Sometimes, life is kind enough to fill a need you didn't even know you had. Here, then, is a hip-hop video that stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Ron Howard for some reason. You're welcome!

Still wondering why Terrence Howard was summarily fired from Iron Man 2? Jamie Foxx has a few ideas!

Ed Koch is turning 84 today. Happy birthday, Mr. Mayor! Jennifer Connelly is 38. Actor Tom Wilkinson is turning 60. Hollywood powerhouse Paula Wagner is turning 62. Fox Business anchor Liz Claman is 45. Rory Kennedy, the youngest daughter of Bobby Kennedy, is 40. Model Bridget Hall is turning 31. Dionne Warwick is 68. Mayim Bialik (yes, Blossom) is 33. And your favorite game show host ever, Bob Barker, is celebrating his 85th. Weekend birthdays below!

Soloist Silenced Even Longer: Paramount announced Tuesday that it's pushing back The Soloist yet again, this time to April 24. The studio surprised even its former DreamWorks partners last month by drop-kicking the Robert Downey Jr./Jamie Foxx drama into 2009, culminating in an unceremonious dump-and-run in March and its withdrawal from the opening-night slot at last month's AFI Fest. The move is yet another slap in the face to the 'Works, whose loss of an '08 Oscar contender is only compounded by The Soloist's new, utterly insurmountable April competition Vanilla Gorilla. Insult, meet injury. [Variety]

The fallout from Paramount's recent release-date shuffle continues today, with agents and saber-rattling DreamWorks brass continuing their protest over The Soloist's move to 2009. While we sustain our first impression that the Jamie Foxx/Robert Downey Jr. tearjerker will in fact be better than the diabetic-coma inducing trailers already in circulation, that's not much comfort to those who fear the bump from November to March will impugn Soloist's profile among critics and audiences alike. But now, as a peace offering to the angry gods at CAA who packaged the film for the 'Works with its clients Downey, Foxx and director Joe Wright, Paramount has forged a silver lining for one-third of that jilted braintrust.Sort of. After all, can DreamWorks or CAA ever really find consolation in a Tropic Thunder campaign pushing Downey as Best Supporting Actor? They'd better — neither Downey nor Foxx had a shot at Best Actor anyway with Sean Penn (Milk), Josh Brolin (W.), Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) and Brad Pitt widely foreseen to hold down four of the five slots, and the latter star's Curious Case of Benjamin Button (not to mention, to a lesser degree, Downey's Iron Man performance) already drawing from Paramount's awards war chest. DreamWorks insiders are still griping over some perceived revenge from Paramount, but even they'd acknowledge that The Soloist is better off with spring prestige all to itself. And that a nominated blackface performance is no doubt one of the least controversial ways to revive public interest in the Oscars. We're pulling for you, RDJ.

What a mess: Paramount's reshuffling of 2008 awards bait including Defiance and The Soloist — the latter of which now won't open until next March — has left devastated Oscar watchers (including us) tossing out their carefully wrought Trophynomics™ calculations for the fall movies season. Few are more dismayed than the DreamWorks gang, whose hopes that The Soloist might at least cover the cost of hiring movers were met with the reality check that the 'Mount has more important, Brad Pitt-y things to do before year's end. We think this, along with other traumatic developments elsewhere over the last week, calls for an all-new Oscar scorecard; start over with us after the jump.So who's in and who's out? · The Soloist: OUT. The move to March 13 stings for everyone, especially with millions in marketing dollars already being spent ahead of the Jamie Foxx/Robert Downey Jr. drama's Nov. 21 release. Both men were on the bubble for actor nominations — Foxx as a schizophrenic cellist and RDJ as the journalist who chronicles his feel-good recovery journey — but Paramount's new conservatism (i.e. an intern hiding Brad Grey's checkbook) means it only has so many in-house resources to lend to its fall releases. The studio's semi-official insistence that the shifts have nothing to do with the film's quality or favoring its homegrown Benjamin Button and Scott Rudin/DreamWorks offering Revolutionary Road, but that's bullshit. It's not 2006 anymore; nobody can afford all this prestige at once.

· We have more info on the lift of the Oscars movie-ad-ban in place since 1953: The Academy will allow one spot per distributor, it must feature only one film, and it must premiere during the telecast. The idea is that the high-profile and elaborate ads themselves will become a reason for the disinterested to tune in—like when gay guys watch the Super Bowl. [Variety] · ABC continued to see steep ratings decline in its Wednesday night lineup, with Private Practice and Dirty Sexy Money both down about 20% from last week's already low numbers. Over at ABC Family, meanwhile, 10 Things I Hate About You will become a weekly series, and Joey Lawrence and Melissa Joan Hart will star in a romcom MOW, tentatively titled, Whoa. [Variety] [THR] After the jump: Which vigilante actor is about to star in a vigilante movie?· Jamie Foxx and pap-busting Spartan Gerard Butler will star in Law Abiding Citizen, appropriately enough about a regular Joe who takes the law into his own hands. [THR] · The newly sovereign, India-based DreamWorks has decided to put off its big Wall Street pitch until the market decides to crawl back out of Satan's anus. [THR] · Mark Burnett will produce an updated version of This Is Your Life, except every week it's going to be Donald Trump's life we're reliving. (And he'll never fail to act surprised.) [TV Week]

♦ In his new book, Alec Baldwin goes off on TMZ's Harvey Levin, and says that the fallout from his infamously leaked voicemail made him want to commit suicide. [R&M]
♦ Barbra Streisand sang four songs at an Obama fundraiser last night. Attendees included Leonardo DiCaprio, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. [Fox News]
♦ Anne Hathaway acted like a bit of a diva at an event in Toronto. She also smokes, which her publicist doesn't want you to know. [OK!, R&M]
♦ Sarah Palin's "secretive circle of stylists" dressed her in a $2,500 Valentino jacket for her big speech at the Republican convention. [P6]
♦ Bad news: Hugh Hefner says all three of the Girls Next Door are getting spinoffs. [E!]
♦ Even worse news: Heidi Montag and her sister Holly are "developing a top-secret project" together. [LAT]

• Russell Simmons lost $15,000 worth of jewelry last Saturday after an employee left a suitcase full of his bling in the hallway of a Bleecker Street apartment building for 30 minutes. The mogul's reps deny the jewels were even his—they say the stolen merch belonged to the employee—but either way, the NYPD is on the case. [Page Six]

Jamie Foxx is the poor man's Denzel Washington, so it makes sense that he's set to play Mike Tyson in the boxer's upcoming biopic. Washington's boxer, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter embodied many of the racial tensions of the 1960s. Mike Tyson is just a crazy dude with a thing for pigeons. Good thing Foxx knows how to play crazy. [ShowBiz Spy]

· Jamie Foxx signs a two-year deal to produce unscripted shows for MTV and VH1, with the first product of their new union being From Gs to Gents, a series "in which a group of men are given social makeovers in a bid to turn them into gentlemen," efforts that a guest-starring Foxx will entertainingly attempt to thwart by dragging them to nightclubs, pouring alcohol down their throats, and urging them to "make it rain" upon nearby members of the opposite sex. [Variety]
· DreamWorks/Paramount is discovering that they have their work cut out for them in trying to simultaneously sell an R-rated musical about a bloodthirsty British hair stylist to the different segments of the film's built-in, but hopelessly fragmented, audience. Potentially ineffective ads telling moviegoers "You've seen him flounce around on a pirate ship, now see him dance around the world's scariest barber's chair" to follow. [THR]

· Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman are frantically finalizing the shooting script of Da Vinci Code sequel Angels & Demons before the Oct. 31st deadline, hoping that the mad rush towards production won't jeopardize the duo's ability to produce the kind of easily digestible, crowd-pleasing entertainment that always results from their lucrative collaborations. Meanwhile, star Tom Hanks has been presented with a hair-growing schedule that will barely provide the actor with enough time to reproduce his character's signature demi-mullet. Truly, no one is immune from the pressures of the looming™ strike. [Variety]
· In what is always a good sign for a floundering series, The Bionic Woman gets another new showrunner, not even two months after "creative differences" ended NBC's short-lived love affair with Glen Morgan. [THR]

As we briefly mentioned on our way out the door on Friday afternoon, the Oscar-winning Jamie Foxx, star of such big-screen entertainments as Bait, Stealth, and critically acclaimed prophylactic-acquisition farce Booty Call, received his very own slab of Hollywood Walk of Fame immortality. Confident that Foxx's star-laying ceremony would generate more local excitement than that of previous honoree Vin "America's Funniest Testes-Traumatizing Home Videos" Di Bona, Defamer videographer Molly McAleer once again decided to thrust her camera lens where it probably didn't belong, basking in the eardrum-bursting love provided by the enthusiastic throng of Fox fans who turned out for the event.

At first Jamie Foxx's Hollywood Walk of Fame induction ceremony proceeded classily enough, with Foxx noting the pride his deceased grandmother must be feeling over the honor in no way sponsored by Universal's The Kingdom, in a theater near you September 28th. Eventually, though, Foxx's famously irrepressible naughty side took over, and the actor dropped to the sidewalk, dry-humping his slice of Hollywood immortality until his moans of ecstasy drove away most of the tourist crowd that had gathered to watch the event. [Breitbart/Photo: Getty]

· Jamie Foxx effectively pre-nominates himself for a future Oscar by signing on to star in the DreamWorks drama The Soloist, based on a true story of Nathan Ayers, a homeless, schizophrenic Julliard dropout who plays his violin and cello on the streets of downtown LA, and who developed a special friendship with LAT columnist Steve Lopez. Our hearts are already warmed on the logline alone. [Variety]
· We're overjoyed by the news that HBO has picked up Flight of the Conchords (for our money, the funniest show on TV) for a second season, but thoroughly ambivalent that Entourage is getting a fifth. [THR]
· Former ICMer Ed Limato and his A-list roster of clients (Denzel Washington, Mel Gibson, Richard Gere, Steve Martin, Michael Biehn. Wait, Michael Biehn?) end up at William Morris. But most importantly, Limato and new boss Jim Wiatt are still deciding whether or not they'll continue the agent's geriatric pre-Oscar blowout. [Variety]
· Scarlett Johansson is trying to book every available job in town before the strike hits. [THR]
· Dakota Fanning will team up with Djimon Hounsou and that guy from the Fantasic Four (the firey one, not the rubbery one, we think) on the thriller Push, about "a group of young American ex-pats with telekinetic and clairvoyant abilities who hide from a U.S. government agency in Hong Kong and band together to try to escape the control of the division." Whew, no mention of rape. We're relieved Fanning's doing something lighter and not revisiting that regrettable phase of her career. [Variety]

The Defamer Special Correspondent On Oscar Parties Which Began After We Were Already Passed Out And Didn't End By The Time We Regained Consciousness This Morning, after somehow surviving the horrors of a Foxx-Whitaker sandwich, has just filed this report from last night's after-orgy at Soho House's temporary outpost in the Hills, where virtually everyone in Hollywood put in an appearance (Scorsese! Leo! Sober Lohan!) at some time point during the night. The list of names far too numerous to render in boldface follows:

A huge debt of gratitude is owed to the Reporter critic who subjected himself to the harrowing theatrical ordeal that was Oscar-winning triple threat (acting/singing/cootenanny-channeling) Jamie Foxx's "Unpredictable" show at Madison Square Garden, an act of self-sacrifice that allows us all to feel a sense of aesthetic violation without having to go through the trouble and expense of flying to New York. An excerpt from the writer's dark night of the concert-reviewing soul:

· Pictured: At this morning's Oscar nominations announcement, Salma Hayek is thrilled to learn that Academy president Sid Ganis was just kidding when he told her that part of her duty as co-presenter was to give him a topless hot-oil massage at the conclusion of the press conference.
· While everyone's in an uproar over the Dakota Fanning rape movie at Sundance, no one's said anything about the one where Fanning rapes Rainn Wilson, a truly disturbing double-standard.
· Anna Nicole Smith is exactly as literate as you'd suspected.
· Jamie Foxx is exactly as classy as you'd suspected.
· It might be time for DreamWorks to cut down on that Dreamgirls For Your Consideration budget.
· Quickly, before he takes the podium: Here's your State of the Union drinking game.

While Edelstein and Scott may have been swept away by Miami Vice, Observer film critic Rex Reed is decidedly less enthusiastic, calling the picture "crummy, pointless, and brain dead." Why such a disproportionate reaction? Perhaps Reed found director Michael Mann's visual style too hard-charging. He might have been offended by the script's frank, racist language. Or, you know, maybe he was just having a bad day.

David Edelstein, New York mag: