· Jesse Jackson lets the industry know that it can't fool him with Oscar nominations (and likely wins) for Jennifer Hudson, Forest Whitaker, and Eddie Murphy, as he sees right through this obvious stalling tactic putting off an oft-promised dehonkification of Hollywood. [Variety]
· ABC might not be revealing exactly what their Grey's Anatomy spinoff will be about, but they're conceding this: Taye Diggs is going to be in it. We're sure they'll find something for him to do involving cradling the adorable, sickly babies Dr. Addison just saved from tragic demises. [THR]
· Fox plans on giving Steven Spielberg's On the Lot reality competition a leg up by premiering it after one of the last American Idol installments of the season, hoping that viewers will stick around even when they figure out that Ryan Seacrest won't be showing up to console the losers. [Variety]
· Today's evocative verb referring to what Idol did to its competition last night: "tramples." [THR]
· The stunt-casting of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter as president and VP in a bit dramatizing every liberal's most disturbing nightmare helps the premiere of Fox News Channel's Daily Show knockoff The 1/2 Hour News Hour to big debut ratings. [Variety]

By now, everyone's aware of the shocking attacks DreamWorks mogul and Democratic primary fixer David Geffen made yesterday on Hillary Clinton, her intern-despoiling husband, the White House's substandard lodgings for billionaire rainmakers, and all that is good and holy about civilized political campaigning in an attempt to demonstrate that all of Hollywood has fallen prone at the feet of Barack Obama, ready to do the Chosen One's bidding. Now that most of the factually inaccurate, post-attack bickering has been dispensed with, Team Hillary is regrouping today, ready to launch a Hollywood counteroffensive that includes trips to fundraisers hosted by her own stable of local billionaires, and, ominously, a trip to the CAA Death Star. Says Var:

We are still two years away from seeing NBC's 11:30 pm-12:30 am slot emerge out from its current holding pattern in a Comedy Ice Age, a long overdue thaw in which Jay Leno's insufferable "stupid man on the street" interviews will finally be replaced by Conan O'Brien's sublime, Horny Manatee sensibilities. But who or what will fill O'Brien's hour remains very much up in the air: With manorexic Carson Daly hardly setting the late-night landscape on fire, NBC has begun to look elsewhere for a possible replacement, including former SNLer Jimmy Fallon. Reports the NY Times:

At this late juncture on the Road to Oscar™, the media has exhaustively polled virtually every awards season opinion-haver about their thoughts on this year's races; determined to find an independent voice that has not yet been heard, this morning local radio station Indie 103.1 turned to the Guy Who Plays Spider-Man in Front of the Chinese Theatre, a free-thinker unafraid to ignore the conventional wisdom in his prognostications. His picks for the major categories:

The paparazzi-clotted streets of West Hollywood are safe again (at least for now): TMZ is reporting that an elite team of patient reclamation specialists from Promises Malibu—armed with oversized butterfly nets, the latest taser technology, and a baby rattle (she misses Sean Preston and the other one)—have succeeded in subduing rehabilitation fugitive Britney Spears and have returned her to lockdown at their minimum security facility. Also: the children are in Kevin Federline's custody, as Spears' preferred child care provider, the clown-faced ghost of Anna Nicole Smith, was unavailable due to a previous commitment.

· Is releasing clips with exposed time codes so they look "leaked" the newest thing in promotional viral video? Anyway, enjoy these Will Ferrell dick-dips from Blades of Glory, coming soon to a theater near you!
· Famous person has two babies! At the same time! Incredible.
· Where will Britney do her first Redemption Tour interview? If she's truly lost her shit, she'll bypass Diane Sawyer for Carson Daly.
· Every 25 year marriage is bound to have its rough patches, right? We're sure Dave and Paul will works things out eventually, but you know how it is when the wife is all blah blah blah all the time.
· Hey, sex-attacking bat demons!

While CAA's drones are still contentedly breathing in the New Death Star Smell still suffusing their fully operational (and newly non-exploding) Century City headquarters, an operative within ICM tells us that not even a heartfelt office-warming gift from their evil neighbors can help the staff shake the feeling that their home in The CC isn't quite as nice as the Creative Artists stronghold:

You know the Academy Awards are just around the corner when you spot a number of able-bodied workers on a cordoned-off strip of Hollywood Blvd., unspooling coiled lengths of cardinal fabric and painstakinly fitting them together into the Oscars Red Carpet. We learned many fascinating tidbits about the carpet itself this time last year (it hails from Dalton, Ga., where it takes five days to dye it the proprietary shade of Oscar red!), but this year, we thought we'd simply take a quiet moment to admire the most fabled and glamorous red carpet of them all—how many rugs are hounded by the paparazzi?—before it's punctured and crushed beneath the weight of an army of P.R. handlers' Jimmy Choo heels, feverishly criss-crossing its expanse in an effort to ensure their clients successfully circumvent Joan Rivers' probing sideline heckles of "Who are you wearing?" typically followed by "And who are you?!"

