· Ang Lee takes home the Golden Lion for Lust, Caution at the Venice Film fest, the movie you may remember as the recent victim of the MPAA's dreaded NC-17 rating because of its "graphic, artsy-fartsy depiction of fucking." [Variety]
· Gus Van Sant attaches Sean Penn and Matt Damon to his long-in-development biopic of openly gay politician Harvey Milk, with Penn playing Milk and Damon taking the role of his suddenly likable assassin. Tomorrow, competing Milk project director Bryan Singer will escalate the casting arms race by announcing he's got Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt "this close" to signing on to his Mayor of Castro Street adaptation. [THR]
· The Creative Arts Emmys are topped by—surprise!—HBO, with 15 statues. [Variety]
· NBC destroys its Sunday night Nielsen competition with the season debut of Sunday Night Football. [THR]
· In other unsurprising, awards-related news, Gil Cates will be back to produce the Oscars a record-breaking 14th time, which he promises "will be just as overlong and filled with inscrutable interpretive-dance numbers as my 2006 triumph." [Variety]

With precious few hours until we kick off for our Christmas vacation, we never expected that the Celebrity DUI Gods would send down yet another drunk-driving mugshot for our amusement, but they've just delivered the gift of this Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Gerry, the Kurt Cobain one) photo through their chosen vessels at The Smoking Gun. The Portland Mercury's Blogtown PDX fleshes out the arrest story with a police official's description of Van Sant, who was driving his Porsche SUV without his headlights on and burned some rubber at a red light: "He had glassy, watery, red eyes, slurred speech, and smelled strongly of alcohol." Unfortunately for the director, recent Drunken Famous Person Mugshot Hall of Fame inductee Rip Torn's playful jailhouse modeling session set the bar impossibly high for his peers, making Van Sant's effort seem all the more uninspired and dour. If there's one lesson Torn has taught us, it's to reclaim one's boozy dignity by having some fun with a potentially embarrassing situation.