Thanks to advances in CGI, reports The Onion, even Michael Bay will be getting his due on Oscar night, as green-screen technology will allow programmers to recreate with stunning proximity the illusion that the director is collecting an Academy Award right alongside his nominated Transformers sound and visual effects men. They even have made a grinning Jack in sunglasses out of millions of tiny vectors! [The Onion]

In case you forgot, Sunday is the single most important day of the year, and not just because it features an all-new episode of Big Brother 9: Watch Me Get Blown Beneath the Covers. It's the Oscars! The day assigned to reminding you what it was that you loved about movies in the first place, until Juno takes it all in a stunning upset, and you forget again. In anticipation of the big event—only four more wife-bartering days 'til Hollywood Christmas!—we compiled for you all the Oscar goings-on in one handy, bulleted round-up:

· Hollywood Out of Ideas: Holy Shit, Now They're Raiding the Game Closet Edition. Universal signs a six-year deal with Hasbro to produce "at least four feature films based on branded properties." Among the classic toys and boardgames in their stable: Monopoly, Candy Land, and Ouija. Bay + Candy Land + Giant Fucking Gumdrops + Marshmellow Explosions = Wicked. [Variety]
· The NBC Universal Super-Exec League of Silver Man, The Zucker, and The Phantom Graboff have connected their powerful Peacock Rings and once again produced the impossible: a 52-week programming schedule. You read that right: 52 weeks. They are truly amazing. [Variety]
· Variety sticks fork in this year's Oscar telecast, declares it done. [Variety]

As a shepherd of great literary works from page to screen, assistant-gobbling producer/Kraken Scott Rudin is arguably without equal: He produced both of the dark, uncompromising visions currently vying for Oscar greatness, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. In an LAT profile, Rudin is credited with scooping up rich source material before it even hits bookstore shelves, pairing it with the right director, making casting suggestion, and even tweaking crucial moments in the script. (Recent legend has it that he quietly pulled P.T. Anderson aside between Blood takes to question if "maybe some other beverage besides Ovaltine might work better in that one line," before staring down at a half-finished Wendy's Frostee for the creative epiphany of a lifetime.) Still, no Rudin profile is complete without the requisite paragraph on his notoriously mercurial temper:

The George Polk awards—described by blogger Will Bunch as the "Golden Globes of American journalism"—were announced early this morning. One of them went to a blogger who blogs! Far out! An army of Davids has stormed the gates! Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo (a blog!!) won the Polk Award for Legal Reporting, for his role in exposing the US Attorneys scandal that eventually brought down Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. On a blog! A blog that follows the rather traditional journalistic model of "hiring" and "paying" "reporters." Brave new world! [E&P via Attytood]

Because we at Defamer would like nothing more than to place visiting couples fully indoctrinated into The Lifestyle with spouse-sharing-curious members of the showbiz community who also happen to be in possession of a spare pair of tickets to the Academy Awards and Governor's Ball, we now faithfully reproduce for you a Craigslist ad brought to our attention over the weekend. (It's since been removed by conscientious members of the Craigslist community, who strongly feel that whoring out one's wife, however much mutual consent is involved, has no place in the most venerated and dignified awards show of all. Get thee to The Flackies, pervies!) The ad begins like this:

Christopher Walken, beloved star of True Romance, and, more recently, testicular-imagery-laden competitive table tennis spoof Balls of Fury, showed up in person Friday night to collect his Hasty Pudding Man of the Year award from the famous Harvard dramatic club. The appearance took full advantage of the multi-talented icon, with Pudding members requesting that Walken perform a song from Hairspray, intone his "more cowbell" catchphrase from the classic SNL skit, and, in a scenario that perhaps skirted the boundaries of good taste, reenact the Russian Roulette scene from The Deer Hunter using a Super Soaker filled with strawberry jam.

