Surefire Sign That Your Movie Marketing Department Is About Ten Minutes From Mass Suicide: The last-ditch recruitment of Barbie to promote your lite S&M stinker to the last demographic not poisoned by your movie's negative hype, seven-year-old girls.

After reading yesterday's examination of the ESPY Awards gift bag, an operative monitors the pre-ceremony action on the red carpet in front of the Kodak Theatre. You'd think that with the constant, panicked traffic reports we've heard on the radio telling us to avoid the area at all costs due to sure ESPY-induced anarchy, there would be a little more action than this:

PlanetOut notices that former adorable, screeching face-slapper and current gay icon Macaulay Culkin's last three projects have been gay-friendly. He explains his latest artistic choices in this excerpt from the interview:

If you thought Pat O'Brien's bitching filled today's quota of aeronautical industry-derived gossip, you were wrong. Who knew there's anything good happening on airplanes besides mile-high quickies in the bathroom? A reader reports on a troubling failure in airline security, which resulted in a hateful bomb being transported on a passenger plane. Luckily, the dangerous cargo is not set to detonate until next Friday. There's still time to save yourselves!

Sister site Gawker posts on a recent legal threat inspired by our recent coverage of the utterly non-hot, totally illegal Cameron Diaz "S&M" tape. The endless threat letter is excerpted over at Gawker. Seriously, if Diaz's publicity people spent one-tenth of the effort that Diaz's legal attack dogs spend on cease-and-desist letters, her ass would've been nominated for its tear-jerking performance in both Charlie's Angels movies.

Ben Affleck has dropped out of the Disney/Bruckheimer production Glory Road less than a month before production begins. Affleck was apparently disappointed with Disney's offered back-end deal. We'd like to go ahead and assume the same problem may have contributed to the demise of his relationship with J. Lo, but nobody gets an engagement ring that big without giving up enough back-end action.

· Finally, Basic Instinct 2? A sequel whose time has long passed, starring a certified box office killer. Produced by guys who had to be sued into making the damn thing, probably because they realize that a Sharon Stone beaver shot doesn't carry the box-office power of ages yore. They really need a little injection of Lohan, in our humble opinion. [Variety,
sub. req'd.]
· Frances McDormand and Charlize Theron sitting in a tree...the two actresses currently working together on Aeon Flux are looking to pair up again for Class Action, the simply riveting story of the first successfully prosecuted sexual harassment case. A banner day for women's rights, HR seminar-leaders, and the handsy guys in Accounts Payable alike. [THR]
· A Harvard study shows that the MPAA has slowly become increasingly tolerant of swearing, violence, and sex in its rating system. What they have dubbed a "ratings creep" is quickly turning into a full-on invasion, as proven by Lindsay Lohan's exploitative, melon-smuggling omnipresence. [THR]
· Trouble at the TCA's: Are companies buying good reviews? The organization looks to celebrate its 20th anniversary with a souvenir program, paid for by ads purchased by the very networks and studios the group covers. [Variety, sub. req'd]

A traveler overhears Pat O'Brien grousing in American's Admiral's Club about the legal problems surrounding his move from NBC's Access Hollywood to the syndicated The Insider at Paramount. (Quick, boring background: NBC-Uni is suing Paramount to stop O'Brien from starting work on the new show.)

According to today's Variety, mercurial starlet/plastic surgery controversy-magnet Lindsay Lohan is in final negotiations to star in Fox's Lady Luck for $7 million large. Now that she's starting to command serious money, maybe it's time that she takes out a Lloyd's of London policy to protect her "talents" so that she can continue to entertain us for years to come.

Like cred-seeking actors invading the east side enclaves of hipster cool, Hollywood's lesser lights are storming the area's real estate open houses. This dispatch from our just-appointed Special Correspondent on B-List Celebrity Property-Browsing Habits catches a few in the act; we hope that an agent was on hand to prevent any open-house fellatio from devaluing property values. Report after the jump.

It just goes to show you: You can take the girl out of Kentwood, but you can't make the girl stop drinking booze out of tiny bottles and chasing it with Red Bull while gorging on junk food with her skeezy dancer fiancé in Malibu. On some level, it's refreshing that Brit has temporarily eschewed Hollywood pretension and embraced her inner trailer park. But we can't quite shake the fear [Ed. note—hope] she'll soon be opening a meth lab in her tour bus.

Readers instantly and vociferously call bullshit on the MySpace profiles of alleged dreamy-eyed hacker Jake Gyllenhaal and cybering gal pal Kirsten Dunst. Among the couple's meat-space giveaways are being "pretentious" (Jake) and short (Kirsten). Comments like these are precisely why we gave up our million-dollar film career for the perfection of cyberspace.

ESPN.com pulls back the curtain—slightly—to give the sport-lovin' plebe a "limited opportunity to go behind the scenes" to see what they're giving the rich and famous in their ESPY Awards gift bags tomorrow night at the Kodak Theatre. [Defamer traffic warning: Avoid Hollywood Boulevard at all costs. Just abandon your car anywhere on Highland and Hollywood traffic officials will return it to you Wednesday.] Among the gift bag highlights: Something called Players Extreme liquor (for all of your pre-game, tremens-reducing needs), a premium soy wax candle, and a dozen Premium Salad Gift Cards from Mickey D's. Oh, how the vegan candle-burning, McDonald's salad-munching crowd lives! So very premium indeed.

We don't want to date ourselves here, but we remember the days when fake celebrity pages were the exclusive province of Friendster. (On the web, any sentence name-checking Friendster might as well end in a story of walking barefoot in the snow to the internet dial-up cafe, uphill both ways.) Now a curious reader submits the supposed MySpace profiles (think Friendster, but louder) of Hollywood lovebirds Jake Gyllenhaal and Kirsten Dunst for evaluation. Because we are cynical and our heart is black, our first reaction, whether we're ruling on the authenticity of jailbait racks or social-networking profiles, is always: Fake. But taking a closer look here, there are enticing candid photos in both profiles, and no over-the-top nonsense in their prose. Maybe those crazy kids are trolling for the third, non-famous part of a three-way? We told you our heart is black.

It was only a matter of time before someone gave the troubled half of the Olsen Twins the t-shirt treatment. Not bad. But we hereby donate the following for t-shirt immortalization: twin "I'm with Cokehead" and "I'm With Fatty" shirts. Feel free to send us royalty checks when you're millionaires.

Hipsters, say goodbye to your East Side Fortresses of Indie Rock Solitude. Spaceland, The Echo, Silverlake Lounge: They're all targets of a coming invasion of celebrities looking to colonize your empire of thrift-store t-shirts, faux-hawks, and sweatbands. Lock up your babies! Hollywood is hungry for your blood! Blogger aj4a sees it coming. He'll be saved:

Queer Eye is finally coming to Los Angeles. [Ed.note—We gave up hope about six months ago when we suffered a stroke in the middle of a Pier 1, waiting for Tom to suddenly appear and help us with our wicker choices.] This time, Bravo is planning on queering up some straight girls at an open casting call this weekend at a Toluca Lake casting agency. But we're thinking the only chicks that will show up are the kind that are panhandling outside a Hollywood Starbucks amongst signs describing Tom Cruise's mind-control rays. What woman in LA doesn't already have a team of gays fussing over her hair?

Hollywood PrivacyWatch sightings are sent in by readers. Send yours to tips@defamer.com and let the famous know that if they didn't want to be noticed, they'd have dinner delivered.

J-Unit of TVGasm, Defamer's resident expert on the veracity of celebrity breast photography, writes in with an assessment of the recent Britney Spears nipple slip printed in The Sun UK.

Blog Cinemocracy extracts a "fun fact" from this Variety story (sub. req'd) on the international pirate DVD trade, in which Interpol (no, not the band, silly hipster!) claims movie piracy is the new black of terrorist funding: "One kilo of pirated discs is worth more than one kilo of cannabis resin.”