We know you, like we, have Grammy fever, with hotly contested office pools and of course a yearly themed party, replete with Victrola shaped cookies and a home-karaoke stage for guests to put their spin on all the best song nominees. It is, after all, music's biggest night, celebrating and rewarding the very best the arguably superflous major record labels have to offer, as opposed to, say, someone throwing a dart at the Billboard Hot 100 adult contemporary charts. The nominees, many of whom point to Jesus "Babyface" Christ for inspiration, were announced today:

In what has to be the biggest no-brainer in the annals of casting history, Warner Bros. (the studio who brought you big-screen remakes of Starsky & Hutch and, less successfully, The Dukes of Hazzard) has placed Erik Estrada's blue helmet on Wilmer "Fez" Valderrama's head, anointing him to star as Ponch in an "action-comedy" (read: neither exciting nor funny) remake of ChiPs. It appears that the role of whitebread partner Jon Baker hasn't yet been cast, but if you rush to your preferred place of worship and make the appropriate offerings to your deity, there may still be time to prevent Ashton Kutcher from getting the job, a move which would almost certainly trigger a cataclysmic tidal wave that would wipe out everything from Santa Monica to Las Vegas. And quite frankly, we all deserve to suffer His righteous wrath if we allow the studio to complete such an unholy coupling.

There are superheroes that forever have given off a faint whiff of the gay, particularly middle aged, single men who adopt young wards, and then there is Superman as red-blooded, American male and heterosexual as you can get (in blue spandex and calf-high red boots). So when openly gay Superman remake director Bryan Singer, who has a not-so-secret penchant for handsome, younger boys, hired square-jawed nobody Brandon Routh to play his Man of Steel, many a Kryptopurist eyebrow was raised and the rumors starting flying: could a Hollywood director have gasp! actually hired someone he wanted to bone? It simply isn't done! Today, Radar fans the fanboy flamer flames:

Not satisfied to fall back on the utterly clichéd, "Are you exactly like your character/nothing like your character" publicity junket question, Reuters boldly inches forward into the somewhat less stale interrogatory frontier, asking The Family Stone star Sarah Jessica Parker if her new character is exactly like/nothing like (get ready for it) her Sex and the City character, Carrie Bradshaw. And the answer will Blow. Your. Mind:

Here's lovably starstruck little brother Defamer on Tuesday, joking about the forthcoming ABC Holocaust miniseries from Holocaust-denier Mel Gibson:

Imagine our surprise when the Hard, Cutting blog pointed out that a just-insane-enough-to-be-true joke we wrote about Mel Gibson's instantly controversial Holocaust project (and we self-quote: "While the baldfaced grab for controversy might seem utterly crass to us, ABC was powerless against the visionary Gibson’s breathtaking pitch for the miniseries’ climactic scene, a Braveheart-style battle with thousands of Jewish and Nazi combatants rushing at each other across an open field.") suddenly became, well, just insane enough to be reported as fact (and verbatim, no less) in a story by the Rupert Murdoch-owned The Australian:

FindLaw columnist Julie Hilden asks the Tom Cruise Legal Question That Dares Not Speak Its Name, using the occasion of the recent South Park episode in which an animated, fictional Cruise quite literally finds himself "Trapped in the Closet" to wonder if the actor could (or even should) sue over the show's thinly veiled (OK, completely transparent) questions about his sexuality. Hilden raises this fascinating parallel argument about whether being accused of being gay should even be considered defamatory:

· Here comes the Hump Day music: The Rapture dance-punks the Troubadour; Rosie Thomas at Largo; and MF Doom at the El Rey.
· The AFI Fellows invite you to a screening of the 1960 Oscars-winner The Apartment at the Alex Theater in Glendale; MovieCityNews hosts a double-bill of Oscar shorts Rize and The Devil & Daniel Johnston, but bring your guild/union/association/Academy card for admission.
· This somewhat cryptic Craigslist ad promise a strange mix of top comedians, Marines, Toys for Tots, and an unnamed Desperate Housewives star (please let it be Roger Bart, we never got a chance to say goodbye when they killed him off) at the Improv on Melrose.

Pity the Memoirs of a Geisha team. They expected to be celebrated for their decision to go with an all-Asian cast, a potentially risky move for a major Hollywood production, but instead find themselves the victims of the tricky cultural tensions between the Japanese and Chinese:

No sooner had we recovered from the collective blow to the stomach that was the annulment of Kimberly Stewart and Talan Torriero's ten day fake engagement, Bringer of Celebrity Couple Bad News Weekly, aka US magazine, deals yet another super-duper exclusive-fantastic crushing suckerpunch to believers in true attention-whore love everywhere:

If nay, when we put out a PrivacyWatch's Greatest Hits album, you can be sure the following classic account of an ongoing pub trivia night battle royale between a couple of loyal Defamer operatives and their nemesis drunken, handsy spoilsport (and star of Speed 2!) Jason Patric will not just make the cut, it will be the very first track of Side B. Seriously, hit the head, grab a snack, get comfy. You're not going to want to miss a beat:

Admittedly, it's a tough sell, but paparazzi Peter Brandt, who offered topless photos of Jennifer Aniston to some magazines (which were immediately served with legal papers to stop their potential publication), acquits himself well with his high degree of difficulty, "So there I was, just minding my own business 300 yards away from Jennifer Aniston's tragically unobscured Hollywood Hills house, when she comes outside and thrusts her bare tits in front of my traffic-cone sized telephoto lens! Whatareyagonnado?" defense to ABC News:

Anxious to avoid another Mask of Zorro-type costumed misadventure, Memoirs of a Geisha producer Steven Spielberg took no chances, beginning his campaign months ago to dissuade sartorially exuberant Sony chief Amy Pascal from painting her face white and showing up to the film's premiere in a kimono. The persuasive Spielberg largely succeeded, his lone concession being Pascal's socks-and-platform-sandals flourish (not pictured).

As if the fine, generous folks on the bridge of the Gawker Media mothership haven't given you enough today with the launch of the new blog, we're going to remind you about their munificence by pointing out that a number of fine t-shirts are available for purchase at the impossibly swanky Gawker shop. This week, we're going to spotlight the Defamer Inspired™ (though not logo-bearing) shirt at left, perhaps the most efficient way to broadcast your clubbing needs short of pounding on the stall door and demanding a little powdered candy, "just for the gums."

Before the adoptions, before the Pakistani relief efforts, even before the official divorce, there were the pictures: our first unimpeded glimpses of the sexual sorcery sparking off "just friends" Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Steven Klein's W magazine pictorial the one that would famously "appall" Jennifer Aniston was pornography for mid-century modernist aficionados, styled to within an inch of its existence, and shot entirely inside a desert Camelot somewhere in Rancho Mirage. Now, that dream can be yours, for a buck shy of $3 mil:

· Controversy-courting ABC TV movie exec Quinn Taylor defends their Mel Gibson-produced Holocaust project: "A lot of people don't know much about the Holocaust... Maybe Mel Gibson and (Con Artists') involvement will attract people who wouldn't otherwise watch." You know, like Gibson's Holocaust-denying dad! [Variety]
· Director James Cameron seeks acrobatic jailbait (think Dark Angel's Jessica Alba, but not safe to perv on) for Battle Angel, his huge post-Titanic project. [THR]
· Wily NBC quietly bides its time until the the lucrative sweeps period is over, senses an opening, then sprints past its complacent network competitors to a Tuesday night ratings win. [Variety]
· The government uncovers Hollywood's latest and most nefarious plan to destroy our Nation, this time by using adorable stars to turn America's children into junk-food craving, morbidly obese zombies. [THR]
· Having developed a taste for tiny men with gigantic egos from starring in Woody Allen's Match Point, Scarlett Johansson signs on to star in Napoleon-in-exile love story Napoleon and Betsy. [Variety]

While we were trawling for a high-powered sugar mama perusing yesterday's THR list of the industry's most powerful women, we found ourselves wishing, nay craving a fictionalized examination of the Entourage-worthy shenanigans of Hollywood's Sex and the City-equivalent wild girls, preferably with a title accessible enough to suggest the fluffiest of Malibu beach reading while simultaneously explaining the concept in three words or less. Courtesy of the Publisher's Lunch book deal e-mail round-up, relief:

Because we here at Defamer feel the need to foster and promote the undiscovered and obscenely talented among you, behold the rubberfaced versatility of local actor Jeff Polage, a walking CGI effect who can morph his mug into virtually any ridiculous celebrity face you point to in a glossy. And don't you dare insult him with stand-in work; someone with this much masterly control of his craft deserves his own talent-holding deal.

It's practically a new American tradition: a reality show hits the air, in this case Project Runway, the Heidi Klum-hosted fashion designer competition that managed to surpress every groan and eyeroll by actually being good, and suddenly every couchbound Mark Burnett-wannabe who ever uttered the words, "I have an idea for a show like The Apprentice, but with [fill in occupation]!" is convinced the fifty word 'concept overview' they scrawled on their IHOP placemat has been pilfered by evil network executives. Then they sue:

News that The Hollywood Reporter editor-in-chief and publisher Robert Dowling was "ankling" or "retiring" (depending on whether you read the Variety or THR report) hit late yesterday afternoon, but we were too mesmerized by the exciting possibilities of Mel Gibson's Holocaust miniseries to pay attention. According to Var, though, Dowling's stepping-down was a "shock" to his underlings, and when questioned about the timing of the move, he embarked upon a Yodaesque meditation on temporality: