· The trades have Emmy fever! Browse their lists of this year's nominees and join in the fun! [Variety, THR]
· The stars react to their nominations with an refreshing mix of humility, surprise, and surprised humility! Really, it's an honor just to be reading about these nominations. [Variety, THR ]
· Hollywood Out of Ideas, Defiling Christmas Edition: The evil stocking-plunderers at NBC will make a completely unnecessary live-action version of the 1974 stop-motion animation classic The Year Without a Santa Claus, with John Goodman starring as Santa. [Variety]
· David Duchovny, whom we'd assumed had given up acting for a quieter life bagging groceries somewhere in Montana, will join Benicio del Toro and Halle Berry in the highly buzzed about DreamWorks project Things We Lost in the Fire. [THR]
· Dakota Fanning is among 120 new invitees to join AMPAS, all of whom she plans to ruthlessly slaughter in an attempt to show fellow Academy members who's going to be running things for the next forty years. [Variety]

Watchers of Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List know that the annoying comic's marriage to her ineffectual, alfalfa-male husband Matt Moline has been on the rocks for a while now. Griffin often mentions that the two are "working things out," which invariably gets a huge response from her adoring audiences, composed mostly of gay men who will laugh at anything if it's said loudly enough. According to an interview she recently gave to Larry King (which has yet to air), however, things aren't looking good:

We know what you were thinking as you glanced over the seemingly endless list of those nominated for Emmys this morning: "I would find this infinitely more compelling if there were a place where I could see some of these people naked." The Tabloid Rabies blog has heard your silent, mental cries for Emmy-related nudity and compiled a brief collection of nude and/or topless photographs and screen-captures of this year's nominees in the Outstanding Lead Actress In A Drama Series category. (Mariska Hargitay and Kyra Sedgwick are well represented, but even though we love ourselves the occasional mature lady, Six Feet Under's Frances Conroy is mercifully clothed). The blog has yet to correct its regrettably sexist bent by posting photos of their male counterparts in either the dramatic or comedy fields, but we're sure it won't be long before images of Larry David's early full-frontal work surface.

Angela Borlaza, Marlon Brando's longtime nurse and companion, is suing his will's co-executors, claiming she was kept outside the room as a signature was coerced from his deathbed—perhaps even forged. That document gave full control of his estate to producer Mike Medavoy, who has plans to develop Brando's Tahitian island into a profitable resort. To help make sense of the complex legal wranglings, we thought we'd illustrate using the obvious parallels to a certain blockbuster currently in theaters and starring a digitally disinterred Brando, Superman Returns: Borlaza's story paints Brando as the frail, wealthy window Gertrude Vanderworth, while the alliteratively named Mike Medavoy comes off like a conniving Lex Luthor, guiding the actor's limp, pen-clutching hand across the signature line, only to rush off moments later to enact his maniacal offshore real estate development schemes.

It seems that Us Weekly has abandoned any hope of landing the first, heavily discounted pictures of Suri Cruise, settling instead on moving glossy product by spotlighting Tom Cruise's profoundly strange delay of the initial public appearance of his possibly nonexistent daughter as the BABY MYSTERY, even going so far as to run a Where's Suri? clock counting the days since the Miracle Baby's alleged birth. But after three months of waiting for proof that Cruise can at least be bothered to pull a stand-in baby off the toddler rack for a photo shoot to ease the public's suspicions, we're ready to upgrade the situation from "mystery" to "riddle that would make the Sphinx incontinent." To add to the weirdness, Us reports that even Cruise's BFFs, both of the regular and Scientological flavors, have yet to gain an audience with the world's most elusive rugrat:

On the morning of the announcement of the Academy Awards nominations, Hollywood rises at dawn, runs through a careful routine of stretching exercises, then invites the media over to its lavish estate to watch as it slowly leans forward and lovingly services its own swollen, pulsing genitalia before it soberly intones the litany of names of its most favored citizens. Hors d'oeuvres are served, and the musical accompaniment by the L.A. Philharmonic is sublime.

· Sure, it might seem cool to have William Shatner beam a personal message to your answering machine via a green laser-arrow, but consider the fine print: "William Shatner and the William Shatner DVD Club reserve the right, at their sole discretion, to make changes to the message if it makes an endorsement of any product or business, contains statements addressing religious, political or ethnic groups or topics, concerns socially divisive issues, makes reference to or suggests illegal or unlawful activity of any nature, includes inappropriate language, terms or opinions not held by William Shatner, or if the message in whole or part is found to be unacceptable on any other basis." There goes your shot at having Shatner slander your least favorite ethnicity or religion! Probably. Who knows what he'd say if you slip him a couple of bucks on the side?
· You're nobody in this town until someone accuses you of starving yourself to death in the name of your career.
· We like to think that Richard Hatch would shoot a puppy if he were ever afforded the opportunity to do so.
· We apologize once again for today's server-related clusterfuckage, and cling to silly hopes that things will be better in the morning. In the meantime: Hey, motherfucking unicorns! (Oh, how we pander!)

The Defamer Special Correspondent on Semi-International Movie Promotions filed this brief report (with accompanying photo) on New Line's latest attempt to grow its Snakes on a Plane buzz in Hollywood's Great Northern Backlot:

· The LA Press Club presents "Misadventures In The Screen Trade (or: Can Journalists Make It In Hollywood?)," in which sitcom producer/KCRW commentator Rob "Martini Shot" Long interviews journalist Toby "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People" Young about Young's new book, The Sound of No Hands Clapping at the Barnsdall Gallery Theater, before anticlimactically declaring that journalists can not, in fact, "make it in Hollywood"—unless they are really hot.
· The AFI screens Marathon Man at the ArcLight, the movie that first made us deathly afraid of Dustin Hoffman's teeth.
· Music round-up: Chris Joyner at the Hotel Café; The Grates and Electric Eel Shock at Spaceland; Kommunity FK at Knitting Factory; Built to Spill does their last of five nights at the Troubadour.

NY Daily News JV gossip Lloyd Grove found himself in the middle of a highly amusing feud between rival publicists after he passed along a "leaked" e-mail to Britney Spears' manager (amazingly enough, it seems she has someone on staff to advise her, "Just stay home, get fat, and squeeze out a couple of rugrats with that deadbeat husband of yours, kid. People will still love you when you're ready to tour again in ten years!") aimed at poaching the embattled baby-fumbler from Leslie Sloane Zelnick, her heroic PR enforcer. Hilarity, as they say, ensues:

You probably won't be able to read this until the problem's solved, but we just thought we'd let you know that we're in the throes of some nasty "technical difficulties" right now, as our servers are apparently suffering from a sympathy hangover from all the beer we drank yesterday while watching the neighborhood kids' amateur fireworks displays. We hope to have things fixed shortly, and thanks for sticking with us through these incredibly trying, post-holiday times.

· Superman Returns pulls in just™ $106 million over its seven-day opening weekend, as well as a Fantastic Four/Hulk-trailing, somewhat disappointing™ $52 million over the traditional three-day frame. [Variety]
· THR is not as reflexively pessimistic as we are, saying Superman "avoided the kryptonite of overhype and muscled its way to an estimated gross of a sturdy $106 million." "STURDY!" should make an excellent pullquote for the next round of movie posters. [THR]
· Foreigners love Superman! Moderately and solidly! Though the Man of Steel is still awaiting his debut in faraway lands that care about the World Cup. [Variety]
· Paulie Walnuts and Silvio finally settle their contract dispute with HBO and will continue on The Sopranos, obviating the need for a clumsy, expository pork store scene in which Bacala rushes in to tell the guys how the pair "got whacked by Big Chris Albrecht on their way over from last season." [THR]
· Ben Stiller will direct and executive produce a CBS comedy pilot starring wife Christine Taylor, who will play the typecasting-busting role of an actress married to a movie star. Stiller will be trotted out for cameos where appropriate. [Variety]

Having decided that dumping insufficiently successful househusband Chad Lowe was not a nearly enough humiliating experience on its own, professional Oscar collector Hilary Swank has told Vanity Fair that Lowe's vague "substance abuse problem" played a part in their marriage's dissolution:

We normally don't concern ourselves with "national news," especially the kind that "doesn't involve Lindsay Lohan suspiciously visiting a bathroom stall multiple times in the course of a meal she's not eating anyway," but from time to time, we like to help our friends at CBS cast their inevitable ripped-from-the-headlines movie of the week, and today's sudden passing of former Enron robber baron Kenneth Lay seems like perfect fodder for a forgettable, modestly budgeted biopic. Normally, we'd wrack our brains trying to come up with an inspired choice for the project, but this time we've outsourced casting duties to the celebrity face-recognition database at MyHeritage.com. (An idea we shamelessly stole from our sibling site Gawker.) The results, we're sad to say, were mixed at best: Robert De Niro's still at least a year away from taking MOW work, and Mark Harmon would probably need expensive prosthetics work to pull off such a physical transformation. (Or, at the very least, the reversal of several pricey cosmetic procedures.) We gave our virtual casting agent another chance by submitting a different photo, but we're pretty sure that even at their drunkest, CBS's staff wouldn't put in a call to Jackie Chan's people to see if he wanted to take his career in a different direction, so their jobs should be safe until this promising technology catches up with its flesh-and-blood competition.

Longtime readers of this internet pamphlet know the drill by now: I return from vacation, make up some wild story about the fascinating things I did on my all-too-brief vacation (which usually includes at least one reference to shoddily executed gender reassignment surgery), and then jump right back on the blogging hamster-wheel. Since we're all a little exhausted from our marathon celebration of our Nation's proud support of the illegal fireworks industry, I'll spare you the genital-swapping jokes and get back to work. But no good editor would return from a brief hiatus without a gift, so please accept this thumbnail image of Sarah Michelle Gellar's wedding cake and the entire, unedited press release about various celebrities' extravagant, marriage-related baked goods we found in our inbox this morning. —Mark

· Those sweethearts at TMZ.com are at it again, sending out some obnoxious punk with a video camera to get into Woody Harrelson's face until he retaliates, which provides them with yet more scummy scoops for their site. As Tabloid Baby blog points out, Time Warner is skating up an oil-slicked slope with this one.
· Let this be a warning to you: The only one who has a right to use Michael Douglas' image to whore out goods and services is Michael Douglas.
· Watching aspiring soap actors unsuccessfully try to tear each other's clothing off never gets old.
· You can now pre-order "Cobras in the Cockpit"—the totally unauthorized SoaP-inspired boardgame. It's no fun for the whole family!
· Save a tabloid editor the time and trouble of having to censor your underage, partying face from photos by wearing the black bar to the club.

· Monday night music: Sara Tavares is at the Temple Bar, OK Stranger at The Troubadour, The Spores celebrate their record release at the Viper Room.
· Join Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and the rest at a screening of Rock 'n' Roll High School at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, then go pay your respects at Johnny's cenotaph.
· The Hollywood Bowl has fireworks tonight as well as tomorrow. Happy Fourth!

You were to be forgiven if, during Superman Returns' opening credits, you had assumed you had stepped into some kind of wormhole to the 1970s: The whooshing blue letters, John Williams' familiar score, and, most of all, the name Jon Peters listed as producer, were enough to instantly throw you back to a simpler time, when the men were ex-hairdressing superproducers, and the Barbra Streisands were afro'd. The LAT takes a look at one-time King of Hollywood Peters, a larger-than-life and reviled figure who, thanks to his 13-year attachment to the Superman project, finds himself in the unlikely position of having another shot at the game. While he refused to be interviewed for the piece, his ex-wife, Mindy Peters (who's now romantically back in the picture), was more than willing to share some insights into what she feels makes this loathsome, lovable man tick:

LA-based electronica duo Captain Ahab (link possibly NSFW, based on how your workplace feels about two shirtless dudes in the throws of Satanic embrace) won New Line's Snakes on a Plane songwriting contest with their catchy ditty, "Snakes On My Brain." (You can hear it at their MySpace page.) The win guaranteed them a spot on the SoaP soundtrack, and, according to a Craiglist posting, a bootylicious video. Seeking generously bottomed lady-types, or, as the ad puts it, "dirty dirty girls who want to shake their asses," the very low-rent (and, we think, no-paying) gig asks the aspiring skanklets to outfit themselves in the finest ho'-wear. Suggestions include:

A news-light trade round-up for the holiday weekend:
· As we mentioned in this morning's B.O. report, the real superhero at the movies this weekend was Meryl Streep's Ultra-Bitchwoman, with audiences helpless to her soul-freezing inferiority-rays. [Variety]
· A boycott of Disney by theater owners in Spain has been lifted, finally allowing Spanish audiences to see Cars, and wonder for themselves exactly how automotive procreation works during the endless Owen Wilson-Bonnie Hunt flirtation scenes. [Variety]
· Roger Ebert is in stable condition after emergency, cancer-related surgery. [THR]
· CBS wins a slow Sunday with repeats of Cold Case and 60 Minutes, or as they refer to it internally, "walking dead night." [THR]