· NBC Universal's Conanfield has reinvigorated the moribund monologue-monster-attack genre! A triumph!
· The Bachelor's most memorable season finale dumpee gets a second chance at fake-love.
· Star Jones has been "rebranded" right out of a job.
· Isabella Rossellini has moved on to bug porn. [via BoingBoing]
· This year's Super Bowl ads will be "gentle and sweet"; except, you know, for that one where Justin Timberlake gets repeatedly smashed in the junk.

With the giant, overturned hourglass in the courtyard of the Hollywood & Highland complex trickling sand until its final grains pass through it at the strike of midnight on February 24, producers of the Oscars ceremony are continuing to stick to their pledge that come hell or high water, audiences looking for four-plus mind-numbing hours of premium trophy distribution won't walk away disappointed:

The career-long battle between Jessica Alba's artistic ambition and the typecast-inviting good looks she knows are preventing her from becoming a Serious Actress rages on, with Alba once again issuing a public plea for someone, anyone to hand her some ugly-making prosthetics—a crooked nose, a suppurating sore, five extra eyes, whatever—and trust her to deliver their passion project to Oscar glory: "Most of all, Alba, who admires Charlize Theron's Oscar-winning transformation in Monster, wants to be seen as a multifaceted actress who can take on any role. 'I'm not really attached to my appearance,' she confesses. 'I know I can get dressed up and look like something. But what's more of a challenge is someone allowing you to play that role and letting you go there — having a director and writers believe in you. To do something where I got to just concentrate on the performance and discover, that's the ultimate, as far as I'm concerned.'" [LAT]

Like a pencil-moustached, beret-sporting fly on the wall of showbiz's innermost circles, celebrity-stylist to the celebrity-stars Phillip Bloch possesses a formidable amount of insight into the Hollywood condition. So much so, in fact, that ABCNews.com has granted Bloch his very own opinion column, in which he can weigh in on any number of pressing celebrity matters, from the foot-anorexia epidemic currently ravishing young Hollywood's emaciated tootsies, to his compelling treatise on how the death of gifting suites is hurtling our society towards freebieless anarchy.

· Music round-up: The Airborne Toxic Event and The Deadly Syndrome at Spaceland; Dengue Fever at Echoplex; Mark Olson (of The Jayhawks) & Mary Gaulthier at the Troubadour.
· The 11th Hour screens at UCLA's Korn Hall, in which Leo DiCaprio teaches you everything you ever wanted to know about global ecological disaster.
· In other enviroterror-related events: at the Beverly Hills Public Library, Joy Horowitz, former LAT staff writer and author of Parts Per Million: The Poisoning of Beverly Hills, discusses about her discovery of the health effects of industrial drilling.

This Sunday, as you may have heard, is the Super Game, wherein the NFL attempts to atone for whatever heinous crimes its players have committed over the preceding year by providing America with an action-packed, four-hour festival of the most creatively ambitious, highest-budgeted advertainments your favorite corporations have to offer.

Now that we know the voice of Bart Simpson is a full-on "Clear" scientologist, we had to wonder what Bart would sound like were he played by the Clearest of All Clears: Mr. Tom Cruise! In this video mashup keenly edited together by Intrepid Defamer Videographer™ Molly McAleer, our favorite yellow-haired toon turns from a loveable little menace whose tagline is "Don't have a cow, man" to an eerie little OT in-training who abides by the mantra "Anything LRH does." We can't help but wonder what would've gone down had the little guy had had the powers of Xenu with him during that climactic final scene in The Simpsons Movie. We imagine that Bart, embiggened with the energy of the alien king, could have extracted the entire family from the Springfield bubble himself, saving Homer all those motorcycle-induced scrapes and bruises.

Poor flipper-footed Denise Richards just can't catch a break. Following news that ex Charlie Sheen is trying to halt production of what could well become the apex of the washed-up celeb-centric reality show genre, Richards' bad luck streak continues with news that her performance as Dr. Christmas Jones in The World Is Not Enough was just voted the Worst Bond Girl of All-Time by Bond's horndoggiest fans.

While rumors of Britney Spears' addiction to crystal meth have been swirling through the blogowebs for a few months now, two papers are now claiming last night's gurney shitshow happened after the fallen star spent days wide awake on Fergie's pre-hab drug of choice. The National Enquirer is reporting that Britney and manager Sam Lufti checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel at 2am on Wednesday morning after sporting around in the brand-new Mercedes she picked up earlier that day. Upon checking into the hotel:

According to ABCNews.com, a coalition of arm-twisting publicists and sympathetic, outraged actors including Natalie Portman, Sarah Jessica Parker, Josh Brolin and Ellen Page were behind a campaign that persuaded ET and The Insider not to air their $200,000 video revealing that Heath Ledger stood in the same Chateau Marmont bungalow as some cocaine following the 2006 SAG Awards.

PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are posted several times a week, so send them in often—the fate of the universe relies upon it! Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line so we don't lose them) and tell everyone about how your spotting of Jimmy Fallon confirmed everything you always suspected about what his hair might look in person.

