When the ominous words "nominees to be determined" accompanied the announcement of The Departed's nomination for Best Picture, industry tongues reflexively clicked, heads were gravely shaken in disapproval, and the eyes of vulnerable children were shielded as if in the presence of a well-endowed drifter who unexpectedly exposed himself near a grade-school crosswalk, for it seemed clear that Paramount emperor Brad Grey had appealed the Academy for a producer credit on the film of rival studio Warner Bros (a credit recently denied by the Producers Guild), a prideful sin compounded by the fact that his own studio's Babel is also in the race for the shiniest Oscar of them all. Today's LAT reports that Academy officials are keeping quiet on the matter of Grey's presumed petition, unconvincingly asserting that they have no idea why their fax machine has recently been clogged with missives from esteemed members of the Hollywood community noting that, "For like an entire year, Brad just wouldn't shut up about how much time he spent producing this Departed thing":

· If you're trying to pinpoint the exact moment when the controversy over Sundance's Hounddog (aka, The Dakota Fanning Rape Project) officially became a circus, we recommend you consider this quote from Officially Outraged Catholic League Media Whore William Donahue, who refuses to see exactly what he's protesting: "If someone tells me that there's a statue of Martin Luther King with an erection receiving oral sex, I don't need to see it." [Variety]
· Pariah producing partners Gavin Polone and Jamie Tarses break up after 14 months of working together. Polone rebounds into an overall deal at HBO, while Tarses sticks around with a new deal at Sony Pictures TV. If you're wondering about the children already in development, the parents are maintaining joint custody. [THR]
· Among Var's Oscar fun facts: sound mixer Kevin O'Connell (Apocalypto) gets a chance to break his all-time record for nominations without a win by scoring his 19th bid. Also, Alan Arkin has gone 28 years in between nominations. [Variety]
· At last, a measure of vindication for persecuted showrunner Aaron Sorkin: Studio 60's ratings are up slightly following a long hiatus of first-run episodes. [THR]
· Coming-of-age film Son of Rambow finally inspires a Sundance bidding war that allows the trades to invoke last year's Little Miss Sunshine insanity. [Variety]

Hollywood's Christmas Morning is finally here, the time when eager Oscar hopefuls rise at an obscenely early hour, rush downstairs in their footie pajamas, and hope to find the previous year's good career behavior validated with lovingly wrapped awards nominations left under the Academy's gilded tree; those deemed good enough for recognition spend the day fielding phone calls from the media, who ask difficult questions about how it feels to be on the receiving end of the golden shower of adoration offered by one's peers (invariably, it feels good! And it's an honor just to be nominated!), while the snubbed quickly retreat back up the stairs to their bedrooms, where they self-medicate their soul-crushing disappointment by swallowing handfuls of prescription painkillers, sobbing through their publicist's assurances that they're still so very, very pretty, and that in this day of the YouTubes, no one watches the Oscars anyway.

· The 3,300 members of the Producers Guild of America surprised just about everyone by giving its top honor to Little Miss Sunshine, the little Sundance acquisition that could. With the PGA predicting the Best Picture Oscar 11 out of the past 17 years, a Crash-style upset for Sunshine isn't beyond the realm of possibility—nor is the requisite musical number, featuring interpretive dancers pirouetting on the roof of a VW bus as Sufjan Stevens strums "Chicago" on an acoustic guitar. [Variety]
· The GLAAD Media Awards nominated Little Miss Sunshine, The Night Listener, Running With Scissors, V for Vendetta, and Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby for outstanding film in wide release. Ricky Bobby made the list presumably for the maturity with which the comedy portrayed the relationship between Sacha Baron Cohen's French Grand Prix champion and his poodle-trainer lover, played by Andy Richter. Despite its enthusiastic gay pride parade sequences and the great strides it made in humanizing the experiences of rubber-fist-dildo enthusiasts, Cohen's other effort this year, Borat, was egregiously overlooked. [THR]
· On the eve of the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nominations announcement, Cohen admitted to a WGA Q&A audience that Borat, whose production notes originally read "there was no script," actually was the work of four writers, with up to 80% of the final film was comprised of scenes they "set out to accomplish." Still, all the studio saw was a five-page outline, not the secret, 60-page detailed master bible the filmmakers were working from. [The Envelope]

Members of the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation have set for themselves one of the most difficult tasks imaginable: Every year, they sift through piles of detritus in an attempt at narrowing an overly crowded field down to a few outstanding instances of big-screen turkeydom. They then bestow among the most deserving of these cinematic poo-gems show business's most uncoveted honor, the Razzie. Leading the nominations this year with seven nominations is Sharon Stone's universally panned return to the icepicks-and-exposed-beaver terrain that first put her on the map, Basic Instinct 2. Tied for most noms, including Worst Picture and Worst Remake/Rip-Off, was the Wayans brothers' Little Man:

· The Art Directors Guild chose fifteen nominees in three categories—period, fantasy, and contemporary—with awards to be presented Feb. 17 at the Beverly Hilton. With Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth, Pirates of the Caribbean, Superman Returns, and V for Vendetta in direct competition, the fantasy ballot alone is likely to send fanboys into a locked, upstairs bathroom to "examine" it more closely. [Variety]
· The Cinema Audio Society awards none other than longtime Oscars producer Gil Cates with their Filmmaker Award. (He's a filmmaker?) Congratulations, Gil, for demonstrating excellence under your many hats of "director and producer in feature films, television and theater." And don't forget blogger! [THR]
· Borat's Ken "Rancid Bubble" Davitian recently took some time to appreciate his good fortune as he made his way through a Golden Globes gifting suite: "I'm a short, fat and bald guy living the good life after an overnight success that took 30 years." [LA Daily News]
· Unless you're a meth addict, morning show anchor, or triathlete in training, you'll probably have to set your alarms in order to be up in time to watch the Oscar nominations announced live, Tuesday morning at 5:30 am. [The Envelope]
· And the "For Your Considerationy" for Most Adorable Tiny Internet Ad goes to... [Universal Pictures Awards]

· The Academy revealed its shortlist for foreign-language Oscar: 9 films, including Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's (fine, we like typing his name) The Lives of Others, Pan's Labyrinth, and Volver. Apocalypto and Letters From Iwo Jima were excluded for being domestic productions. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu was excluded as part of the Academy's ongoing Criminally Overlooked Foreign and/or Documentary Submissions campaign. [Variety]
· Cautiously waiting for Golden Globes fever to die down lest it siphon some of the enthusiasm from their own honors, the St. Louis Gateway Film Critics Assn. Awards finally announced their winners. The Departed took best picture, the Mirren-Whitaker one-two combo we've all but inked into our Oscar ballots triumphs again, and Jennifer Hudson earns another boost to her self-confidence with her win for best supporting actress. [Variety]
· With the Globes question now factored in, here's a look at how the Oscar race is shaping up. This analysis names Dreamgirls, The Departed, The Queen, Babel, and Little Miss Sunshine the odds-on favorites for a best picture nomination, with outside shots for Letters From Iwo Jima and Flags of our Fathers. [AP]

Obviously looking to stir up some trouble, an anonymous tipster dropped us this note about the conspicuous table-hopping activities of Paramount emperor Brad Grey, whose various fiefdoms came away with awards for Dreamgirls and Babel:

· Warner Bros. announces a deal with Fox-owned stations for a daily show based on website TMZ.com. Think an "edgier" Insider or E.T., but with regular segments devoted to video of Brandon "The Firecrotch Guy" Davis entering and exiting Hyde and an onscreen bug devoted to monitoring exactly how much gas is in Paris Hilton's car at any given moment. [Variety]
· Finally, the words we've been patiently awaiting while lamenting a singular talent being wasted on party-hosting and horse-auction gigs: "Tara Reid is attached to star in and executive produce the indie romantic comedy Honestly," the story of "a hard-boiled private eye who works as a temptress to test the fidelity of philandering husbands" (and then, of course, eventually falls for her mistress-diddling quarry) . Even more touching: It's being directed by her brother. [THR]
· The highest-rated Globes in three years earns NBC a Monday night ratings win, a victory that Donald Trump will soon attribute to his frequent appearance on camera due to his Apprentice-promoting placement at The Greatest Golden Globes Table in the World. [Variety]
· Netflix debuts its new online Watch Now video-on-demand program, which lets customers stream movies and TV shows over the internets free of charge. [THR]
· Now you can say it with authority: Germans think Ben Stiller is funnier than Hitler, as Night at the Museum holds off Third Reich yukfest My Fuhrer - The Absolutely Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler at the Teutonic box office. [Variety]

Even on Hollywood's Second Biggest (And First Drunkest) Night, Isaiah "Dr. McChokey" Washington found himself unable to escape the lingering spectre of Chokegate, in which the homophobic slur Washington allegedly hurled while in the middle of a high-minded debate with co-star Patrick Dempsey over their professional relationship launched other co-star T.R. Knight out of the primetime closet. While Washington offered a red carpet soundbite expressing his unbridled enthusiasm for all things queer ("'I love gay. I wanted to be gay,' he said. 'Please let me be gay'"), the controversy-hungry press corps wouldn't let him off the hook when he arrived backstage following Grey's Anatomy's Globe win. Reports Access Hollywood:

Showing the same kind of unfailing dedication to a comedy bit that led the actor to never launder his trademark gray suit or properly use Western-style bodily waste elimination devices during months of in-character press obligations (while Fox publicists undoubtedly tired of toting takeaway feces bags for excited journalists, the exacting actor demanded they be available for all junket participants), Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen offered this behind-the-scenes look at how co-star's Ken Davitian's anus—the subject of Cohen's Golden Globes victory speech—not only made his performance possible, but nearly turned their movie into a faux-documentary snuff film:

We know that we harbor absurdly high expectations for awards shows, and that anything short of witnessing a despondent Leonardo DiCaprio dousing himself in the alcohol that is so readily available at these events, taking the stage in the middle of Forest Whitaker's emotional victory speech, and spectacularly self-immolating to atone for his public failure to win the trophy despite comprising 40 percent of the Best Dramatic Actor field all by himself will leave us feeling empty and disappointed. Still, we wonder if even such a magnificent tableau as the one above would satisfy; deep in our hearts, we suspect that performers can never possibly be drunk enough, dispirited enough, or engulfed in the raging flames of nullification enough to please us, the jaded kudocast viewer. But still we watch, because settling in for three-plus hours of watching well-dressed famous people handing gilded trinkets to other famous people (who then go on to recite a list of names of still more people, some of them familiar to us) momentarily makes us feel better about the acute lack of attractive celebrities handing us shiny objects in our own, small, tragically un-televised lives.

· The 12th annual Critics' Choice Awards Friday night gave The Departed best picture and best director, while Dreamgirls and Little Miss Sunshine take four awards apiece, and Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker take lead acting awards in the races for which they were considered the favorites. Scorsese's Oscar hopes are raised as never before, but the threat of a Lucciesque disappointment lingers. [The Envelope]
· The AFI Awards keeps the proceedings painless, with few speeches, lots of clips, and everyone out the door by 2 p.m. [Variety]
· The Scripter award—going to the pairing of a screenwriter and the author of the book upon which its based—goes to The Children of Men author P.D. James, and the movie's screenwriting team. [THR]
· The Golden Globes air tonight (with a three-hour delay for us—thanks, NBC!), and you know what that means: Yes, a song that's gotten an obnoxious amount of radio play this year will be rerecorded by session singers, with lyrics rewritten to incorporate many nominees! ("I remember when, I remember, I remember when I saw Dreamgirls! Do Globes make us crazy? Globes make us crazy!") [HFPA.org]
· Bonus Golden Globes Governator surprise: Arnold Schwarzenegger will announce the Best Motion Picture Drama. [NBC4.tv]

Let it never be said that Jake Gyllenhaal doesn't know where his gay-icon bread is buttered: to kick off his SNL hosting gig this past weekend, the dreamy-eyed triple-threat deftly offered an air-kiss to fans of his legendary cowboy-bottom turn in Brokeback Mountain, then got down to the dirty business of winning back the hearts of any fans that may have been momentarily captured by Jennifer Hudson's moving™ rendition of that Dreamgirls song. Right about now, a half-dozen male Golden Globes nominees are frantically calling their writer friends (sadly, even Borat himself probably can't pull off the gag now, as much as we wanted to see it), begging them for new victory speech bits, knowing that their hilariously off-key thunder has been stolen by last year's most high-profile Globes snubbee. On the bright side, now we probably don't have to see Forest Whitaker whip off a breakaway tuxedo and bound into the audience to lovingly serenade double-nominee Leonardo DiCaprio with a show tune.

· DreamWorks marketing guru Terry Press is leaving longtime partner Jeffrey Katzenberg after more than a decade of service to start her own company. But don't worry, she's still handling a variety of upcoming DW projects, ensuring that their ambitious Shrek the Third campaign, in which every child buying a Shrek-promoting Happy Meal will be painted bright green at the time of purchase, doesn't have to be overseen by a lesser visionary. [Variety]
· More Viacom corporate upheaval fun! MTV Networks president/COO Michael Wolf resigns after 15 months at the company. [THR]
· Sacha Baron Cohen's recent, insufficiently snuggly, out-of-character interviews make Var chieftain Peter Bart note that while he's clearly a "gifted satirist," he's a little too uncomfortable with the media when robbed of his protective, stinky grey suit. [Variety]
· The Brits love them some monarchs and intimidatingly muscled super-spies, with The Queen landing 10 BAFTA nominations and Casino Royale nabbing nine. [THR]
· A profanity- and Bada-Bing-titty-free Sopranos bow scores A&E the highest-rated off-network premiere in the history! of! cable! Self-congratulatory, full-page ad in the trades featuring James Gandolfini chomping on a cigar while being serviced by a stripper to follow. [Variety]

Since we know that most Oscar voters (at least the ones who don't delegate their responsibilities to their undocumented domestics) are probably scrambling to squeeze in some last minute DVD screeners before their nominations ballots are due tomorrow afternoon, we thought we'd help them more efficiently utilize their precious time by pointing them to these three moments from Sienna Miller's Factory Girl performance, tied together thematically by the actress's unselfconscious nudity, which potentially could free harried Academy members from having to watch the entire film. While the third clip, featuring a strung-out, naked Miller showing off her acting chops is the clear Oscar contender of the group, we prefer the one of her love scene with Hayden Christensen, in which the unshowy, Skinemax-inspired editing truly spotlights her generosity as a performer. Take some time to watch these highlights before hastily filling out those ballots with easy choices like Helen Mirren's nevernude queen; it's what Harvey Weinstein would want you to do.

· The Writers Guild of America nominations smile upon a few comedies this year: Babel, Little Miss Sunshine, The Queen, Stranger Than Fiction and United 93 for original screenplay, and The Departed, The Devil Wears Prada, Little Children, Thank You For Smoking, and Borat for adapted. Since Borat was based on a previously created character, it qualified for the latter category, but that does little to ease the sting for Clint Eastwood's screenwriters (Paul Haggis among them) of knowing their "important" work was nudged out by dialogue of the "I will look on your treasures, gypsy. Is this understood?"-variety. [Variety]
· The American Society of Cinematographers nominated Emmanuel Lubezki for Children of Men, Dick Pope for The Illusionist, Robert Richardson for The Good Shepherd, Dean Semler for Apocalypto and Vilmos Zsigmond for The Black Dahlia for the top feature film award. The winner will be announced February 18 at the Century Plaza Hotel. It won't be broadcast, but you can be sure all the home video shot there will make stunning use of available light. [Variety]
· Here's what some Golden Globe nominees and past winners have to say about their peers, and we don't think we're giving too much away when we tell you that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has Forest Fever. [The Envelope]
· The Costume Designers Guild nominated The Devil Wears Prada, The Queen, Little Miss Sunshine (really? The costumes?), Casino Royale, and Babel for contemporary film, and Marie Antoinette, Dreamgirls, Curse of the Golden Flower, The Illusionist, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest for period. There's a fantasy category as well, but we'll let you find out for yourselves how Eragon faired. [THR]
· The DGA named their TV directing nominees, with ABC getting three nominations for Grey's Anatomy, Boston Legal, and Ugly Betty. NBC's 30 Rock and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip got one each. [THR]

· The always-reliable National Enquirer reports that Lindsay Lohan's doctors are concerned about her overworked liver, but isn't that exactly why they installed the back-up last week? With that extra organ up and running, she was able to resume her partying almost immediately.
· LAist thinks that Gwen Stefani might fill the suspicious hole in her touring schedule with a Coachella appearance. Do with this information what you will—we'll probably use it to give ourselves another excuse to skip two days of sweating in the desert this year.
· R.I.P. Yvonne "Lily Munster" De Carlo.
· Overeducated and Underemployed offers five easy tips on how not to pose with your newly won People's Choice Award. Sadly, this advice arrives too late to save Jennifer Aniston from looking like she's so lonely that she's going to sleep spooning her trophy for the next three months.
· Studio 60's resident Krazy Khristian on why the show isn't doing better, other than the fact that in any given episode, a senile writer from the blacklist era might show up to teach us all a lesson about history: "The engine was running so long on this baby before it ran out of the gate, I think it just overpowered people," she said. "It was like the audience was being held at gunpoint and the message was, 'You better watch the best damn show on television or else.' That's liable to turn anybody off."

· The HFPA has reached an agreement with the IRS over Golden Globes gift boxes, meaning the government will see their rightful cut of the luxury giveaways from years past. Starting this year, the gift boxes will be done away with entirely, depriving stars from the satisfaction of overturning them onto their tables, rummaging through the contents, then agitatedly sweep the pile of gadgets, sunglasses, and spa vouchers to the floor, and saying "There's no fucking iPhone in here. Anyone want this crap?" [HFPA.org]
· Vogue's Andre Leon Talley will host an Oscar fashion show in the Academy lobby, featuring "many of the spectacular dresses that have been worn to the Oscars through the years." Quick: Think of three, not including Cher or Bjork's swan dress. Not that easy, is it? Memory loves ugly. [Variety]
· Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest picks up five People's Choice Awards, and Halle Berry, accepting for Favorite Female Action Star for X-Men: The Last Stand, begged "every person in the room" who wants to see another X-Men movie to "write letters! Write a letter to Tom Rothman at Fox and tell him so." Good thing she didn't ask the viewers at home to do the same, or Tom Rothman would have been flooded with mail pretty soon! [InsideSocal]

• HOLY CRAP THAT FREAKING HURT!!! [PR Differently, via Gawker and SPR]