ABC yanks both the stillborn Day Break and Nielsen bed-Shatter Show Me The Money from its airwaves, spackling episodes of America's Funniest Home Videos, According to Jim, and George Lopez into the resulting cracks in their schedule. [Variety]
Bob Yari picks another Oscar season battle, this one with Warner Brothers over their lack of support (quotable gripe: "Someone up there wants the film buried.") for The Painted Veil. [THR]
Judith Regan's late Friday firing from HarperCollins, ostensibly over the PR shitstorms caused be her O.J. hypothetical murder confession book and Mickey Mantle sex novel, leaves the media with many questions regarding the ownership of certain properties, as well as the future of the ReganBooks imprint. [Variety]
The Survivor: Cook Islands finale gives CBS a Sunday night ratings win over football and Christmas specials on competing networks. Unfortunately, we missed the show and have no idea which race finally proved its superiority in building boats out of driftwood and tolerating Jeff Probst's smarmy presence. [THR]
· USA Network beats other basic cable networks for the rights to Casino Royale with a $20 million offer, with Spike eventually bowing out because it ultimately "felt a little gay" bidding up a movie in which James Bond repeatedly doffs his shirt to show off his abs. [Variety]

· A distribution of nominations according to studio puts Paramount Pictures at the head of the pack with 15, not including Paramount Vantage's 7 for Babel. You can bet the hugs were flying at Vantage today! [GoldDerby]
· If you caught a replay of the nomination announcements this morning (or, heavens forfend, actually woke up to watch them), then you probably caught an ethereal Jessica Biel's shimmering cascade of giggles as she twice had to read the words Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. You then fell back to Earth with a thud when permanent grouch-face Matthew Perry approached the podium to cough up his list of nominees. [Reuters]
· Nominee quote orgy! The Gloater: "I'm just going to sit and bask in people's envy." -Justin Kirk. The Anhedonic: "Our film is really about enjoying the experience of life...and not getting caught up in the contest." -Jonathan Dayton, co-director, Little Miss Sunshine. The Liar: "It is a privilege to be mentioned in the same breath with actors like...Will Smith..." -Leonardo DiCaprio. [AP]
· Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry describes the typical writers' room post nomination announcement celebration: "I will probably toast my writing staff with Diet Coke and we'll spend about 10 minutes talking about it and then we'll just jump back into work," putting their celebration at roughly five times the duration of the one Teri Hatcher and Eva Longoria have planned for their nominated co-stars, Marcia Cross and Felicity Huffman. [AP]

Just hours after the Golden Globe nominations were announced, better entertainment news bureaus everywhere were on the phone with the lucky, chosen few, who shared their "where they were" moments (let's get a handle of things, folks—these are the Globes we're talking about) and their initial reactions (generally positive, save for double nominee Clint Eastwood, who felt the final installment of his WWII trilogy—a YouTube video of a hamster making its way through a video game prison camp—was sorely overlooked.) A round-up:
· Best "where were you" answer definitely goes to Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who was stumbling in from a party at 5:30 a.m. to find his wife still awake, watching the results. Nice save, Gonzalez! You know you were toast without the nomination. [Variety]
· Sacha Baron Cohen delivers this statement: "I have been trying to let Borat know this great news but for the last 4 hours both of Kazakhstan's telephones have been engaged. Eventually, Premier Nazarbayev answered and said he would pass on the message as soon as Borat returned from Iran, where he is guest of honor at the Holocaust Denial Conference." [The Hot Blog]
· The WGA nominations were announced today, and HBO is the only TV network (not that it's TV) with two series in each of the major categories (Deadwood and Sopranos/Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage). NBC, meanwhile, picks up four of the five nominees for best new series, pitting 30 Rock against Studio 60 in a contest we can only assume was concocted purely for the guild members' amusement. [THR]

Fox orders eight episodes of the Mark Burnett game show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? Unfortunately, the competition won't pit adults against school kids, just ask them questions from fifth grade textbooks. The children will, however, be on hand as lifelines and to remind their elders how stupid they've become in their dotage, a decreased mental capacity probably resulting from watching the network's brain-smoothing reality TV programming. [Variety]
Frequent Academy Award nominee (but zero-time winner) Ennio Morricone will receive an honorary Oscar for his legendary score-composing work, a recognition the Academy hopes will make up for decades of painful snubs. [THR]
Johnny Depp's shingle goes on an acquisition spree, buying up the film rights to three books and hiring writer D.V. DeVincentis to adapt Nick Hornby's lighthearted suicide novel, A Long Way Down. [Variety]
The Devil Wears Prada actress and Texas fright wig model Anne Hathaway enters the supernatural thriller part of her career, signing up to star in Passengers, the story of a grief counselor to whom freaky, Sarah Michelle Gellar-level shit inevitably happens. [THR]
Film production company Bauer Martinez celebrates the holidays by laying off 20 percent of its staff, citing the recent bombing of their Van Wilder sequel and Harsh Times as reasons for the Yuletide firings. Merry Christmas, new job hunters! [Variety]

We hate to return so quickly to the Golden Globes nominations, but since we made a point of spotlighting Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip creator Aaron Sorkin's hope that a Globe nod would elevate his Little Serious-Minded Sketch Comedy Drama That Could from a "critical hit" into the type of hit that people actually watch, we thought it relevant to note that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association decided not to sprinkle its magic Nielsen dust on the series, granting a single nomination recognizing Sarah Paulson's performance as the proud Krazee Khristian who so glows with talent that her cast members can only gaze upon her through welding masks. We trust that Sorkin will handle this disappointment maturely, refraining from the petty impulse to have Matthew Perry and Brad Whitford hold forth at length about the meaninglessness of awards shows on a future episode, lambasting the "back-slapping, junket-whore buffet monkeys who wouldn't know quality programming if a DVD screener lodged itself next to the empty heads lodged in their asses" for abandoning his show in its hour of need.

With no Golden Globes story line as compelling as last year's tension over whether or not the Hollywood Foreign Press Association would pit Heath Ledger's mumble-mouthed rancher against Jake Gyllenhaal's dreamy-eyed-yet-mercurial cowpoke (or, more accurately, "sheep-poke") bottom, we suppose we'll have to settle for the one you're going to be reading about all day: the double nominations of Clint Eastwood in the directing category (for both of his World War II movies) and Leonardo DiCaprio's dual Best Actor nods for The Departed and Blood Diamond. For those so inclined, squeezing one's eyes shut and imagining the steamy Leo-on-Leo action of DiCaprio's Boston cop and South African smuggler wrestling over the gilded Globe statue while grunting in passable Southie and Afrikaner accents might fill the erotic void left by the celebrated gay cowboys. In other multiple nominations news, Helen Mirren was recognized for playing both Elizabeth I in a TV miniseries and Elizabeth II in The Queen, an achievement that we genuinely hope you won't use to concoct transgressive, cross-generational fantasies that sully the monarchy. Leave the queens alone, sicky.

With all the bongo-beating build-up to tomorrow morning's announcement of the Golden Globe movie nominations, it's easy to forget that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's annual awards ceremony also celebrates excellence in the Dramatic Televised Arts. And where Emmy voters are seemingly bound by conservative voting practices (or just can't be bothered to watch the screeners in the first place), the HFPA members are free to reward on merit alone, often taking it upon themselves to champion groundbreaking programming in its nascency. THR looks at the chances for some of this TV season's boldest new voices, including Aaron Sorkin's drama about the serious-minded people who make sketch comedy, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip:

· The mavericks of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle give their top honors—picture and directing—to Todd Fields' Little Children. Helen Mirren wins best actress for The Queen, a status quo concession they make up for by awarding Sacha Baron Cohen best actor for his Pamela Anderson-stalking work in Borat. Screenplay honors go to the hardboiled, Raymond-Chandler-meets-Degrassi indie, Brick. [SFFCC.org]
· Time's Richard Corliss gives us yet more insight into the shadowy goings on behind the closed doors of the New York Film Circle's annual gang bang ("The job is simple: tear yellow-lined paper into cracker-size bits; write a name or three on one piece; wait while the names are read out and tabulated," he writes, grippingly), and does some actual math to figure out if these lists actually predict Oscar results. Answer: Yes, they do! Occasionally. [Time.com]
· Clint vs. Clint. Leo vs. Leo. Peter vs. Peter. (Morgan: he wrote The Queen and Last King of Scotland.) In a bounty year of award-worthy output, will ceremonies like the Golden Globes (nominations out this Thursday) see multiple nods for single artists who did double-duty, or will vote-splitting end up cancelling them out? [LAT]
· Letters From Iwo Jima and United 93's strong showing in critics' polls puts the underhyped downer movies high on Academy members' radars; Ellen DeGeneres and her writers are already salivating at the hilarious opening montage sequence in which she single-handedly foils the plans of a group of 9-11 terrorists, only to jet-pack to the ground and find herself trapped in a Japanese internment camp. [Reuters]

Julia Roberts will produce and possibly star in an adaptation of the Lolly Winston novel Happiness Sold Separately, about a suburban wife whose husband, forgetting that he's married to Julia Roberts (perhaps things will be complicated by the character's mousy hairstyle, clunky glasses, and dowdy wardrobe), starts banging the nutritionist at his gym. [Variety]
· Comedy Central signs away another part of its soul to the blue-collared comedy devil, ordering a half-hour animated pilot about Larry the Cable Guy's wacky misadventures as the co-owner of a cable TV station. [THR]
· Meanwhile, Nickelodeon tries to counteract corporate sibling Comedy Central's development evil by greenlighting a new animated series starring SNL's Amy Poehler, Mighty B, about an adorably psychotic 10-year-old Honeybee scout. [THR]
Producers Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Jason Blum buy the film rights to an upcoming Vanity Fair article about the CIA, The Shop; no word on if VF editor Graydon Carter will earn a producing fee for once musing to himself while staring out his office window that the story would make a great movie. [Variety]
Dan Mazer, longtime Sacha Baron Cohen partner-in-crime, is officially inducted into Hollywood's Comedy Mafia by making a deal to write and direct a Judd Apatow-produced, "broad, out-there" comedy for Universal. Bonus soundbite: Mazer marvels that Cohen's dangling of "his testicles in another man's face" has not disqualified him from Oscar consideration. [Variety]

We here at Defamer love the holiday season for no other reason than the bounty of movie critics' year-end lists and awards it brings us, like decrees handed down from on high from our pull-quote producing, thumb-direction-assigning cinematic sages. The Broadcast Film Critics Association adds another layer of intrigue to the process, dragging things out heightening the suspense by first releasing a list of nominees in every category, and later announcing the winners at the E!-broadcast Critics' Choice Awards—a mini-Oscars, as it were, only with the added feature of having Ryan Seacrest backstage to helpfully offer select Best Actor and Supporting Actor nominees stress-relieving lower back rubs. A partial list of the nominees, from The Envelope:

Like nearly all seemingly feel-good Hollywood stories, March of the Penguins's triumphant run is ending in legal ugliness, with the doc's director of photography suing for a director credit on the film. [Variety]
Jason Lee will star in and produce Krater, a comedy about a late 70s/early 80s rock band who hires a lead singer with "secret Broadway ambitions" a description that we will decode as "is secretly gay." [THR]
Getting a whiff of the awards buzz on Letters from Iwo Jima, Warner Bros. pushes director Clint Eastwood in front of as many media members as possible, politely urges him not to confuse people by talking about the other World War II movie he recently did for another studio that everyone's already forgotten about. [Variety]
The Reporter calls 2006 the "Year of the Apology." Serial apologizers Mel Gibson and Michael Richards figure prominently. [THR]
With Studio 60 getting the week off, made-for-TV holiday flick A Year Without a Santa Claus ably filled in as NBC's designated Monday night ratings momentum-stopper, even though the movie completely ignored the lessons we learned about the sham that is Christmas on S60's uplifting holiday special. [Variety]

We mentioned earlier how critics' list deliberations are often contentious and complicated affairs, where the dominant members of the pack have been known to stalk and surround its weaker members, savagely cannibalizing whichever lone voice might have found Helen Mirren's The Queen performance to be "nuanced and accomplished, yes, but hardly the year's best, you bunch of shit-for-brains!" The ScreenGrab blog claims to have had an all-access insider present at this year's powwow, and they share several interesting anecdotes, including one about how Observer critic Andrew Sarris literally flushed away his vote for best animated film:

Once a year, our nation's most esteemed movie critics lock themselves inside smokey, windowless rooms, and heatedly debate, Twelve Angry Men-style, the relative merits of what they have seen over the previous twelve months. It can often escalate into full-on violence—at the New York Film Critics Circle deliberations this year, for example, The New Yorker's David Denby reportedly had The Observer's octogenarian critic-in-residence Andrew Sarris in a half nelson in a dispute over Ryan Gosling's performance in the film of the same name—but inevitably, a consensus is reached, giving obsessive Oscar prognosticators key pieces of evidence to jot down on index cards and affix in perfectly aligned columns to their bedroom walls. A round-up of the results of four major critics' lists:

The National Board of Review makes the first official penetration of the awards season orgy, naming Letters from Iwo Jima best film, Martin Scorcese best director, Forest Whitaker and Helen Mirren best actors, and Volver best foreign film. Brace yourself for the imminent deluge of awards and nominations announcements that may or may not have anything to do with a film's Oscar chances over the coming weeks. [Variety]
The Grammy nominations are out! And? These are probably the only words we're going to write about them: Mary J. Blige, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Justin Timberlake are all multiple nominees. [THR/Billboard
At yesterday's HRTS luncheon, showrunners of scripted programming gathered together to bitch about reality television and the absurdity of network censorship guidelines concerning the number of pelvic thrusts one may display during sci-fi show sex scenes. (Answer: as many as you can squeeze in without depicting "rhythmic sex.") [Variety]
· This article about the five actors who've joined Paul Haggis' next directoring effort, In the Valley of Elah/The Untitled Paul Haggis Project, makes absolutely no mention of Crash or its Oscar victory. For a very happy moment, we allowed ourselves to believe the win was just a very bad dream. And yes, we're still carrying around that pain. [THR]
Imagine's Brian Grazer chooses Spike Lee as the directorial vessel through which the superproducer can explore the L.A. riots in dramatic form, signing on to produce L.A. Riots for Universal. Negotiations are ongoing as to whether he can convince his director to bill the movie as "A Brian Grazer (with Spike Lee) Joint." [Variety]

It's been literally hours since we've considered the plight of the soul-searching/ hand-wringing/hair-tearing Academy voters who are trying to determine whether they should punish Mel Gibson for the paranoid, tequila-liberated thoughts about Jews he expressed on that fateful night in Malibu by withholding awards nominations for Apocalypto, or whether they should ignore such outside concerns and celebrate the directorial artistry necessary to movingly depict the graphic removal of ancient Mayans' faces. In today's NY Times, Sharon Waxman gives us a fresh opportunity to contemplate the Oscar dilemma, even getting a Actual Jewish Person to go on the record about the matter:

Variety today launched its new, online-only "Pushy Question" feature, in which various industry types are invited to offer anonymous opinions that might otherwise be too honest for full attribution in a respectable trade paper without career repercussions. The inaugural query (our paraphrase): "So, Apocalypto is kind of good, but how fucked is Mel Gibson with the Jews who run the Academy Oscar voters?"

