Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson were the main attractions at Monday's Bride Wars premiere at the Lincoln Square Cinema. Others who turned up for the chick flick: Vera Wang, Tara Subkoff, Rachel Roy and her daughter Ava, Barbara Walters, Cindy Adams, Erin Fetherston, director Gary Winick, producer Alan Richie, Kristen Johnson, Robert Verdi, Holly Dunlap, Damien Fahey, Mike & Juliet hosts Mike Jerrick and Juliet Huddy, Lisa Rinna, model Hana Soupkova, and Dina Lohan, as well as the cast of Real Housewives of NYC: Jill Zarin, Kelly Killoren Bensimon, Simon van Kempen and Alex McCord, LuAnn DeLesseps, Ramona Singer, and Bethenny Frankel. [PMc, Wiremage, NYO]

Believe it or not, there are five critics whose year-end Top 10 lists are even more mystifying, patience-testing and all-around terrible than those five awarded here yesterday. And the Listys go to...

Sure, the inauguration is twelve days away, but Barack Obama's speech today was his most public declaration that he's in charge and (Lord help us all) knows the way out of the financial apocalypse.

Maria Bartiromo turned up on Ellen the other day to explain to the American Express pitchwoman why it is she doesn't possess a credit card. First of all, she has a debit card, which is, like, almost the same thing, isn't it? Plus she has a corporate card, which she uses all the time. (No doubt!) And have you heard about all the people who load themselves up on credit card debt and are forced to pay high interest rates? It's tragic. Of course, if it weren't for those insane interest rates, how else do you think Citigroup would have been able to afford to fly Maria around the world on its private jet?

A mysterious show known as the 2008 People's Choice Awards was broadcast Wednesday on CBS, selecting The Dark Knight, 27 Dresses, Will Smith, Reese Witherspoon and others among its many honorees.

• Paramount chief Brad Grey has renewed his contract for 5 more years. [NYT]
• Meredith Corp. is shutting down Country Home magazine. [MW]
• The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet is ending this summer. [NYT]
• Barnes & Noble reports sales dropped off in 2008, not surprisingly. [WSJ]
• CBS slashed its Tel Aviv bureau just before war erupted in Gaza. [NYO]
• Oprah's weight-gain confessional scored big ratings for Monday's show. [NYP]

Maybe Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick aren't so broke after all? Though they lost money in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, a tipster tells us they're flying first class to LA right now.

A landmark actual new scientific study has discovered that, yes, Axe Body Spray can help you get laid. But opening your stupid mouth could render the sickly juvenile aphrodisiac worthless.

Ha! You know Nevan from The City? (Oh you don't? He's socialite cast member Olivia Palermo's fey cousin.) Well, it seems he has a police record for soliciting a prostitute in Miami.

Great news for desperate singles: According to behavioral scientist Larry Young, who studies the chemical basis of love and romance while apparently watching telenovelas, "recent advances in the biology of pair bonding mean it won't be long before an unscrupulous suitor could slip a "love potion" in our drink." We can't wait for men to start paranoically keeping an eye on their beers in bars. [Reuters]

Who sat next to me in celebrity hotspot Cafe Grumpy today? Clark Johnson, a.k.a. heroic city editor Gus Haynes from The Wire! Of course he is a big fan* of Gawker:

Hello. My name is Joshua David Stein. I'm an avid Top Chef fan and am here to discuss with you that show.

It's not easy making billions while everyone else is losing their shirts. Just ask John Paulson, the founder of the hedge fund Paulson & Co. who collected $3.7 billion in 2007 and, unlike the vast majority of his peers, had a fantastically profitable 2008, too. Of course, making money off the collapse of the global economy isn't the sort of thing that earns you many fans, as Gary Weiss points out in the new issue of Portfolio: "It's hard to see how any financier who made a fortune from market turbulence can improve his public image when the economy is in such serious trouble... Traders like Paulson will probably never be popular. They might as well get used to it."

Far be it from us to make you dread the year before it's properly begun, but if you assumed that the blood pressure-raising murderousness you once felt toward Brooklyn boy-wonder novelist Jonathan Safran Foer was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, during 2009 his brother Joshua Foer will sadly prove you wrong. Foer the younger is about to launch a travel website (featuring "all the curious, wondrous and bizarre places that are just below the radar of more conventional travel guides") and this fall will see the launch of Moonwalking with Einstein, his book on memory that, since it cost Penguin $1.2 million to acquire, will probably be promoted until we beg for mercy. [New Statesman]

Is it smart for Israel to blow the hell out of Palestinian civilians past all boundaries of good sense? No. But has Israel timed this war brilliantly, from a PR perspective? No doubt.

I sat through the whole hour of The Real World: Brooklyn premiere last night. (Plus some of the After Show.) It was surprisingly better than I'd feared it would! And, ugh, surprisingly worse.

If you're a Top Chef fan—or the idea of having Padma Lakshmi list off a bunch of different foods every time your cell phone rings amuses you for some reason—this ringtone is for you! Click on Padma's pic to download the MP3. As we've mentioned before, you may need to do a little work to get the ringtone working on your phone. But we're sure the five minutes you spend sorting it out will be time well spent. Previous ringtones: Anna Wintour, Andre Leon Talley, Bernie Madoff.

Twitter is supposed to save journalism 140 characters at a time. Media people love it, and we love media people, so let's take a look at what the Twitterati have to say for themselves.

Get ready to see lots of overdressed couples with stars in their eyes wondering around Lower Manhattan beginning on Monday. Next week the city opens its new, 24,000-square-foot Manhattan Marriage Bureau following $12 million in renovations to the building. (The mayor tapped his personal interior designer, Jamie Drake, to do the job.) Why spend so much money on such a trivial slice of city bureaucracy when New York City is facing a historic budget shortfall? It's all part of Michael Bloomberg's plan to unseat Las Vegas as the nation's "wedding capital" and turn New York into a marriage destination!

For years, the likes of Hannah Montana and the Jonas Bros. have ruled the kiddie icon market. No more. Soon, heterosexual boys will have their own channel full of crappy Disney tween characters from hell.