Ever since that weird photo of Al Pacino and Christopher Walken hanging out together surfaced a few months ago, many wondered what those two crazy dudes were up to.

Matthew Broderick is coming to television. Orlando Bloom will play a creepy doctor. Anti-gay activist Anita Bryant might get a biopic. Sony Layoffs are here, though not queer. The Trade Roundup: Come, let us round this up.

Normally, we'd be content to allow you to take the crash course in crowd-pleasing moviemaking offered by CNN.com's always edifying Story Highlights box, then send you on your way to get started on an incredibly lucrative career producing the kind of sure-fire hits that result from the combination of big-name stars, latex fat-suits, and middle-aged men falling off of motorcycles. But we thought that producer/director Brian Robbins' stirring defense of Norbit earner Eddie Murphy's talents bears a moment of your time, if for no other reason than it provides something of a bonus lesson in how to defend your talent against snobbish accusations that farting through a pair of grotesquely dimpled rubber buttocks isn't a valid demonstration of craft:

· But how did yesterday's 416 point stock market bed-shitting affect the faceless multimedia corporations behind your favorite entertainment products, you ask? Disney was hit the hardest with a 6% fall, followed by Time Warner at 4%, and 2-4% drops by News Corp., CBS, Viacom, and Sony. [Variety]
· Kelsey Grammer's Grammnet Productions throws away a 15-year relationship with Paramount for a one-year fling with 20th Century Fox TV's younger, hotter piece of studio ass. [THR]
· Fox's Fifth Graders Humiliating Morons draws a depressingly huge 26.6 million viewers in its American Idol-boosted premiere. Realizing that the series' initial numbers might be a little inflated by its lead-in, the network hopes to continue to hold that audience's interest by adding an element to Fifth Grader in which the show's precocious ten-year-olds kick its contestants in the genitals after each incorrect answer. [Variety]
· Oscar winner Alan Arkin will join Little Miss Sunshine co-star Steve Carell underneath the Cone of Silence in Warner Bros. Get Smart movie adaptation. [THR]
· Robert Downey Jr. signs on to play "Kirk Lazarus, the greatest actor of his generation and a four-time Oscar winner" in Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder, but there's no mention if that's the role that Tom Cruise was reportedly hoping to land to extend his buddy time with Stiller past Hardy Boys. We'd hate for Downey to get blacklisted at Cruise's United Artists for stealing a role away from the new mogul. [THR]

· Oscar Recap Mania! Var and THR remind you about the Oscar moments you were too drunk to remember this morning. [Variety, THR]
· In your face, Altman, Hitchcock, and Kubrick! Martin Scorsese's Best Director win betters the recognition received by those directing legends, who had to settle for honorary Oscars (Bob and Alfred) or nothing at all (Big Stanley). [Variety]
· Warning, members of the media bold enough to suggest that The Departed might not be one of Scorsese's better films: Producer Graham King will melt off your fucking face with lasers emitted from his eyeballs. [THR]
· More Oscar Fun Facts: Alan Arkin's win comes 40 years after his first nomination. That offers some hope to Eddie Murphy, who'll only have to work until 2047 to have a shot at repeating the feat of the man who stole his Oscar last night. [Variety]
· The Oscar telecast's ratings are up slightly over last year's Crash-marred debacle, bumping from 2006's one billion viewers to last night's 1,000,000,002. [THR]
· Anyone who claimed to know that The Departed would win Best Picture is full of shit, says Var. Nonetheless, we'll go on the record as being full of shit: We totally knew! [Variety]

One of the last things we saw before we collapsed head-first into our laptop mere moments after the final credits rolled on the Oscar telecast was this press release from Access Hollywood, concerning the virtue-protecting jinx eventual Best Supporting Actor usurper Alan Arkin put on precocious co-star Abigail Breslin: