Though Hugh Jackman's upcoming projects sound as though they exploded from the mind of a Ritalin-deprived, 8-year-old gay boy (Oscar hosting, 3-D Cleopatra musical), at least he's got Wolverine to balance the books.

This morning's news that Australia star/Sexuality League trade-rumor subject Hugh Jackman might host this year's Oscars was not just some pleasant waking dream! This just in from Variety:

The Oscars producers—that would be the dynamic Dreamgirls duo of producer Laurence Mark and director Bill Condon—opted not to go with our suggestions of Mickey Rooney or Korean singing sensation Dong as emcee.

Not a fan of Jon Stewart or Ellen DeGeneres hosting the Oscars? Well, here's something completely different for you then: Hugh Jackman as a no-jokes-making Academy Awards emcee. Possibly with singing and/or dancing!

• Ben Silverman and NBC have come to terms on a new contract. [B&C]
• Jeff Bewkes is taking over as Time Warner's chairman. [Bloomberg]
• As expected, Newsweek is trimming both staff and circulation. [WSJ]
• Do his 8 Golden Globe nods mean Harvey Weinstein is on the rebound? [THR]
• CBS Interactive is restructuring and making major cuts. [PaidContent]
• Hugh Jackman will be hosting the Oscars next February. [THR]

What do you do when your big sweeping Oscar-hopeful epic that cost $130 million dollars does a shallow swan dive at the box office? You completely change the party line on the entire movie! Well, that's what Fox is doing about Australia—Baz Luhrmann's continental Nicole Kidman/Hugh Jackman period romance—at least. Though the film initially was being thrust at us as Titanic but with Aborigines and a lot more plastic surgery, it's now been shifted (or downgraded) to an artsy "adult" (not that kind of adult) flick. So its disappointing $20 million Thanksgiving numbers aren't disappointing at all anymore!

At last night's opening night party for the New York City Ballet's David H. Koch Theater, guest of honor David Koch and wife Julia mingled with Candace Bushnell, Sarah Jessica Parker, Alicia Keys, Al Roker, Debbie Bancroft, Lisa Falcone, Mary Alice Stephenson, Alexandra Lebenthal, Zani Gugelmann, Annie Churchill, Peter Martins, Veronica Webb, Mark Indelicato, Blythe Danner, Valentino, Rachel Roy, Derek Lam, Peter Som, and Vanessa Williams, who all ate, drank, and danced to inaugurate the new Lincoln Center venue. [Wireimage, PMc, Style.com]

Welcome back to a special holiday edition of Defamer Attractions, your weekly guide to everything new, noteworthy and/or stillborn at the movies. And this Thanksgiving, we're grateful for a slate of Wednesday releases granting us a reprieve from another day of Twilight chatter. Not that any of them will surmount last week's blockbuster, but we have a quick and dirty forecast for long weekend's hits, sleepers and subplots, including a glimpse at the biggest disappointment and underdog to come. As always, our opinions are our own, but are easy to bake for that last-minute dessert idea. The full recipe is after the jump.WHAT'S NEW: Speaking of recipes, Four Christmases sure has a fresh one! Mix Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn. Add two cups of diced ensemble players including Robrt Duvall, Jon Favreau, Kristin Chenoweth and Sissy Spacek. Flavor with ball-kicking, pratfall and baby-vomit jokes. Bake for two hours. Serve lukewarm. It's good for about $40 million over five days. Transporter 2 is a little simpler hors d'oeurve for the guys out there, with Jason Statham liberally seasoned with bullets, quick cuts and decibels, turning out $18 million before the main course on DVD. But if you're allergic to the multiplex, you may be best best suited to skip ahead to this week's new home video releases; the art-house kitchen appears to be closed to deliveries for the holiday weekend. THE BIG LOSER: Australia is almost three hours' worth of the expansive (and expensive, at $130 million) hisorical epic no one makes anymore. And despite Oprah Winfrey's lavish endorsement, there's a reason for that: It's one in a generation that actually finds any traction in the two female quadrants whose repeat viewings push it toward box-office longevity and, almost necessarily, Oscar luster. Fox needs half a Titanic here (thus its Hugh Jackman heartthrob push at non-starter Nicole Kidman's expense) to make this work, and for the sake of the studio and director Baz Luhrmann and all involved, we hope they get it. But the middling, $26 million reality — especially on Twilight's likely second week at No. 1 — is what it is.

Hugh Jackman picked up his Australia co-star Nicole Kidman's infamous late-night slack Monday on Conan, offering his host an impromptu run through some of the perplexing Aussie phrases littering his Outback epic. The accompanying tutorial includes a few samples for your learning pleasure, but please: the Sexiest Man Alive's choice of "budgie smuggler," "shut the door," and any other homoerotically-tinged vernacular herein are purely coincidental. Expect Jackman's beleaguered wife to mount yet another vehement bathroom-stall defense of his straightness by the end of the business day. [NBC]

Stateside critics have finally seen Australia, and the reviews are in! Kind of, anyway; we've mostly been sorting through first impressions, rough blog sketches and less-then-soaring anti-summaries ("Some kind of lethargy virus had taken over my system," wrote Jeffrey Wells), but we think we have enough to go on to figure out where Baz Luhrmann's epic may sit among this fall's most anticipated releases. Your one-stop cheat sheet follows the jump.· It's... OK! Todd McCarthy has the most substantial review so far in Variety, starting off:

People's annual crowning of the Sexiest Man Alive is a treasured tradition as ancient as the celebrity publication itself—a jubilant coronation followed by a week of Sexy Man festivities, capped by the delicious spit-roasting of the Sexiest Suckling Alive.Strict term-limits kept the hands of editors tied this year, preventing them from bestowing yet another win upon double-title-holding SMA all-stars George Clooney and Brad Pitt. The search therefore extended beyond U.S. borders—something they were reluctant to do after the debacle that was Sean Connery's 1989 win—and eventually landed upon debonair star of stage and screen Hugh Jackman, who was quickly certified following an exhaustive, 150-point mechanical and appearance Sexy Man inspection. Jackman just happens to star in Baz Luhrmann's blockbuster romance Australia, set to open momentarily around the globe, but a People rep assured us the timing is purely serendipitous, and the actor "would have still been our choice even if he was high-kicking it eight times a week in Paul!: The Paul Lynde Musical on Broadway." As our gift to you, we've created this keepsake Hugh Jackman: People's Sexiest Man Alive 2008 poster, suitable for framing.

Fans of big old sweeping historical, romance, adventure epics (like us) are mostly pretty excited for Australia, Baz Luhrmann's (Romeo + Juliet!, Moulin Rouge!!) new 1940's set ode to his home country, starring native son and daughter Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman. It's the most expensive movie ever made in Australia, and is the Great White hope for its tourism industry. Well, it finally premiered last night in Sydney and sooo how is it? According to early critics, it's pretty good! Stirring and exciting enough, romantic enough, not as treacly as its big, grand trailer (above) may make it seem. We'll give a little digest of the reviews below. Megan Lehmann for The Hollywood Reporter:

Dreamily inventive billionaire Bill Joy, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems, has predicted doom for the human race in the pages of Wired. He has a new reason for pessimism: A Manhattan condo he put on the market for $40 million has reportedly sold to Australian actor Hugh Jackman for $21 million — down from a previously rumored sale price of $25 million. The five-bedroom, three-floor condominium has a view of the Hudson River. We have a theory on why Joy sold, even at such a discounted price.It's not like he needs the cash. But we don't think Joy, who joined Kleiner Perkins three years ago, as a partner in the once-storied venture-capital firm which funded Amazon.com and Google, among others, has much time to enjoy the place. Kleiner, like much of the venture-capital business, is struggling, especially with its bets on cleantech which have been battered by both the credit crunch and falling oil prices which make alternative energy sources less profitable. Better to unload it at any price — and invest in real estate closer to the office. As for Jackman, we figure the X-Men star simply knows a bargain when he sees one.

♦ Tommy Mottola and his wife Thalia have reportedly sold their 12-acre Westchester estate for $15 million. The 15,000-square-foot Aspen-style home in North Salem was first listed in 2006 for $21 million. [NYP]
♦ Hugh Jackman has closed on the triplex apartment at 176 Perry Street he was in negotiations to buy late last month. Jackman paid between $20 and $23 million for the 11,032-square-foot pad, which was previously owned by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy. [NYO]
♦ NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein and his wife, Sony exec Nicole Seligman, are about to close on the Sag Harbor home of author Harry Hurt III and his wife, chef Alison Becker. The price is reportedly $2 million. [NYP]

The Tribeca Film Institute hosted a benefit screening for the Quantum of Solace last night, which was followed by an afterparty at Tavern on the Green. Attendees included Daniel Craig, Becki Newton, Chris Diamantopoulos, Robert De Niro and Grace Hightower, Craig Hatkoff and Jane Rosenthal, Julia Stiles, Kelly Killoren Bensimon, Jeffrey Wright, Debra Messing, Andre Balazs, Andrew Saffir and Daniel Benedict, Hoda Kotb, Jill Stuart, John Sykes, Judy McGrath, Howard Stringer, Rob Wiesenthal, Liya Kebede, Stewart Rahr, Molly Sims, and Serena Altschul. [PMc, Wireimage, GoaG]

Not much has changed in the last week since industry observers filed a missing persons report on Australia; Baz Luhrmann's $130 million historical romance is still officially unfinished with only nine days to go before its homeland premiere and 16 days before it opens worldwide. Again, Baz, don't hurry on our behalves, but! We learned a lot more over the weekend about those "mechanics of stotrytelling" so troubling the director in his quest to put his Nicole Kidman/Hugh Jackman epic to bed. And massive spoiler aside, it should make for a roiling eternity of second-guessing, DVD revisionism and studio-hating from Luhrmann loyalists.The Daily Telegraph reported yesterday that "disastrous reviews from test screenings" rejected Australia's original ending, in which Jackman's character dies:

Director Baz Luhrman's historical epic/romance/tourism ad Australia is set to premiere Nov. 19 in its home country before opening wide here Nov. 26. It has a press junket in LA scheduled in between. And as of this writing, it has Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and $130 million worth of Fox's Oscar hopes tied up in an unfinished bundle in Luhrmann's editing bay. No one has seen much more than a couple stirring trailers and, according to Anne Thompson, an unfinished print that screened without effects for a lucky Oprah Winfrey audience (none of whom, of course, were critics). So with less than three weeks before the studio expects to introduce it to the world, what's taking so long?Last month Luhrmann told The Age that he was expecting to hand the 170-minute film to Fox one reel at a time while he tightened "mechanics of storytelling." (The Kidman/Jackman romance, though? Totally believable!) Over the weekend, though, he vaguely hinted that the Nov. 19 date was just another porous deadline:

It's long been rumored that Steven Soderbergh keeps a checklist in his wallet — a tattered index card on which he's scrawled dreams nurtured since before his sex, lies and videotape breakthrough nearly 20 years ago: "win an Oscar," "make a four-hour Socialist biopic," "work with a porn star," and alllll the way at the bottom, "shoot a completely fucked-up 3-D musical version of Cleopatra." Finally, with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Hugh Jackman in talks to star, he might be that much closer to crossing off that last Impossible Dream.Variety reports that Soderbergh will follow his current film The Girlfriend Experience with Cleo, a $30 million project with music provided by Guided By Voices and a script by GBV's bassist James Greer. No one seems to know how or even if this news squares with the Liberace biopic Soderbergh is plotting with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, but we admit we're a little less intrigued by Cleo knowing that Jackman would not, in fact, play the Egyptian queen. And surely, in a sleek, dark loft somewhere in Australia, a sleepless Baz Luhrmann is wondering why he didn't think of this first.

♦ Hugh Jackman has reportedly gone into contract on a triplex apartment at 176 Perry Street for more than $25 million. The 11,032-square-foot spread, which was originally listed for $40 million and later dropped to $33 million in April, is owned by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy. [NYO]
♦ Tech exec/art collector Roy Judelson and his wife Mary paid $10.5 mil. for a four-bedroom spread at 33 East 70th Street. Their new neighbors will include Joan Didion and Marina Rust Connor. [Cityfile]
♦ Now that he's settling in at 15 CPW, Dan Loeb has put his carriage house at 7 MacDougal Alley on the market for $7 million. The 4,000-square-foot home features a roof deck, media room, and wine cellar. [Curbed]

Lift up your beer and make a toast: Mr. Mario Lopez is 35 today. Others celebrating on this Friday: Jets quarterback Brett Favre is 39. At the New York Times, Stefano Tonchi is 49 and Adam Nagourney is 54. Socialite Celerie Kemble turns 35. Artist Banks Violette turns 35. Cornell's Antonio Gotto Jr. is 73. Paper's Mickey Boardman is 42. And David Lee Roth is 54. Weekend birthdays after the jump.