Last Friday's ranking of the top-earning actresses in Hollywood was just a tasty appetizer for the Reporter's annual, year-end feast celebrating show business lady-potency, their Power 100 list of the most influential females in a still male-dominated entertainment industry. Determined to avenge last year's loss and regain the Iron Tiara she's held in three of the last four years, Disney Media Networks co-chairman Anne Sweeney spent the last 12 months engaged in a physically punishing training regimen in preparation for her rematch with 2006 titleholder, Sony's Amy Pascal, in last night's pay-per-view Power 100 Championship Pillow-Fight Presented by Lifetime Networks

· In replacing her picketing writing staff with a set of bongos today, Ellen DeGeneres may be onto to something; look for Carson Daly to kill some time on his own strike-hobbled program by spending ten to fifteen minutes bashing away at a full drum kit before bringing out his guest.
· Jennifer Love Hewitt has broken her silence about the junk in her trunk, defending the honor of unfairly persecuted size 2's everywhere.
· Sandra Oh gives the Canadian perspective on the writers strike.
· And speaking of our neighbors to the north, there are more of those horrifying PSAs where that face-scorcher came from. [Warning: not for the weak of heart or delicate of constitution.]

By now you may have already seen some disquieting photos taken of 1980s nighttime soap star Joan van Ark yesterday at a Paramount lot performance of Love Letters starring Dame Elizabeth Taylor and James Earl Jones (yeah, we have no fucking clue either), and all we can say is: What the hell happened? She was looking so healthy and vivacious up until only recently! [Daily Mail]

With The Kite Runner's gala premiere scheduled for tomorrow night, the NY Times updates us on the whereabouts of the controversial project's child stars, who, you may remember, required the services of a studio-hired extraction team to get them out of potential harm's way for participating in the film's "culturally inflammatory rape scene." The good news: the children have been shuttled out of Kabul and are now safely in an undisclosed city in the United Arab Emirates, where they're being lodged in a luxury hotel while the details of their indefinite stay are being worked out:

If you missed 60 Minutes's fawning profile of Will Smith last night—"This charming kid's just charmed!" seemed to be the main thrust of Steve Kroft's piece—we've included an outtake, in which the I Am Legend star describes how early on in his career, he and his manager looked at the top ten grossing films of all times, found some common themes (creatures, special effects, and love stories), then used those findings to map out a blueprint with which to conquer Hollywood.

If you're one of those Knocked Up audience members whose bullshit-sensing adrenal glands went haywire watching Judd Apatow's blockbuster paean to chubby, jobless, weed-huffing types and the attractive, upwardly mobile women who drop everything to carry their accidentally conceived children to term, then you are not alone, as even the actress called upon to bring such an improbable scenario to life has expressed her own misgivings about taking the role in the current issue of Vanity Fair:

· Music round-up: Vampire Weekend at the Echo; Carbon/Silicon (featuring Mick Jones from The Clash and Tony James from Generation X) at the Troubadour ; In Waves at the Viper Room.
· Join cast members John Stamos and Linda Cardellini in celebrating 300 (!) episodes' worth of attractive physicians, gruseome traumas, and revovlving cast members on ER at the Paley Center.
· Writer/director Adam Rifkin will be on hand for a post-show discussion at Stephen Farber's Reel Talk screening of Look, a film that "interweaves half a dozen stories, all filmed through the lens of the surveillance cameras that have become an omnipresent fixture of modern life," at the Wadsworth Theater.

In People's DEVIATED SEPTUM CORRECTION EXCLUSIVE! with High School Musical star Ashley Tisdale (not the naked one, the other one), the actress offers the magazine the go-to excuse for why she just had her nose reshaped, a surgery that should bring the offending organ more in line with Disney's exacting proboscis standards. "I'm not feeling great today. It's uncomfortable and I hope this is the only time I ever have to go through something like this," said the appealingly naive Tisdale, who likely will be spending considerable time on the therapist's couch when a casting director lowers his eyes to her chest and remarks, "Not bad. But I'd like your chances better if you went you went a little bigger? One of the Cheetah Girls was in here this afternoon and said she'd do whatever it takes. A real go-getter, that one." [People]

Our favorite part of The Rachael Ray Show—pretty crazy that we have one, right? You know, besides the segments where she blows our minds by preparing economical meals in an impossibly speedy timeframe—has always been Stupid B-List Actress Tricks, where the pathologically perky host invites her semicelebrity besties into the studio to show the world the non-acting-related talents they rarely get to display at their day jobs. Today, Big Bang Theory's Kaley Cuoco dropped by to demonstrate her amazing ability to accurately Blackberry without looking at the device's tiny keyboard, a trick that enables her to safely keep her eyes on the highway while staying in constant communication with her agent, family, and chatty friends.

Alas, not every post-American Idol story ends in record deals and sellout tours—for every Carrie Underwood or Kelly Clarkson, there is a Jessica Sierra, the husky-voiced, bad-girl contestant from the show's fourth season who's had repeated run-ins with the law since being ejected from the karaoke showcase Eden without so much as a creepy, lingering embrace and promise of, "I'll be in touch," from Clive Davis. But nothing has yet compared to Sierra's performance Saturday night, after being taken into custody outside a Tampa bar for "cocaine possession, battery, and disorderly intoxication." From The Smoking Gun:

But the reward sure to be most coveted comes from the producers of Battlestar Galactica, who are donating three autographed pieces of fabric that have touched the private parts of star Jamie Bamber to the cause:

Appearing on internet-only talk show LateNet with Ray Ellin, Hank Azaria regaled the audience with the origins of his many classic characters from The Simpsons, admitting he had to devise his own George Takei when the original was politely not asked back after he "creeped out a lot of the staff," and bestowed the nickname "Angel" upon rewrite-distributing intern C.J. [dailycomedy.com, Page Six]

· Unsatisfied at being the face of just one blockbuster franchise, Dark Knight star Christian Bale is in talks to join the next installment of the about-to-be-revived Terminator franchise. Somewhat disappointingly, he's coming on as the John Connor character, not the latest iteration of the series' (nearly) indestructible, killing-obsessed cyborg, which would have been a pretty amazing bit of casting. [Variety]
· Tom Petty will play Super Bowl halftime, a choice that will probably prevent the musical festivities from being marred by exposed nipples or terrifying demonschlongs, though the puckish rocker may decide to defy the conventional wisdom that he's "safe" by hanging some brain in the middle of "Free Fallin'." [THR]

Revisiting Andy Cohen's blog on Friday, something we hadn't done for a while, kind of made us nostalgic for the guy, as no other blogging basic cable network executive really gives it to us straight the way Andy does. A return seemed in order, and today's post certainly doesn't disappoint: Andy on the 2 Girls 1 Cup internet phenomenon: "I can't and won't watch it." Andy on Guy Ritchie's night out with the NY Times: "[T]he writer catches up with a Singlet-Clad Guy at his wrassling class or wrestling meet or homoerotic night at group therapy or whatever it was." And finally, Andy on meeting Helen Mirren: "She was very nice and wearing a black suit." [Andy's Blog]

Since her first 10 Most Fascinating People special, a hodgepodge of politicos, celebrities, and persons of note that included everyone from the Archduke Ferdinand to Sarah Bernhardt, Barbara Walters annual compendium of the year's most spellbinding personalities has only grown more essential and, dare we say it, fascinating.

Briefly enticing the occasional director of hyperkinetic gangster flicks away from the time-consuming responsibility of making sure that his wife's orphan acquisitions aren't repossessed by any disillusioned biological family members while she's out shopping with the promise of some cocktails at the Sunset Marquis bar, the Sunday NY Times spent a fascinating "Night Out With" Madonna househusband Guy Ritchie, an encounter which began with Ritchie demonstrating his martial arts skills to an impressed reporter:

The Las Vegas entertainment landscape has never fully recovered from the abrupt departure of Siegfried & Roy, the openly schwul Bavarian illusionists renowned for the tiger-charming prowess, after a shocking stage mishap that saw Roy carried off in the jaws of one of their prized feline performers. Now, in an exclusive interview with the Review Journal, Siegfried reveals that with the near-miraculous strides Roy has made in his recovery (he's playing racquetball! Against tigers!), a return to the Vegas floorshow stage isn't out of the realm of possibility:

Perhaps wounded that some disgruntled, newly laid-off Tonight Show staffers anonymously griped that their early-bonus-proferring boss had failed to equal the generosity of peers like eventual successor Conan O'Brien, who'd previously pledged to financially support every last self-abusing bear and incontinent, bolt-excreting robot on his payroll during the writers strike, host Jay Leno has decided to join the compassionate ranks of late night TV saviors by covering his employees' salaries on a week-to-week basis. Christmas is saved!

This completely escaped our notice, as every time Shia LaBeouf appears onscreen we're so mesmerized by his star power that we're rendered completely unaware of the words coming out of his mouth, but our friends at Goldenfiddle have reduced the most powerful moments of his Transformers performance to a single, masterfully intoned syllable. [goldenfiddle]

In another one of those post-Thanksgiving weekends at the box office in which Hollywood serves up the cinematic equivalent of mold-encrusted stuffing and rancid cranberry sauce, the moviegoing public largely chose to stay home and avoid a grudging feast on studio leftovers. Have a look at the anemic numbers from a slow three days at the multiplex, which Box Office Mojo says was "the least attended in a decade":