· Fox reaches into a hat containing slips of paper with the names of actors, wacky situations, and clichéd expressions written on them, producing the Cameron Diaz/Ashton Kutcher project What Happens in Vegas, the story of two people who wake up to discover they've gotten married—and won a huge jackpot!—following a night of debauchery. [Variety]
· Get on the phone with your friends and figure out who's going to host the viewing party: The The Hollywood Reporter's 36th Annual Key Art Awards are coming! [THR]
· Elijah Wood playing Iggy Pop? Sure, why not? After yesterday's announced Tim Allen/David Mamet project, we're open to anything. [Variety]
· Fox signs up 24 for two more seasons, keeping Kiefer Sutherland in beer money through 2009. [THR]
· Cannes kicks off today! Obviously we're not there, so we feel we can be bitterly dismissive of all the Rivieria-side orgies we're missing out on. [Variety]

It should surprise no one to discover that launching a film at the Cannes festival is an absurdly expensive proposition, as the overseas export of Hollywood's auto-fellating promotional machinery requires the transport, lodging, and constant pampering of scores of entitiled executives, talent, and hangers-on pressed into movie-pimping duty. (Publicists and other support staff, of course, sleep 30 to a motel room and subsist only on the croissant crumbs they brush off their betters' tuxedo lapels on the red carpet.) In looking at the costs associated with properly debuting at Cannes, the LAT notes that at least one maverick studio is doing what it can to halt the budget-destroying insanity:

According to a Weinstein Co. source, everyone who's headed to the Cannes film festival to support the many projects they've got in competition there, including the Quentin Tarantino half of Grindhouse, will be flying to France economy-class. Well, everyone except Harvey, who's flying there in his private plane, of course. So is the big bossman feeling the pinch of Grindhouse, Factory Girl and Breaking and Entering's respective floppy openings? Well, in other areas, it doesn't seem like he's hurting—he was just yesterday crowing to the Post about how much money he plans to pump into Halston, the "iconic brand" he bought as a present for his girlfriend. And we also hear that "50% of the Cannes budget is just his hotel, his plane." So maybe he's just still a huge jerkface! Making his staff travel with the common people!

· To celebrate Fox's order of 13 more episodes of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?, please take a minute to once again relive the televised near-humiliation (hey, he got it right...eventually) of Pledge of Allegiance Guy. Many more special moments like that one are sure to follow! [Variety]
· The floundering First Look Studios is rocked by yet another "mutual decision" for an executive to surrender his or her job, with president Ruth Vitale announcing she's exiting her post once she makes sure Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters gets released without any marketing campaigns that terrify entire cities with their innovative techniques. [THR]
· Ocean's 13 will make its international premiere at the Cannes Film Festival (though out of competition). What this means to you: Nothing, as your boss is too cheap to fly you to France for the fest, but you at least might get to hear some amusing stories about the French audiences booing the film for not living up to the lofty artistic expectations set by Ocean's 12 . [Variety]
· Daniel Craig is in talks in the Fernando Meirelles drama Blindness, getting a start on the long and frustrating process of obtaining roles in which he's not asked to portray a British superspy. [THR]
· Behold the awesome power of American Idol, which can elevate even the worst, previously low-rated sitcom to unimaginable Nielsen heights! [Variety]

· International audiences love boringly presented blasphemy, Brett Ratner: Da Vinci Code wins the foreign box office for the second week in a row with $90.9 million, while new release X-Men: The Last Stand rakes in $76.1 million. [Variety]
· CBS settles its lawsuit with Howard Stern and Sirius, with Stern's new satellite home paying CBS $2 million for rights to his radio archives, dashing our hopes that the affair would be settled by a winner-take-all match of anal ring toss between Les Moonves and Beetlejuice. [THR]
· The Palm d'Or goes to director Ken Loach for The Wind that Shakes the Barley, reminding us that films besides Da Vinci and X-Men screened at Cannes. [Variety]
· Studios looking past traditional promotional campaigns with fast food and soft drinks tie-ins this summer are joining up with less conventional marketing partners, like Superman Returns' risky, co-branded line of feminine hygiene products featuring Lois Lane's likeness. [THR]
· ABC and CBS make it easy for viewers to ignore their American Idol clones The One and Rock Star by scheduling them to face off in the same summer timeslot. [Variety]