· Music round-up: Grizzly Bear at the Troubadour; Gomez with Ben Kweller at the Wiltern; Cold War Kids at the El Rey.
· The downtown Central Library hosts a screening of The Dixie Chicks: Shut Up & Sing, the doc detailing the Grammy-beloved group's fun experiences following Natalie Maines' expression of her feelings about the President. The film's director will also be on hand for Q & A duty. [via flavorpill]
· The Colleghumor.com Comedyjuice show at the Hollywood Improv has Dave "Insomniac" Atell, Mike Birbiglia, Nick Thune, and Dan Levy. Oh, and Joe Rogan, reclaimer of stolen jokes and sworn nemesis of Carlos Mencia.

A brave Defamer operative in WeHo relates her near-brush with potentially dangerous rehab fugitive Britney Spears, who a little while ago mesmerized some law enforcement officers into assisting her escape from the swarming paparazzi looking to collect the bounty on her bald head:

Now that the Oscar ballot deadline has passed, the DreamWorks publicity team can safely shift its focus from designing Dreamgirls ads aimed at reminding Academy voters of frequently latex-hampered thespian Eddie Murphy's mastery of the awards-baiting man-cry to ones like this full-pager that appeared in today's Variety, publicly apologizing for the confusing dramatic license the film may have taken with the Motown story. There's some background on the reasons for the mea culpa here, including a quote from Berry Gordy's public statement applauding the studio for reminding everyone about the difference between movie semi-magic and reality, demonstrating no bitterness that Jamie Foxx's performance as the character based on him wasn't good enough to get an Oscar nomination.

· We aren't getting an advanced look at a model of the Oscars set like we did last year, but Swarovski, the ubiquitous crystal purveyors who have never seen a mundane cellular communications device they couldn't jazz up, have previewed the "superbly sparkling Swarovski Crystal Curtain" that will hang on the Kodak Theater stage, valued at "$1 million." A mil? Please. Charlize'll have that much hanging around her neck, and we'll probably be too preoccupied with whatever is jutting out of her shoulder to notice. [PR Newswire]
· Need a leg-up on your Oscar pool prognosticating? EW.com canvases five resident experts, then plots out their opinions on highly confusing Connect Four boards. [EW.com]
· J-Lo Talks to Action News About Oscars! [6abc.com]
· Here's a list of black actors "robbed of their Academy Awards." Why, oh why, must Marlon Wayans' empty mantel suffer at the cruel hands of The Man? [VIBE]
· Approached for advice for 10-year-old Abigail Breslin, Oscar-winning former child star Mickey Rooney responded by saying, "I understand there's talk of a sequel. Can I interest you in a tweaker great-grandfather?" [Reuters]

· Is it starting to feel like ABC's getting a little desperate to squeeze the life out of its hits? They've now signed up Housewives creator Marc Cherry to a four-year, eight-figure deal to stay with the show through its seventh season, during which the only remaining unexplored plotline will involve Eva Longoria and Teri Hatcher waking up to find themselves trapped in each other's bodies. [Variety]
· Today in theoretical WGA strike saber-rattling: A Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. study says a strike, whether "real or de facto," would "not be good news for areas of Los Angeles County with exposure to the business." The LAEDC also recommends that studio executives who find themselves suddenly impoverished by a labor stoppage "burn piles of stockpiled scripts for warmth." [THR]
· The DreamWorks Obamamaia fund-raiser may have raised $1.3 million for Barack, Hollywood blood money the candidate's campaign has no intention of giving back, no matter how pissed off Hillary was by David Geffen's crack about the Lincoln Bedroom. [Variety]
· American Idol producers Nigel Lythgoe and Ken Warwick are tasked with trying to make the moribund Emmy telecast a little more exciting, a goal they hope to achieve by handing Paula Abdul a garbage bag full of prescription painkillers and then sending her out on stage as host and sole presenter. [THR]
· Rules of Engagement's early success following Two and a Half Men leads Var to postulate that audiences might be craving more formulaic, multicamera sitcom crap. [Variety]

As Virgie Arthur, Larry Birkhead, and Howard K. Stern have it out in a Broward County Circuit Court in Fort Lauderdale over the fate of Anna Nicole Smith's estate, baby, and rapidly decomposing remains, one person who can stay silent no longer is Kimmie Walther, who won our hearts as a regular fixture on The Anna Nicole Show with a combination of her butch charms and unflappable loyalty to her boss, as demonstrated by the Anna Nicole tattoo etched on her arm. On kimberlywalther.com, Kimmie rails against who is emerging as the real villain of this tale, hurling a list of questions and accusations at Smith's former puppeteer/lawyer/non-binding life partner:

Not content to demonstrate his Democratic kingmaking power by throwing a beachside cocktail party/Hillary Clinton effigy burning for Hollywood Chosen One Barack Obama on the pristine sand behind his Malibu compound last night, DreamWorks activist David Geffen granted the NY Times's Maureen Dowd an exclusive fireside chat, during which the power-mad billionaire stroked an overfluffed white cat while cackling his way through his plans to destroy his presidential-hopeful nemesis. The column is behind a subscriber wall, but here are some of the thoughts Geffen shared with Dowd about Hillary, Bill, the political hot water in which Steven Spielberg finds himself submerged for going along with the Obama fund-raiser, and his luxurious sleeping quarters:

Jerry Springer appeared on Good Morning America today to unveil the new cast of Dancing with the Stars, ABC's hit reality competition that gives la crème de la D-list crème one more shot at foxtrotting their way back into America's hearts. This season, producers have amassed arguably the most illustrious group yet of besequined washouts to grace those polished floors with their varying degrees of technical skill, culled from worlds as disparate as professional sports and Beatle-marrying famewhoredom, with the requisite former boy-band members, pageant queens, and stars of Beverly Hills 90210 thrown in for good measure:

Have you ever found yourself bumped out of the trance once reliably induced by a claustrophobic, emotionally fraught exchange between Ellen Pompeo and Patrick Dempsey in one of Seattle Grace's conversation-enabling elevators by the thought, "This contrived sexual tension is nice, but I really wish I knew what McDreamy's ex-wife was up to right now"? If you're the one, please immediately wrap your head in tinfoil, scrawl the word STOP on a nearby wall in your own feces, and smash your TV's screen with the commemorative stainless steel vibrator from your Sex and the City: The Complete Series box set, as ABC's Steven McPherson is clearly burgling your thoughts: Today's WSJ reports that the network is planning a two-hour Grey's Anatomy special that will serve as a back-door pilot for a potential spinoff centered around Dr. Addison Montgomery-Shepherd, the show's "sexy neonatal-surgeon" character. As yet, there's no plot or title (let's just slap Dr. Adddison: Baby Saver on the project and be done with it), but these are minor concerns when there's a "white-hot" property to be exploited before the public tires of distressingly skinny doctors in labcoats fucking in unoccupied hospital rooms, then spending the next five episodes whining about the experience.

After a daring, early morning escape from Promises Malibu involving an armor-plated Escalade piloted by toddler Sean Preston (we told you she was training the kid to be a getaway driver), Britney Spears is once again free of the clutches of yet another evil cadre of sobriety-pushers hell-bent on denying her the kind of good, clean, alcohol-fueled, baby-neglecting fun so readily available to members of her celebrity hedonist caste at Hollywood's VIP lounges. Brace yourselves for a follow-up report about a Promises re-check-in before lunchtime, just as soon as one of her concerned parents tranquilize her and schlep their daughter's unconscious form back to Malibu, where she'll be chained to a gold-plated radiator until she lasts at least two days in a treatment facility.

As a rule, the sequel is never quite as satisfying as the original, but this follow-up to the YouTubes sensation "Seven Minutes and Fifteen Mind-Blowing Seconds Of David Caruso One-Liners," spotlighting only the times the dialogue-devouring star supplements his patented delivery by shielding his eyes from both the punishing Miami sun and his own actorly brilliance, has its own charms: note that just before the one minute mark, we're treated to a sequence in which Caruso bolts from the frame after he's done his bit, as if anxious to remind the director, "Now that...is how you end a cold open," before heading off in dogged pursuit of another line to murder.

· Oscar FunTime: The Big Screen Little Screen invites you to participate in the kind of "Pick One Quirk From Column A, Then One From Column B" character work that's carried Little Miss Sunshine to multiple Academy Awards nominations.
· American Idol shocker! Contestant pees into toilet, has breasts!
· Now even minor league hockey teams are victimizing Britney Spears.
· Tired of Studio 60 video parodies? Mix it up with one about Heroes.
· Annals of Unauthorized Celebrity Endorsements: Alicia Silverstone and the Indian tongue scraper.