With the shocking news that Vanity Fair—traditionally the host of the most extravagant, starfuckiest soirée of Oscar seasons—would not be holding their annual festivities, Hollywood's society set was instantly thrown into turmoil over fears that the entire Oscar party circuit would tumble like Mexican Train Dominoes. Thankfully, those fears were for naught:

· Variety floated the days-old AICN rumors about The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus this morning. Namely, they re-report that Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell have all signed on to play the role in which Heath Ledger was originally cast. Reps for Cate Blanchett, meanwhile, have yet to confirm her involvement, but it's widely assumed she'll also throw her interpretation into the ring, and walk away with the picture. [Variety]
· The ACE EDDIE Awards give top editing honors to The Bourne Ultimatum and Sweeney Todd. The best reality show editing went to an episode of Cops (for real!), though the winner's acceptance speech was tragically cut short when he triumphantly waved his Golden Scissors trophy above his head and lost his grip. [Variety]

· Good news, advertisers, entertainment journalists, and fans of overblown montages of new shows that will likely be canceled before December: The upfronts are back on! The networks may continue them in some modified form, but it seems as if they're planning on maintaining the most crucial part of the tradition: free booze. [Variety]
· This year's five Best Picture nominees have earned just $295 million at the box office (and Juno is responsible for about $120 mil of that), putting the group on pace to be the second-lowest grossing crop of Academy honorees in two decades. You should all be ashamed of yourselves, especially if you haven't seen No Country or There Will Be Blood yet. [THR]
· Ellen Page and Cillian Murphy will star in Peacock, in which Murphy will play a small town guy with a multiple personality disorder that leads him to live life as both a man and his wife, and Page the "struggling young mother" who touches off a domestic dispute between the two sides of his fractured psyche. Disclosure: a friend of ours co-wrote this script, and it's fucking brilliant. We're not even going to be objective about this on our last day. [Variety]

One of our favorite Oscar traditions is the menu of original cocktails inspired by the five Best Picture nominees, as devised by the clever bartending staff of The Polo Lounge. We gave them a call to see what they came up with this year (yes, these are all real):
· To honor No Country for Old Men, they have Blood and Sand: Johnny Walker Red, cherry brandy, sweet vermout, and a splash of OJ served strained in martini glass. Enough of those should give you a hangover that feels like a bolt-stunner to the melon.
· The Juno drink is a Blue Slushee, named for the frozen treat our hero upchucks into her stepmother's urn: Stoli raspberry, blue curacao, and lemonade, blended with ice.

With the joyous news that the writers strike has unequivocally ended, an historic accord marked by Nick Counter and Patric Verrone appearing together on the balcony of the Warner Bros. water tower on Valentine's Day eve, as thousands below chant, "Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!" until the reluctant peacemakers finally acquiesce to a deafening roar of approval, it would seem everything is right again in the magical realm of Hollywoodland. Which makes this rumor all the more disconcerting: Could the NBC Universal ruler, whose upward-failing rise to power was prophesied in lesser-known New Testament appendix The Book of Jeff, really be mulling a lawsuit with the HFPA against the WGA for robbing them of a Golden Globes ceremony? Deadline Hollywood Daily says it could be so:

Supremely confident that tonight's WGA vote will end the writers strike and finally free him of the three-month-long recurring nightmare in which he's forced to personally read the names of this year's Oscar winners to an empty Kodak Theatre while wearing nothing but a tattered tuxedo t-shirt, ecstatic producer Gil Cates triumphantly declared at today's production meeting that the Academy will put on its "A" show , officially scrapping plans for the clip-heavy, star-deficient backup ceremony everyone feared might take place.

While No Country For Old Men has been collecting most of this award season's Best Picture statuettes, the stuffy limeys at BAFTA instead decided to award their prize to one of their homegrown jewels, the weepy Anglophiliac wet dream Atonement. However, the most intriguing award of the night had ostensibly nothing to do with a great performance and everything to do with ensuring that the British Academy of Film And Television's bottom line was sufficiently padded. The award in question, the Orange Rising Star Award, was handed to Shia LaBeouf and presented by the mobile phone company Orange. Now that the normally reserved BAFTAs have cashed in their principles for a taste of the almighty dollar pound note, can The Oscars be far behind?

· Network executives are trying to make sense of the brave, new, post-strike world they suddenly find themselves in, either taking this unprecedented opportunity to blow up their development system, or shrugging it off as a "blip" and going back to the old, comfortable ways of doing business (i.e., throwing a bunch of money at talent and pilots). Also, tough decisions need to be made about which series should be rushed back into production to finish up this abbreviated season, which should be put off until the fall, and which should be put out of their misery after losing their momentum. [Variety]
· Unsurprisingly, utterly fearless NBC perfect storm Ben Silverman (motto: "Let's do stuff!") is seizing the chance to shake things up inside the Peacock Family by shuffling around some executives and eliminating its largely vestigial current series department. [THR]

Kanye West is a man who has nobly borne cruel indignities with quiet grace. Like when he stormed the stage of the MTV Europe awards and threw a tantrum because his video that had him "jumping across canyons" wasn't recognized as a masterpiece. That show, of course, lost "credibility" by stiffing him. The Grammys weren't about to take that risk. They gave Kanye an appropriately respectful number of awards, but made the mistake of trying to cut one of his acceptance speeches short with background music. Don't the producers know that his mother just died? That means he will talk as long as he wants, damn the world. Is it just us or... tacky much? The "MAMA" haircut and Mama tribute song probably would have sufficed. Watch his humble appeal to good taste and decide for yourself.

Apparently, network partner ABC is succumbing to the same "Which show are we going to put on?" panic as the Academy, as this promo teasing a "Oscar's Best 'Fuck You' Moments" montage that would run during a clip-heavy, strike-crippled telecast has surfaced on the YouTubes. We hope it's testing well; even if the WGA contract dispute is resolved in time to save the program, the normal awards ceremony could definitely be livened up by revisiting the infamous "It's about fucking time, it's been ten goddamn years since Pretty Woman, you ignorant shit-for-brains voters!" tirade Julia Roberts unleashed following her 2001 Best Actress win for Erin Brockovich.

Though still plagued by (an ever-diminishing) uncertainty about whether they'll be executing their full Hollywood's Biggest Night™ vision or putting on their picket-line-crippled Reading Some Names N' Watching Montages Writers Strike Contingency Spectacular in two Sundays, the Academy has no choice but to make all the customary stops on this year's pothole-riddled Road to Oscar. Having just whet the awards-obsessed public's appetite by revealing the closely guarded kobe-slider secrets of Wolfgang Puck's Governors Ball menu, it was time yesterday to give the media a sneak peak at this year's exceedingly ambitious, Roy Christopher-designed $400 million Kodak Theatre set.

· Anxious that the Oscars are approaching and he still has no real idea of whether or the WGA—obviously a little preoccupied with their own issues—intends to grant a waiver for their awards ceremony, Academy president Sid Ganis begs the Guild for answers so that complicated logistical issues can be resolved. "We're running out time! [desperate punctuation ours]," wails Ganis, pleading for the sweet release of either a simple "yes" or "no." [Variety]
· Following his reported Monday dismissal from CAA for allegedly getting caught with his hand too far into Oprah's network cookie jar, reality TV agent Michael Camacho lands at UTA after "competitive and aggressive courting" by other agencies who believe that the controversy just proves he's an impish go-getter who might have gotten a little carried away during that recent Death Star misadventure. [THR]

For those of you deflated by yesterday's devastating news that the annual Vanity Fair Oscars party had been canceled, in deference to the striking writers and the $250,000 worth of crabcake canapés that risked going uneaten if they weren't able to iron out their differences in time, some encouraging news: We bring you the (mildly stale) news that Wolfgang Puck unveiled the full 2008 Governor's Ball menu to a gathering of reporters last week, where they were free to photograph the smorgasbord of Oscar-themed noshes to be served after the hopefully star-intact ceremony. (Any attempt at sampling, however, was quickly met with a swift, stinging swat from the celebrity chef's rubber spatula.) Javier Bardem, life-sized and in chopped liver, after the jump!