Today's NY Times story on the films entered into competition at the 2007 Sundance Festival Of Film, Open Bars, And Swag Suites updated us on the journey of a project we first heard about in July, back when it was struggling for financing to complete the shoot and the agent of its talented, pre-teen star was raving about how proud she was of her client's ability to convincingly portray the violent taking of her innocence:

Nominations for the Independent Spirit Awards, the annual celebration of films largely released by the somewhat less corporate-seeming arms of huge multimedia conglomerates, have been announced, with Little Miss Sunshine and Half Nelson both receiving five nods. [Variety]
Anna Faris will take a break from being bopped in the head in Scary Movie sequels by starring in the "farcical sci-fi comedy" Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel. [THR]
Heroes and Deal or No Deal win the 18-49 demographic for NBC Monday night, while Studio 60's uplifting episode about how tragic murder-suicides can interfere with the production of a live sketch comedy show (which anonymous internet poster Dilbert27 called "a heavy-handed treatment of already ill-chosen subject matter") fails to draw the expected droves of new viewers to the series. [Variety]
The Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers lead negotiator is "shocked and dismayed" that the WGA refuses to surrender their strike leverage by entering negotiations on the studios' timetable. [THR]
The Hollywood Foreign Press puts Apocalypto and Letters From Iwo Jima on the Golden Globes shortlist for Best Foreign Language film, even though neither is eligible for an Oscar in that category. Oh, conflicting awards show rules, why must you be so confusing? [Variety]

· Hot on the heels of the launch of NBC Universal's online humor site DotComedy (it's still around a week later, apparently—so far, so good), AOL and HBO announce plans to erect This Just In in January, a novel idea centered around the unprecedented use of blogging technology to explore current events in comedic fashion. [Variety]
The Academy announces the Oscar documentary shortlist, which includes Dixie Chicks film Shut Up and Sing and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Among the snubbed: Wordplay, Who Killed the Electric Car?, and This Film Is Not Yet Rated. [THR]
Warner Bros. suddenly moves up the release of Clint Eastwood's other World War II drama, Letters from Iwo Jima, to late December to put it into awards contention, hoping to snag some of the nominations that may elude his floptastic DreamWorks effort, Flags of our Fathers. [Variety]
· 27.2 million viewers tune in to watch Emmitt Smith stiff-arm Mario Lopez on the way to the Dancing with the Stars championship, while temporary Lost timeslot-filler Daybreak's premiere was "trounced" by Criminal Minds. [THR]
Fox decides that since it might look bad to cancel all of their new shows, they might as well pick up additional episodes of Til Death and Standoff in hopes that they might eventually draw some viewers once American Idol and 24 return. [Variety]

At Defamer HQ, there is hardly an event more breathlessly anticipated than Miss Golden Globes Day, in which the Hollywood Foreign Press announces which teenage celebrity offspring will be plucked from relative obscurity, momentarily paraded on stage during their alcohol-drenched awards ceremony in an extravagant gown, and then immediately returned to a life of languishing in the shadow of their famous parents, left with little more than the fleeting sensory memory of the overpowering whiskey fumes rising off slurry presenter Harrison Ford. At a ceremony taking place earlier today, Lorraine Nicholson (the 16-year-old daughter of multiple Globe-winner Jack, should you not be familiar with her work), like every Miss Golden Globe that has come before her, emerged from a twenty-foot-tall, gilded vagina representing "Mother Hollywood" (modeled, legend has it, on the ladyparts of pioneering actress Mary Pickford), a powerfully symbolic entrance dramatizing the honoree's glorious rebirth into the show-business community. Please join us in recognizing young Nicholson on this special day, then in looking forward to the profoundly uncomfortable moment in which daughter and proud, scene-chewing Dad appear together onstage, when Jack will find himself unable to resist the temptation to tick off the names of each of Lorraine's predecessors with whom he's enjoyed a sexual relationship.