[Trapped cult wife Katie Holmes carries daughter Suri, one toy monkey and two babydolls in New York City last night; image via X17]

People spent last week getting rid of people, but whatever the magazine saves next year by eliminating 18 editorial jobs, it's a drop in the bucket compared to what the magazine has to pay celebrities for pictures of their babies and weddings. To preserve its place at the top of the celebrity weekly heap, People has long stuck to a policy that it will never be outbid by the likes of In Touch, Us Weekly or OK!. Because celebrities auction off their most precious moments, the competition typically knows the sort of bottomless budget they're up against. And it's jaw-dropping: just these eight covers, all from this year, have set the Time Inc. title back by about $25 million.

· You've got to know that any time Seth MacFarlane is named the smartest man in TV, Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin get a reality show, the seventh walrus saxes, and that many heads roll at studios and media around the country, then Pop Culture Doomsday is upon us.
· Elisabeth Hasselbeck would like to apologize for her comments regarding Deepak Chopra; some of her best friends are in fact incense-burning self-help mystics from India.
· The Dark Knight destroyed X-Files' chances at the box office. Its work here is done.
· Doubt warmed up for awards season with its trailblazing "Fuck Off and Die" press tour, featuring a surly Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep. It could use some tinkering.
· If we could ask only one of our questions remaining for Britney Spears after viewing For the Record, we'd go with: "Holy pole-dancing Christ, your sister did WHAT???"
· It was close, but Keri Russell defeated Helen Mirren in this week's Battle of the Water-Frolic All-Stars.
· So The Reader is actually pretty good! Not nudity-award good or Porky's good, but just, you know... regular old good.
· Knight Rider may be but a memory, but don't worry: NBC will find new ways to be unwatchable.
· The long-awaited, star-studded anti-Prop 8 musical was great and everything, but we think it could benefited from just one more showstopping performer.
· Real Housewife NeNe may have some housing issues to explain, but at least she doesn't have pitchiness in her left saline implant.
· Rachel Getting Married is looking good for awards season; Frost/Nixon and Ricky Gervais, eh, not so much.
· That welt on our head? Oh, that's nothing — just where the new season of Lost went clubbing us with one marketing element after another.
· Quick! Someone! Anyone! Save Archie!

· There's just four more days until MTV premieres their latest bisexual dating show, A Double Shot at Love, starring the "Ikky Twins" Rikki and Vikki. In the sneak peek above, Vikki admits she's the twin with a dick.
· Throw something on Kanye's stage, you just might have inadvertently inspired his newest NSFW hit.
· Fox's The Secret Millionaire is caught in a phony phony-poor-person check-giveaway scheme.
· Boy George was found guilty of Norwegianhustlernapping today. As his punishment, he will be required to—slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrp. Slurrrrrp. Slrrrrr. Sl. Slll. Sl. OK, where were we? Oh right, Boy George's sentence. No word yet.
· "'It is a reverse Punk’d,' says Fox President of Alternative Entertainment Mike Darnell. “'Instead of the worst day of your life and then a joke at the end, this is the reverse. This is the best day of your life, and then we arrest you.'"
· Hey—McDonald's went with Sterling Cooper's campaign idea. WTG, Peggy Olson!
· Wow—that one uninjured dog sure must be hungry.
· Bronx Mowgli Wentz, ca. 2032.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button star Cate Blanchett was awarded with that most exclusive of all Hollywood decorations presented within spitting distance of a technicolor-wig store, the Walk of Fame star. There to share in the honor were producer Kathleen Kennedy, Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull director Steven Spielberg, and begoateed Button director himself David Fincher, who in his prepared statement likened Blanchett's luminous beauty and staggering talent to "my second rimjob. My first wasn't so hot, but the second one, I was like, 'OK—I think I get it. Yeah—this is pretty awesome.' That's how I feel about Cate Blanchett. I just get it, and I think she's pretty awesome."

What a week! Lest we forget, Pop Culture Doomsday opened its gaping maw in Hollywood, and all we had to fend it off was the wit of our commenters. Now that we've managed to collect the survivors (currently receiving generous, Niacin-heavy recuperation at the Celebrity Centre), it's time to announce our five favorite ripostes, whose authors will each receive their own wholly unnecessary film remake. So who's set to star opposite Jaden Smith in a reboot of the Problem Child franchise, and who will be helming the Zac Efron starrer Say Anything? On to the winners:

Here's a Doomsday holdover for anyone who thinks today is going a little too conveniently well: Ryan Kavanaugh, the film financier whose Relativity Media interests intersect heavily with Universal, Sony and pretty much anyone else making films in Hollywood right now, will be arraigned next week on speeding and drunk driving charges dating back to October. His arrest was his second since 2006, when he previously sideswiped a Malibu police cruiser. And that would be a probation violation; do they allow development meetings in jail?

"'They call her the black widow. Every program she touches turns to death,' growled our source. 'She is on very thin ice.'" That was how Page Six described Universal Media Studio President Katherine Pope (pictured) last month in a suspiciously positioned item foisting blame for the network's disastrous string of recent offerings—shows like Bionic Woman, My Own Worst Enemy, Lipstick Librarians, and freshly squeezed lemon Knight Rider—on her fetchingly exposed shoulders. Nikki Finke accuses Silverman of having leaked the items himself ("that's one of the fringe benefits of his selling his Reveille to Elisabeth Murdoch and yachting with her this summer") in her analysis of today's shakeup that saw not just Pope's exit, but that of NBC Entertainment EVP Teri Weinberg, as well. (Weinberg was the D-girl Silverman brought over from Reveille who was later discovered in the compromising position technically referred to in the business as shtupping your showrunner. Because no one ever fucks anyone they work with in Hollywood—ever.)

Before he works his way up to the Hitchcockian classics, Michael Bay is determined to tackle some more lowbrow cinematic remakes, and so it is that we have this newly released full trailer for the upcoming Platinum Dunes re-do of Friday the 13th. Directed by Marcus Nispel, who also helmed the Bay-produced remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and apparently hasn't exhausted his "attractively lit stabbing" jollies yet), it's the tale of a murderous hockey player who suffers a six-game suspension for slandering Elisha Cuthbert, which leaves him plenty of time to slice and dice teenagers up at Camp Crystal Lake. And, in a loving homage to the original film's trailer, Nispel has made sure that every single "kill" is teased and tabulated on-screen. The clip, after the jump:

This video of blogmistress Arianna Huffington explaining to Charlie Rose "how blogs work" in her ominous Greek accent is like a dada performance art. There's no way this is real. It's like the blind leading the blind. God, I wish I was stoned right now. What is a link? Why, in Arianna's world, it's "a magical thing."

Plan B-List. Were the last words you said to your laid-off assistant as he carried a cardboard box of personal effects out the doors of your office for the very last time, "I cannot BELIEVE they cut $25 million from my budget! What the fuck is the world coming to? We're screwed!!!" Fret not: Your tentpole might not have collapsed just yet. Empire has a list of perfectly serviceable alternative to costly A-list stars—some even arguably less box-office-poisony than the originals! [Empire]

Grammy Hell mascots Coldplay have pissed off yet another music listener with their anthem "Viva La Vida," but Joe Satriani won't settle for just turning off the noise. In a copyright infringement suit filed Thursday in L.A., the wanky virtuoso alleges that he actually wrote the noise. The evidence (such as it were) follows the jump.

Our TiVo guilt has reached epic proportions and the DSM-IV was of little use in curing our shame, so we're going to spend the next 72 hours watching everything on the box, from a season of NCIS we've been deftly avoiding to a Meet the Press from May ("So, Ms. Bartiromo, where do you think the economy is headed this summer?"). There's only 19 shopping days left until Christmas/Kwanzaa and 16 until Hanukkah, so we'll do our shopping online and spend tonight watching holiday films featuring Full House alums.

Now that talk on a possible, long-gestating Ghostbusters sequel is heating up, MTV spoke to Sigourney Weaver about her potential involvement (when will someone call Peter MacNicol? We're dying over here!). Weaver admitted that she's supposed to call Bill Murray next week about the project, adding, “I would hope that my little [movie son] Oscar would be one of the Ghostbusters even if I’m not in it!” Careful, Sigourney — you're giving producers some Seth Rogen casting suggestions. Weaver also revealed that she's been talking to Ridley Scott about a potentially radical overhaul of the Alien franchise:

• Barack Obama's not so hot after all. I mean, his podium hates women. Angry ladies around the nation are already hanging up on him! At least he has a cabinet of hotties that we can ogle (even though some of them no longer have beards).

Hottie 27-year-old chief speechwriter for Obama, Jon Favreau, acted inappropriately with a cardboard cut-out of Hillary Clinton at a party (HE GROPED IT) and it ended up on Facebook and now everyone's talking about the golden boy gone douche. What if it leads him to not get his White House appointment, now that Hillary is Secretary of State? He already sent an apology to the Clinton camp, for the crime of posing in photographs where he's "dancing with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of secretary of state-designate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and another where he's placed his hand on the cardboard former first lady's chest while a friend is offering her lips a beer," as the Washington Post put it. Come on, dude's 27—you have to take the good with the bad. And God knows what kind of hours ol' Obama has him working.

[Jim Behrle's kartoon kats will save publishing from itself, or from you, or something. It is kind of a final solution, to the problem of books. Also: hot author photos! Klick thru!]

We heard from a pretty good source that two Jossip-owned blogs—celebrity-focused Mollygood and black person-focused Stereohyped—are shutting down, probably due to the bad economy. And it's at least half confirmed, because Mollygood has just written a post confirming that she's gone [UPDATE: Now it's totally confirmed; additional goodbye post here]. They're both pretty decent blogs in their fields, so the appropriate response here is sadness. If you have more details we should know, feel free to email us; below, a small excerpt of Mollygood's goodbye [UPDATE 2: And a statement from Jossip boss David Hauslaib]:

Hollywood PrivacyWatch: 12/4 — I was cruising home and decided to stop off to check out some of the sales at the 3rd Street festival. A limo was parked outside of the clothing store Milk, and when I walked in to peruse the racks, a film crew had set up in the back near the dressing rooms. LUDACRIS was shooting some type of commercial, and the director kept telling him to walk in and out of the dressing room and act like "this is the best pair of jeans you've ever put on in your life! You look GREAT!" [Hollywood PrivacyWatch is written by and for Defamer readers; send your sightings to tips@defamer.com.]