about yesterday's announced demise of The O.C., greenlighting his Gossip Girl pilot, his second pilot pickup in the last two days. Nothing helps dull the pain of cancellation better than a couple of hefty checks. [Variety]
Fox uses some sneaky math to claim a new worldwide box office record, combining the grosses of all of its divisions to come up with a $3.6 billion take in 2006. [THR]
ABC can't buy a comedy hit—trust them, they're trying—as the heavily promoted premieres of midseason replacements The Knights of Prosperity and In Case of Emergency bomb into fourth place in most Nielsen categories. [Variety]
· The trades weigh in on Robert Newman's unexpected defection (a "jaw-dropper!" raves Daily Variety) from ICM to Endeavor. [THR, Variety]
New Line responds to a disappointing™, Snakes on a Plane-hampered 2006 by giving senior executive VP (and Seth Rogen doppelganger) Richard Brener a fancy new COO title, pledging that the new year won't be as shitty as the one they've just put behind them. [Variety]

The LAT reports that the Producers Guild has rejected Paramount head Brad Grey's attempt to receive a producing credit* on Warner Bros' The Departed, a movie the former manager was "instrumental" in putting together before taking his current job at the 'Mount, a decision that will probably deny Grey the chance to hedge his Oscar bets by competing against his own studio's Best Picture hopefuls, Dreamgirls and Babel. The Times explains the PGA guidelines that could keep Grey off the podium in the eventuality of a Departed Academy Awards win:

Scribes of dead-tree media, beware! Your days of carelessly printing alleged falsehoods about vestigial celebrities are over. Now, the unfairly maligned can strike back with that mighty tool known as MySpace. Kendra Wilkinson, the "Young Dumb One" from The Girls Next Door (the cringefest where wizened mummy Hugh Hefner oversees his trio of nubile concubines), got a brief mention in a recent Page Six. The small bit simply mentioned a tipster who confirmed the worst-kept secret in Hefnerdom, i.e. that his sweet young things might live in his mansion as part of some commercial arrangement. Today, Kendra respondeth:

Angela Borlaza, Marlon Brando's chief assistant and homemaker during his final years, has settled her lawsuit claiming she was locked out of his room in the days before his death so that producer Mike Medavoy and others could coerce a signature from the legend giving them full rights to develop his Tahitian estate into a resort. She also claimed she was wrongly evicted from the San Fernando Valley home she says was a gift from her former boss. Reports the LAT: