After the 63.4 million American Idol finale votes were tallied (more than for any president*, as Ryan Seacrest pointed out in probably the most depressing single statistic you'll hear this year), we once again saw a popular red state candidate edge ahead of the blue, leaving the nation with the terrifying prospect at least 12 more months of subpar Joe Cocker covers. Idol even managed to pit family member against family member:

· "Bombastic" Marvel Studios head Avi Arad, the man responsible for making sure that even the most obscure Marvel comic book character had a movie deal somewhere in Hollywood, is leaving the company for a production deal, a move suspiciously timed in the wake of his selling his shares in the company for a reported $60 million. [Variety]
· The Super Bowl nipple fine stands! The FCC decides that it was correct in penalizing CBS $550,000 for the indecent exposure of Janet Jackson's armor-plated areola. [THR]
· The actual news in this story isn't nearly as important as the side-by-side pictures of Topher Grace and Imagine superproducer Brian Grazer, which looks like a worst case scenario rendering of what Grace might look like in 25 years. [Variety]
· CBS supreme leader Les Moonves reassures his network affiliates that they're focused on their on-air programs, promising that their new, token foray into internet content delivery, Innertube, would feature nothing better than low-cost, grainy webcam video of Moonves attending to various personal hygiene tasks or the occasional trip to a Mystic Tanning center. [THR]
· Brad Pitt will hardly have time to enjoy his new baby, as he has to shoot Ocean's 13 this summer and fulfill various promotional duties for Babel and his Jesse James movie in October. You know, if Angie lets him. [Variety]

The folks over at esteemed Scary Hollywood Lawyer factory Lavely & Singer gave Angelina Jolie an incredibly thoughtful gift shortly after the Namibian birth of her baby, registering an array of domain names, including ShilohJoliePitt.com and ShilohNouvelJoliePitt.com, for their highly valued client. It's the latest indication of how much better the Jolie-Pitt image machine is run than the rival, suspicion-inviting Cruise-Holmes team. Cruise's lawyer, Bert Fields, carelessly opted to send some knit booties as a shower gift and let SuriCruise.com slip through the cracks, resulting in the embarrassing Countdown to Legality that gleefully informs us that there are only 6530 days, 12 hours, 52 minutes, and 40 seconds until Suri's 18th birthday.

We imagine that $120 million was all the validation X-Men: The Last Stand director Brett Ratner needed for his superhumanly hacky vision, so a trip to the ongoing flame wars raging on his official messages board probably haven't shaken his faith in his work. And it's not like Ratner doesn't have defenders on his home turf—as you can see in the subject list, a fan (sadly, not CLove1000 ) declares that "All the anal retentive sexless Ratner haters can go to hell!", a sentiment which nicely balances the regrettably violent "I Want To Punch You In The Face" and the sodomy-flavored "You bent X-Men over...", two threads initiated after Ratner himself somewhat prematurely thanked his online community for "how supportive everyone has been."

Visitors to Lindsay Lohan's motel residence might fear that opening the wrong closet could result in an avalanche of white powder rivalling the dynamiting of a Himalayan mountainside, but as it turns out, one would merely be covered in the designer detritus of a rumored $100,000 a day shopping habit. The always-entertaining Life & Style magazine reports that Lohan is aware of her alleged problem and has sought professional help:

· Good news! Lisa Turtle isn't all coked up! And she's willing to sue to make sure everyone knows it.
· You've read about the Chosen One, now buy the t-shirt commemorating the place of her birth.
· Our gearheaded brother site Jalopnik is all geeked up over some leaked set pics from the Transformers movie. Michael Bay has hurt us before, so we're holding back our enthusiasm for now.
· If the photos of a clean-cut K-Fed weren't enough to chill your soul, try the images at Catlebrity on for size. We're convinced the one of Paris Hilton is what we'll see before we die.
· A starting bid of just under $1,000 gets you a shot at winning a real Britney Spears wedding invitation. But why not wait a while and see how much longer the marriage lasts before dropping a grand?

While Hollywood myth has it that Charlie Sheen's insatiable appetite for cheerleaders had him regularly ordering up flatbed truckloads of pep-squad pyramids to his home at a time, Maxim magazine has finally established his rightful place in the he-whore pecking order by releasing a top ten list of "Living Sex Legends." The divorce scandal-embroiled Two and a Half Men star lands at the #2 spot, with 5000 spirited notches on his belt. The only more successful seed-spreader is #1 Umberto Billo, a porter at The Venetian hotel who supposedly earned his tip 8000 times over. Others to make the list are KISS' generously betongued bassist Gene Simmons (#3 with 3600), and beloved Oscars cut-to reaction shot subject, Jack Nicholson (#7 with 2000). The rest of the list is after the jump.

· Music round-up: Listing Ship do an in-store at Amoeba; His Name Is Alive at Spaceland; and—get ready for it, because here it comes in all its ponytailed, arm-breaking glory—Steven Seagal plays "the blues" at The El Rey.
· Dita Von Teese discusses her book Burlesque and the Art of the Teese/Fetish and the Art of the Teese at Duck Soup at the Farmers Market. It should also be mentioned that she has had sex with Marilyn Manson on several occasions.
· Our pals from CollegeHumor.com sponsor comedy night with Ben Gleib at the Hollywood Improv. Or over at the UCB, Paul Scheer and Owen Burke will tell you why your MySpace profile hasn't landed you a starring role on To Catch a Predator.

Even if the occasional unannounced visit and needy voicemail about unrequited affection gets a little creepy at times, a stalker will still love you when your agent is a little slower to return your phone calls than you'd like:

We know that the above 0% Rotten Tomatoes rating for The Break-Up is based on a relatively meaningless eight early reviews, but we suspect that someone over at Universal is a little spooked, and is nervously considering making the telephone call that instructs Vince Vaughn to publicly dump Jennifer Aniston and finally set in motion their scheme to boost opening weekend buzz. Should this headline-grabbing publicity ploy fail to overwhelm a critical drubbing, the studio has a more extreme, somewhat untested contingency plan prepared, but everyone involved is hoping that things won't become so desperate that Vaughn has to go on Oprah to announce that he's having Brad Pitt's next baby.

We'd always thought that if one loosened Kevin Federline's cornrows, he'd collapse into a pile of loose skin, overlong cargo shorts, and a wife beater, but something called Item magazine proved that providing K-Fed with a shave and a haircut doesn't actually result in sudden, catastrophic background-dancer loss. The stunning transformation might be too much for an already vulnerable Britney Spears to bear; we picture her momentarily ignoring her baby's cries, spilling tears of her own on the photo spread while she feverishly composes a few lines of incomprehensible, depressive tenth-grader-quality poetry lamenting that she wasn't knocked up by an investment banker.

Before he discovered that America would surge to the multiplexes in Memorial Day weekend record numbers to see how many cars he could blow up in a movie about mutants (answer: too many to count, as evildoing genetic freaks seem to have a nasty grudge against the automotive industry), X-Men: The Last Stand director Brett Ratner risked a grisly gutting by the replica Wolverine claws of disappointed fanboys by taking in public screenings at the Chinese Theatre on Thursday and Friday night. At the midnight Thursday showing, Ratner wisely brought some muscle, as a high-level Defamer operative shares this story:

According to TMZ.com, Jessica Simpson has offered Nick Lachey a divorce settlement of "less than $1.5 million," an f-off number way beneath the 50 percent he's entitled to, with Simpson allegedly banking on the fact that Lachey will sooner accept the sum than engage in a nasty and embarrassing legal battle for his share of her earnings. Simpson's father/manager/creepy stringpuller Joe Simpson put in a call, TMZ reports, attempting to convince his former son-in-liability to take the money and run:

· Paramount is putting together a deal with Mike Myers to co-write and star in comedy about a "new age guru" character named Pitka, crossing its fingers that Myers won't eventually suffer another ugly Dieter-style freakout that ends in a bunch of lawsuits. [Variety]
· Columbia Pictures buys the top-secret "fraternal twins" script Jack and Jill for Adam Sandler's Happy Madison to produce and as a potential starring vehicle for Sandler. [THR]
· MGM already seems tired of its relationship with Sony, acting out against its loss of independence by snatching back its home video rights and messing around with Fox for DVD distribution. Next week, MGM plans on having Sony walk in while it screws the pool boy, just to make sure it gets the message. [Variety]
· Viewers in the key demographic prefer NBC's Last Comic Standing premiere to the reruns offered by other networks. Break out the champagne, NBC! A win is a win. [THR]
· Russell Crowe leaves Baz Luhrmann's Australian period epic over "disagreements" with 20th Century Fox, which we are contractually obligated to mention did not include physical violence. We think. [Variety]

Ever since Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie announced that the couple was supplementing their adopted brood with a biological offspring, the tabloids' favorite psychological bloodsport has been the constant monitoring of Jennifer Aniston's emotional state in the wake of her ex-husband's hasty insemination of the first appropriately famous uterus willing to accept his genetically desirable seed. Accordingly, Star reveals Aniston's reaction to the news that her dread has been made flesh:

While her wax doppelganger clings to a deluxe stripper pole currently installed at Madame Tussaud's, the real Britney Spears is left desperately clinging to the metaphorical stripper pole of her own sanity, as she watches what's left of her marriage tumble to the ground like ashes from so many half-smoked Philly Blunts. Not a week after her wrathful poem, "Remembrance of Who I Am" (soon to be required reading in all college Feminist Lit courses) appeared on her website, The Scoop notes that, according to Us Weekly, husband/askew-hat-enthusiast Kevin Federline has been leaking stories to his pals, which they in turn have been selling to the tabloids:

Despite the fact that the Chosen One is widely believed to be the savior of mankind and possesses messianic, cripple-healing powers, charging Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt's parents with delivering Namibia from its AIDS and poverty crises swill just set up the African nation for disappointment. Angelina Jolie's much-photographed commitment to charitable causes is unquestioned, and the high-end baby boutiques that might sprout up there may help the local economy, but Brad Pitt may be uncomfortable being saddled with such a massive responsibility for a place he picked out for the birth of their child because "it would be cool to see some lions and shit while Ang pops out the rugrat."

Today's Variety reports that Warner Bros. will release Superman Returns two days earlier than originally planned, shifting the opening from Friday, June 30th to a new debut on Wednesday, June 28th, a move designed to create a (God please forgive us for writing this) box-office-boosting "superweekend":

· Gallery of the Absurd makes the heretical claim that the Chosen One might wind up something less than physically perfect, then follows it up with an equally heretical graven image of the baby that will one day save mankind.
· Also: Names Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt Wanted to Name Their Baby But Decided Would Be Too Traumatic
· And one more: "A Hebrew name, Shiloh is 'generally understood as denoting the Messiah, "the peaceful one," ' according to Easton's Bible Dictionary, an 1897 work of biblical definitions." Nothing like getting a kid started early with those messianic expectations.
· After two failed marriages, Halle Berry no longer feels the need to be validated by a husband. Also, she doesn't fear eventually being a single mom, saying, "My mother was alone and raised me. And I think I came out OK," having already forgotten about the absent father issues that probably led to those aforementioned bad relationships.

When it came to her 60-day LA County jail sentence for violating parole by getting arrested in Hawaii on a DUI charge, Michelle Rodriguez was prepared to "do what you got to do." In the end, however, all she had to do was 4 hours and 27 minutes of hard time, upon which she was released because of overcrowding: