Having a TV network service an entire sex is tricky business. Lifetime "Television for Women" found an identity and audience by dispensing with any pretense of "you go girl" feminism and focusing squarely on trashy, earnest women-in-peril TV movies. Spike TV, the men's network, has yet to find its formula, substituting Defending the Caveman-caliber cliches for actual programming (ex: The Three Stooges, 7 days a week). Realizing that route wasn't working, the network has decided to go back to the drawing board, polling thousands of young males about their TV likes and dislikes. Stunning conclusion: young men tend to identify with anti-heroes.

· Tonight's Light of Day concert is a benefit to fight Parkinson’s Disease and ALS, featuring Peter Case, Jakob Dylan, Lucinda Williams and a host of others at the House of Blues on Sunset.
· KCRW presents Gimme Shelter, their annual acoustic Christmas benefit, at the Roxy. This year, you can catch Lucinda Williams (busy night of charity for her, it seems—follow her up the Strip!), Son Volt, Phantom Planet, and Marjorie Fair. And other we're too lazy to type.
· The Hollywood's Master Storytellers series holds a screening of operatically filthy documentary The Aristocrats at the Chinese Theatre. In attendance: Saget. Silverman. Dick. You need no further enticement.

Apparently, the gunfights, mutinies, and notoriously demanding director on the cursed Miami Vice set are enough to drive a hard-drinking movie star straight to the overzealous ingestion of prescription medication for a back injury. Reports the AP:

Always reliable British tabloid The Sun reports that the new Superman's Package of Steel is presenting problems for Warner Bros. execs and might be exposed to the withering effects of digital Kryptonite:

Our nation's film critics are commendably proficient at arriving at year-end localized consensus, not so much when it comes to scattering the news. As their God-like pronouncements of 2005's most deserving motion picture achievements continue to tumble forth, we bring you part two of our awards round-up:
· The Boston Society of Film Critics hop on the tastefully decorated bandwagon and give Brokeback Mountain the film that artfully reminded us of the tender cowboy love currently missing from our bleak lives the year's top honor, with Ang Lee's contribution acknowledged as best director. A shut-out Steven Spielberg spends the day shaking his head and repeating to himself, "Assassins don't win Oscars. Sad cowboys win Oscars." Reese Witherspoon picks up a best actress nod for her work in Walk the Line, but Joaquin Phoenix is again snubbed, losing to what is quickly looking to be this year's Best Actor frontrunner, Philip Seymour Hoffman.

A delighted recipient of CAA's assistant gift, the semifunctioning CamCorder that will no doubt precipitate scores of defections from studio desk duties to promising filmmaker careers, sent in this camphone pic of the high-tech gizmo's artfully written packaging. Indeed, the agency Santa Claus haggling down the Chinatown stall vendor to $20 per box of 300 showed the "nobellest" of taste in his gift selection.

The New York Dog and The Hollywood Dog are two magazines obsessed with celebrity canines, regularly sniffing A-list pooch butt as skillfully as In Style and People do their owners'. Their reader poll voting the best and worst celebrity dog havers is out today, and no surprise, Paris Hilton was named hands down worst dog owner of the year:

· The trades react to the sad news that Richard Pryor died of a heart attack on Saturday. Var calls him "groundbreaking," and "talented and tormented," while THR reminds us that Pryor nabbed $4 million for the awful Superman 3. [Variety, THR]
· Paramount will try to defray the cost of Friday's impulse-buy (when Brad Grey sees something he likes in a store window, money is no object!) of DreamWorks by flipping the studio's 59 title live-action library to a third party for $1 billion. [Variety]
· The WB benefits from Friday's bombshell Paramount/DreamWorks announcement, pink-slipping about 20 network workers while everyone was worrying about how much richer Steven Spielberg and David Geffen were about to get. [THR]
· Brokeback Mountain and Memoirs of a Geisha set limited release box office record. The gay cowboys wrangled $108,910 per theater, while the controversially Chinese geishas did $84,194 per. [Variety]
· Hollywood Out of Ideas, British Import Edition, Part XXIV: Fox greenlights a pilot for The Worst Week of My Life, based on a BBC series about a "hellacious" week (read: wackiness ensues!) before a couple's wedding. [THR]

A crucial step in any blockbuster studio move is the self-congratulatory memo to one's underlings following the public deal announcement. New New Paramount™ employees arrived to find this companywide e-mail from DreamWorks-swallowing leader Brad Grey in their inboxes this morning, which, quite frankly, lacked the "Holy fucking shit, I just stole Steven Spielberg from Universal! General Electric is Viacom's bitch!" panache that we were hoping for.

The first critics association awards were announced this weekend, widely considered to be Oscar barometers, up until the actual Oscars when we are reminded annually that the Academy is looking less for critical achievement, more for films exhibiting what best could be described as an inherent "Ron Howardness." A round-up of the nominees and winners thusfar:
· The Los Angeles Film Critics Association names Brokeback Mountain, the shattering film that flipped over and spittle-diddled our hearts, Best Picture. Ang Lee, who went to comic book villain extremes in his quest for cowboy-love-thwarting realness, is recognized for the effort with a Best Director nod. Philip Seymour Hoffman's uncanny kazoo-voiced transformation into Truman Capote won him Best Actor, while Best Actress went to Vera Farmiga in Down to the Bone, which in turn wins the LAFCA its own award: Best Recognition of a Performance No One Has Seen.
· The New York Film Critics Online go with Defamer repeat viewing favorite The Squid and the Whale for Best Picture, and the curveballs keep flying from there: Best Director, Fernando Meirelles for The Constant Gardener; Best Actress, Keira Knightley for Pride & Prejudice. The only non-surprise goes to Hoffman for Best Actor.

Bruce Willis ex and backyard 1-meter shallow-diving bronze medalist Brooke Burns clearly didn't learn her lesson from last month's accident. While the only apparent ill effect she's suffering from her pool mishap is paralyzing adorableness, the hundreds of copycatting aspiring actresses who throw themselves headlong into drained pools in hopes of authentically rocking a bedazzled Kitson neckbrace like Brooke's may not be so lucky, and likely will wind up in far less fabulous Swarovski-encrusted wheelchairs.

Over the weekend, another former Sopranos cast member did his part to tear a new hole in the fragile Reality/Fantasy Continuum, and is being held for killing a NY cop during a bungled burglary:

Another Monday morning, another new (albeit temporary) Hollywood savior is born.

· This just in! Paramount buys DreamWorks. Layoffs to follow, which should cover costs of having their stationery changed to The New New Paramount.
· Brad Pitt has adopted Angelina Jolie's children as his own. Hopefully he won't get sick of them the way he did Frank Gehry and drop them after two meetings and a dinner.
· Mel Gibson will direct a Holocaust miniseries for ABC, leading Australian press to discover "blogs."
· 'Tis the season of giving (crappy, most probably worthless) presents to agency assistants!
· The week in Sony: Amy Pascal goes gaga for Geisha at the premiere, ignoring the growing international controversy over the film's cultural grab bag cast. Who can blame her? The whole thing might be someone else's headache any second now.
· Pub trivia night fans: consider yourselves warned.
· Britney Spears throws her no-good husband out, repos his Ferrari, cuts off his credit line, and, perhaps most shocking of all, turns his background dance studio into a mirrored playroom. Cold, woman, cold.
· Disney's Anne Sweeney is named Most Powerful Woman in Hollywood by THR for the second year in a row. The scorned lower rung entrants plot their revenge, soon to be loosely fictionalized in a bitchy chick flick-lit novel.
· Frodo Baggins weighs in with a Narnia review and dental diagnosis.
· The fate of Tookie Williams weighing heavily on the Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger seeks out the wisdom of the Barney's shoe department for guidance ("Prada moccasins, he lives. Gucci loafers, he dies.").
· Jennifer Aniston threatens to sue if topless photos of her are leaked. The photographer offers a "would you believe..." defense to make Maxwell Smart proud.
· Ben Stiller takes neurotic Jewdom to fearless new heights.
· Spielberg's single pre-Munich interview gives us a strong indication that he's avoiding the press probably because he's sick of hearing people complain about his movies.
· Nicole Richie, DJ AM and Us magazine decide to call it quits, with Us claiming "it has grown as a magazine and wants different things."

· It's like the first three minutes of Sluts on a Plane, the best porno movie never made: Two cops arrive to arrest a pair of drunken, belligerent Playmates who've just terrorized the passengers of a two-hour plane ride with their intoxicated antics...the slurring vixens make "sexual advances" to avoid charges...and then get arrested anyway. That's why it'd never get made.
· No, it seems that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie did not get married in Florida today, no matter what that radio DJ there said.
· Someone finally stepped forward to help Lindsay Lohan out with her appearance-cancelling digestive problems. Also, here's a pic of Lohan teaching A Prairie Home Companion co-star Meryl Streep the finer points of lip-syncing.
· At least it's not called Trading Races.

Friday
· Friday night music: Death by Stereo at the Troubadour, Morcheeba at the Wiltern, and exclamatory dance punk revolutionaries !!! will be at the Glass House in Pomona. (!!! also plays the El Rey on Saturday night.)
· Catch a screening of Woody Allen's latest, Match Point, at LACMA, starring Scarlett Johansson, whose lack of star power hopefully won't sink this one like it did The Island.
Saturday
· It's the 10th Annual Light Festival at Griffith Park, when your friends at the Department of Water and Power transform a one-mile stretch into a twinkling holiday wonderland.
· Phyllis Diller signs her sure to be hilarious new book, Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse at Brentano's Century City. On a completely unrelated note, Jay Leno will be appearing Vroman's to sign his effort, How To Be the Funniest Kid in the Whole Wide World (or Just in Your Class).
Sunday
· DJ AM, we know you're hurtin'. Shop your heartache away at the Community Record Fair at the Little Temple, where you can pick up used Vinyl, CDs, collectible rarities, and more.
· Catch Kathy "Cockadoodie" Bates (we know she's had an illustrious career, but she'll always be James Caan's hobbler to us) and others at Tongue Groove, an evening of short fiction, personal essays, poetry and music at the Hotel Caf .

Well, now it looks like Paramount wasn't just fucking around when it prepared its bid for DreamWorks. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Steven Spielberg is jilting Universal and dashing into Brad Grey's outstretched arms:

This just in: blogger The Gilded Moose is, as we speak, liveblogging Bruce Vilanch that's right, Hollywood Square Bruce Vilanch, the man who puts the 'did she just say that?!' in Whoopi Goldberg's Oscar-hosting monologues as he takes in an afternoon screening of Brokeback Mountain at the Grove. The updates, so far:

It's been a couple of weeks since we've hurled the crystal ball against the wall and "read" the shards by crushing them between our palms (sometimes we wish we hadn't thrown out the instruction manual), so serve the right to be even more inaccurate than usual in these amazing weekend box office predictions:

Alec Baldwin is hosting Saturday Night Live for the 12th time tomorrow night, perhaps the only man who can make a Boy Scout molestation sketch funny ("I ll tell you a truth, canteen boy! You know what I hate? Underpants!"). The NY Times celebrates this SNL milestone, which ties him with John Goodman and puts both just behind lucky 13 Steve Martin, by spending some time with the actor as he prepares for the show. It appears the SNL writers have once again (quite literally) tapped comedy gold by placing Baldwin in a rugged environment to get his man-sex groove on: