Welcome to Defamer's Fourth Annual Hollywood Christmas Party — aka, our Oscar Liveblog! This year, we'll be splitting our barbed coverage into two robust and equally exciting halves. Seth will be handling the coverage of the (potentially ratings challenged) ceremony itself (separate post to follow at approximately 5:30pm PST), while your Uncle Grambo will be taking the reins for the pre-show. Stick with us, it's gonna be a rip-roarin' old time!
UPDATE (5:30pm): Looking for the Oscar liveblog? Look no further!

10:01pm: ABC, hope you were taking notes. If any of your ideas for The Oscars resemble any of the ideas that NBC utilized tonight in their sham of a "press conference," your federal broadcasting license will be revoked. Herbert Eugene Ives would've been ashamed of your performance tonight, Silverman. You should go to sleep knowing that.

NICK DOUGLAS — I had a lot of fun live-mocking last year's moving but off-kilter speech by sci-fi author and futurist Bruce Sterling. The venue was South by Southwest, the topic (mostly) spimes, Sterling's pet idea of constantly trackable objects. He's speaking again this year, no one knows what about. And in what I'm now declaring an annual Valleywag tradition, I'm live-blogging it below.

Welcome once again to our Oscars liveblog, where for roughly the next four hours and seventeen minutes (adjust your Oscar pool tie-breaker answer accordingly), we'll be huddled over our laptop, offering alcohol-delayed commentary on the very things you're watching on your TV at home. And because we're not afraid of the kind of cutting-edge innovations that will be on display in the Academy Awards telecast, this year we'll be blogging from inside a Lucite tank that will slowly fill with refreshing, liver-perforating pink André champagne; should the show exceed four hours, we'll perish by drowning unless our quick-thinking Sober Intern can fish us out before our lungs have completely filled with affordable sparkling wine. Should we not survive, embeddable YouTube video of our grisly demise will be made immediately available.

We've said it before, but we are simply ill-equipped to run with the stallions competing for coverage of Bravo's Daily News docu-series Tabloid Wars. Paralyzed by our love for deputy metro meatbaton Greg Gittrich and slow at the keyboard thanks to various, unrelated medications, there's just no way our treatment of this "story" would ever satisfy the show's 2,000 die-hard fans. So instead, we rededicate our energy not to liveblogging the show, but liveblogging FishbowlNY editor Dylan Stableford's conscientious liveblog coverage of the show. After the jump, we watch Dylan watch.

We know our limitations, and on a sweaty Monday night viewing of Tabloid Wars, we're going to be rendered useless (more so than usual) by our love for Daily News deputy metro meatstud Greg Gittrich (more on him later). We're not capable of much, then, other than drooling at the screen and fantasizing about life as Gittrich's "hard" news fluffer. In general, our lustful paralysis means that we simply cannot keep up with FishbowlNY's vigilant live-blogging of the show as it unfolds. So instead we present you with our liveblog of Fishbowl editor Dylan Stableford's Tabloid Wars liveblog. After the jump, soak up the meta.

Sun Micrososystems interim-but-doesn't-know-it-yet CEO Jon Schwartz kicks off the Thursday talks at the Supernova 2006 conference. He opens with a little speech about Moore's Law as it applies to Sun's data center innovations (and clogging the conference wifi by streaming the World Cup).

Tom Cruise just made it to Yahoo HQ for his Q&A time, says my man on the scene. And he brought Katie! "Just a few more weeks" til the baby, sez Tom.