· 2008's January box office is up 18% over last year, thanks to both newly released, pump-and-dump triumphs like Cloverfield and steadier earners holding over from December, like National Treasure and the Chipmunks movie. [Variety]
· Fox's still-disappointing Moment of Truth (current number of lives ruined by the televised revelation of their past sins: 0) falls off sharply from last week's huge premiere numbers, but still finished behind only American Idol on the night. [THR]
· Where in the world is Oscar-nominated U.N. messenger of peace George Clooney? At U.N. headquarters, trying to convince headshot-wielding staffers to let him put down his Sharpie long enough to fill them in on the atrocities he just witnessed in Darfur. [Variety]

Many, including us, have been wondering out loud how Warner Bros. plans on addressing the unique (and thankfully so) marketing problem currently facing The Dark Knight: Namely, what to do about a campaign that took fiendish pleasure in showcasing Heath Ledger's singularly bleak and twisted take on iconic Batman villain the Joker. Slate now reports that the studio's plan, in place since the beginning but perhaps being ushered in more hastily since the actor's death, is to shift the focus over to the film's other featured villain:

Reacting late last night on Daily Kos to the news that daytime TV's Montel Williams Era was coming to an abrupt end, Brandon Friedman speculates that a recent Fox News Channel appearance, in which the former Marine decried his hosts' obsession (and, to be fair, that of the entire American media) with covering Heath Ledger over the Iraq war, might have had something to do with his show's whacking, as a non-renewal by a number of Fox-owned stations contributed to its demise: "Three minutes into this awkward segment on Fox, one host cut off Montel in order to go to a commercial. Montel did not return after the break. Four days later, after 17 years as a television host, Montel lost his job." There's more to the argument than that pullquote (he has video, and also readily recognizes that Montel might have already known his show's fate and decided to "cut loose"), but we'll end there to fuel conjecture that somewhere, a displeased Rupert Murdoch whispered to a lackey, "I want his career buried deeper than that instigator Sally Jesse Raphael's." [Daily Kos]

It seems that when we briefly mused about a scenario in which curiously hacky hired-gun Brett Ratner might be called upon to take over The Hobbit franchise by a panicked New Line, we regrettably attached the director to the wrong combination of pants-soiling studio and destabilized hairy-protagonist project. Following Mark Romanek's recently announced departure from The Wolf Man, a desperate Universal, perhaps seeking a collaborator with whom "creative differences" will never be a problem as long as a large enough paycheck is signed, will ask Ratner to step in and render his predecessor's original vision unrecognizable, according to Ain't It Cool News:

Are we going soft if we're starting to feel a little badly for Mr. Phil? The guy answers one frantic phone call from a family in need, then instantly jumps to action, gathering a handful of tongue depressors, a non-functioning stethoscope, and a camera crew before rushing bedside to treat their daughter's Fake British Accent Disorder. He then innocently offers his frank assessment of her condition to Paramount TV syndie-cousin ET.

Perhaps scared off by the litany of physical side effects rattled off at triple-speed towards the end of its TV spots, audiences abandoned Cloverfield in droves in its second weekend at the box office. Still, before moving on to their next Ken Davitian-in-nipple-jewelry obsession, fickle entertainment consumers managed to cement its status as the biggest January opening, like, ever. Which means, of course, that a sequel is already in development:

An allegedly shocking video of Heath Ledger attending a "Hollywood drug party" (or as such an event is more commonly referred to in Los Angeles, "a party") at the Chateau Marmont following the 2006 SAG awards, which may prove conclusively that the recently deceased actor has been in the same room as cocaine and may have discussed his own chilling marijuana use, has surfaced.

Oh dear. For those of you who actually sleep at night, you missed a whopper of an evening at the Spears household. After Britney's newly assigned psychiatrist visited her at her house in the early evening, he found her condition and recent antics so dismal, he contacted the LAPD in an attempt to have her officially committed to UCLA Medical Center — a plan that TMZ reports was "days in the making". What followed was an all-night is-she-or-isn't-she-sane frenzy, the timeline of which we've etched out for you after the jump:

The time has come for MTV Networks beleaguered slavey permalancers to learn their fate. Brand-new human resources lady Catherine Houser issued a memo an hour ago to the Viacom subsidiary's contractors, announcing they would learn if they were among the lucky group whose positions will be converted to staff jobs, as promised in December. On what basis will a permalancer earn job security and benefits? Among the benchmarks: "The position would be staff if there was headcount." Uhh...what? "The position transcends a specific project or show," is another. Considering that a key issue in the uproar over Viacom's benefit cuts last month centered around the frequent rotation of workers (which made it hard for them to accrue the required time needed to qualify for benefits), it sounds like MTVN has given itself a whole lot of leeway with that one. So you've been an MTVN cameraman for nine years? As far as Viacom is concerned, you only spent four months at a time on Pimp My Ride and Cribs, so you're shit out of luck, pal. God be with you, and also with you and you. Let us know how it goes. After the jump, the memo in full.