· The American Idol finale numbers are in and predictably huge, as 36 million people tuned in to watch Taylor Hicks embark on a career of overwrought, Idol-supplied ballads and Joe Cocker covers. As the Reporter notes, that total is "nine times the population of Hicks' native state of Alabama," where Hicks will be named emperor-for-life in a ceremony later today. [THR]
· People suddenly start caring about the NBA Playoffs this season, spurring a ratings surge helping justify ABC, TNT, and ESPN's massive investment in televising pro basketball games. [Variety]
· Hustle & Flow director will stay with Paramount to make Maggie Lynn, the country music-centered third installment of his "music that people in Tennessee seem to like" trilogy. [Variety]
· Studios and networks are suing Cablevision for offering its "RS-DVR" on-demand service, which allows customers too forgetful to set their own DVRs to watch programming the cable provider has pre-recorded for them, on the grounds that the nets and studios need more time to launch their own services aimed at further bleeding the lazy. [THR]
· Sofia Coppola's dad rides on the coattails of his famous filmmaker daughter, decides to give the directing thing a whirl. [Variety]

No one knows better than we do that regrettable editorial oversights like this one will happen from time to time (we'll never live down the one where we recently misidentified Dakota Fanning as "Bruce Willis' favorite dominatrix"—whoops!), but even knowing ahead of time that something was wrong, it still took us a moment to realize that this photograph's neon-junk-slinged subject was Sacha Baron Cohen alter ego Borat and not, in fact, respected actor Jean Reno proudly displaying his French homeland's most fashion-forward beachwear during a break in Da Vinci Code promotion.

· Sony's worldwide day-and-date release strategy for The Da Vinci Code proves incredibly effective, especially in Catholic-heavy countries like Spain and Italy, which set box office records this weekend. As a reward for their patronage, Sony's Amy Pascal has promised those markets special premieres of any future film that blasphemes their savior. [Variety]
· We'd somewhat naively assumed that deleting a show from our TiVo season pass made it disappear from the airwaves, but the huge Nielsens of the Desperate Housewives finale prove otherwise. [THR]
· Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette has already generated buzz in the fashion world. We don't even know what "flouncy pink footwear" is, but apparently it's "in" because of the movie. [Variety]
· A development executive at MTV wakes up from a two-year coma and greenlights a Jennifer Lopez-produced reality series about dancers trying to make it, tragically unaware that no one cares about what Lopez does anymore. [THR]
· After five days at Cannes, no film has emerged as frontrunner for the Palm D'or. Jury members, however, are considering awarding it to the out-of-competition X-Men: The Last Stand if Brett Ratner promises to leave their country a few days early. [Variety]

Another contentious film is set to premiere at Cannes tomorrow night, though the religious suppositions challenged in Fast Food Nation—a fictionalized movie starring Ethan Hawke based on the non-fiction best seller—are about America's blind worship of fast food behemoth chains and their conveniently numbered combo menus. And while the industry's deeply vested interests haven't rallied a counterattack to match the scale of that of Da Vinci's devout detractors, as the WSJ reports, they still don't plan on letting Nation premiere without a fight:

At the Waterloo station in South London today, Ron Howard proudly showed off his Da Vinci Code-branded Eurostar train to stars Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou, which will carry the trio from England to their movie's world premiere in Cannes. The train is specially equipped with a state-of-the-art loudspeaker system which will blare controversy-exploiting promotional messages such as "Hey Catholic ! Did you hear how Jesus married a prostitute? Come see The Da Vinci Code and find out more!" and "Everything the Pope told you is a lie!" as they hurtle through the idyllic European countryside, ensuring that they'll be met by throngs of curious moviegoers when they disembark in the south of France.