Yesterday our soulmates at Confidential reported Kylie Minogue had been spotted out and about in Melbourne, enjoying dinner with at a restaurant on Monday night, and bonding with a chum at a cafe on Greville St.

Kylie was spied yesterday having a drink with a blonde girlfriend at Greville St cafe On The Corner.

Our spy said the pop pixie was wearing celebrity standard-issue big black sunglasses, khaki pants, a purple T-shirt and a yellow headscarf.

Earlier, she had lunch at Candy Bar in the same area.

"She was looking fabulous, beautiful blonde hair and looking very relaxed," our spy said.

Well, our source actually served Ms Minogue and immediately texted us (prefacing his revelation with the kind words "You're the only homo in my phone that I thought might be vaguely interested. Go figure.") to inform us of this fact. When pressed for information, he revealed the following.

"She had a skinny latte with "not too much milk" and blue berry pancakes. Looked old and very blonde. I'd do her... but that's not saying much."

Indeed it isn't, friend. As for looking old, well - she IS pushing forty, god love her! We still think Kyles appears fab and not at all like a bad version of Dannii who resembles a bad version of a young Kylie and now we know how to fix her coffee should we ever, you know, run into her and she declares she's in desperate need for a caffeine fix.

If you spy a celebrity - no matter what grade, A is great but Z suits us just fine - feel free to inform us by emailing us. We suppose you could text us like our mate Ryan did, but this would involve you knowing our mobile number. Which you probably don't.

Young Matt Corby - remember him? - who was tipped to be the sure-shot victor of Australian Idol '07 (despite, you know, not actually being the victor) evidently isn't too fussed about whether he makes it or not (despite, you know, not actually going back to school in favour of a career in the industry).

It seems that Sony BMG offered him a shiny record deal - despite (last time we'll say that, promise) the word that only winner Natalie Gauci would be signed - but Goldilocks Matt has decided he doesn't want it after all.

The Idol runner-up was reportedly gloating about rejecting an offer from Sony BMG because he wanted to be his own man, even though he is still a teenager and the label has said it wants to give him time to grow.

"I'm still a young guy and I don't want to be packaged. I'm just cruising along and playing music, if it all fails I'll go back to doing my HSC or become a garbage man," he said.

See, Matt, it's meant to be! You're as big a wanker as any of these other pretenders! Take the record deal! TAKE IT!!

We were struck first this morning by the touching news that Kelly Osbourne - herself a former drugs and booze stuff-up - is wide open and there for our Winegums, telling the Mirror "I talk straight. I don't say: 'Look Amy, you're just fantastic.' I say: 'Amy you have a problem. I'm here when you are ready to deal with it.' I'm not going to tell her to go to rehab. She's not an idiot, she knows what her problem is."

However, that news pales in comparison with today's other shocking Winegums piece - THE HAIR! THE HAIR!

In short, Amy has gone blonde (we've adjusted our traditional Winegums image for your delectation), and it's about as flattering as Britney's myriad of poo-coloured brunettes, or the time Gwen Stefani went blue for the AMAs.

Looking more glammed-up washerwoman than Hollywood femme fatale, the Back to Black singer bundled her freshly dyed tresses up in a brilliant yellow headscarf and completed the look with a flicked up fringe.

Perhaps, after 12 months of turmoil, the troubled artist hopes the old saying blondes have more fun will prove true.

However, the look is likely to do little to get the 24-year-old off the 2007 Worst Dressed list which was unveiled yesterday.

She came second, only beaten to the top spot by stick thin clothes horse Victoria Beckham.

Just call it a hunch, we're pretty good like that. Almost as good as Jackie Stallone.

We suppose the above bargain-budget, highly suspect "interview" with Britney Spears's alleged drug dealer could have been easy enough to fake. Simply hire a Dateline-ish looking interviewer to sit down with a subject shot entirely in silhouette, add a little voice-distortion (or is "Jane" a transexual?--it's difficult to say), and let them run off at the mouth about the Costco-sized drug orders the singer would regularly have delivered to the Four Seasons. Still, our quick, grossly unscientific mental calculations (2 oz. cocaine per day = 57 grams per 24 hrs. = heart[KABOOM!]) leads us to question the rigorousness of their sourcing standards, as that's enough blow to kill a Blue Whale.

• Britney's Drug Dealer Speaks [YouTube]

· In an unusually star-studded strike video (Eric Bogosian! Dean Winters! B.D. Motherfucking Wong!), we're introduced to Murder Unscripted, a completely writerless police procedural. Enjoy.
· If someone had actually cast the LOLrus alongside Nicholson and Freeman, we might've gone to see The Bukkit List.
· Weirdly, our nightmares almost always involve Sherri Sheppard being chased through Central Park by enormous rolls of toilet paper. Get out of our minds!
· LAT editors justify all the manpower they've been throwing at the Britney Spears story.
· "TMZ has learned the divorce between Pam Anderson and Rick Soloman is back on and Pam is pregnant!" Yeah, we stopped reading there.

Despite now both being self-confessed homosexualists, it seems Anthony Callea and Tim Campbell are still resisting their natural need to do impure things to each other, preferring to do lunch at cafes to simply doing each other. But they both have penises! DOESN'T THIS MEAN THEY HAVE TO TAKE TURNS BUMMING EACH OTHER IN A TOILET BLOCK?

Good lord. If the people of Australia can't depend on stereotypes to explain what's going on in the world, what can they depend on? Nothing.

Pop prince Anthony Callea and former Home and Away heartthrob Tim Campbell insist they're just mates.

But the pair continued to strengthen their friendship over lunch at a Williamstown eatery.

A spy said the twosome - who are out and proud (and single) - hid from onlookers at the back of the Atomic cafe, concealing their faces behind caps.

Concealing their faces eh? Because their faces were covered in each other's mangunk? HUH? IS THAT WHAT HAPPENED?

Or, you know, maybe they just like being friends and talking about boys and eating salads and bitching about David Campbell and they'd prefer it if the eyes of the media weren't constantly following them, waiting for one to jump the other's bones.

OK, now the Golden Globes are really, truly, stick-them-in-the-ground-and- shovel-some-dirt-on-the-coffin dead: The E! network--whose 101 Most Awkward Red Carpet Moments Involving An Actress Being Taken Aback By Ryan Seacrest's Encyclopedic Knowledge Of High-End Women's Footwear clip-show special is a ratings winner even after years of reruns--can't even be bothered to dispatch its starving, celebrity-circling vultures to pick at whatever carrion-morsels are left on the event's bleached bones. And it gets worse:

In a scheduling move that's the basic-cable equivalent of urinating into the Globes' open grave, they've decided to run a marathon of Keeping Up With the Kardashians instead. "We're taking the attitude that if the stars are staying home, we're staying home. These shows are about stars," said E! head Ted Harbert with a note of resignation before continuing, "Please excuse me, I have to go take down all the mirrors in the building before I break the news to Giuliana Rancic. We can't have her smashing them and running through the office to hack away at anything that moves with the jagged shards as she tries to work through her grief."

[Photo: Getty Images]

• Networks set Golden Globe plans [Variety]

Just a while back we delighted in bringing you the pictures of David Beckham's packed lunch in a Giorgio Armani underwear advertisement - which Posh Spice then helpfully assured everyone was her husband's: "He's massive, isn't he?"

Well, it seems there has been some deflating in the Becks underwear department, with his latest Armani campaign looking a little less than "massive" - and it's clear this doesn't wash with his legions of dick-obsessed fans!

David Beckham's legion of fans - both male and female - may be a little disappointed with his latest advert for fashion house Armani.

The 32-year-old turned underwear model was again dressed in the tight underwear which caused a veritable furore when first seen, but on this occasion failed to make quite the same impression.

Davidlooked somewhat less impressive in a pair of black underwear in comparison to the earlier pictures of the star, which were so striking they caused onlookers to debate whether the pictures had been enhanced.

But when asked if the images had been tampered with to give Beckham a greater appeal, his spokesperson was less than forthcoming, and replied with a simple: "No comment."

Can't you just hear Becks' adorable whine now? "But Giorgio, can't we do the shoot another day? I just had a cold shower and I've been fighting with Vickie, and there was an odd number of Diet Coke cans in the fridge and now I feel all nervy. Pleeeaaase?"

Having received a tip that the building that formerly housed the 360 Restaurant and Bar is leaning, we threw it open to you, our intrepid readers, to send in photo evidence suggesting whether or not the angle was merely an optical illusion, or if in fact at any given moment There Will Be Blood patrons at the nearby Arclight Dome won't end up seeing far more blood than they had bargained for. More than one of you came through, and after a careful examination, we fail to see a significant tilt to the structure, and we thus really see no need for Hollywood locals to run screaming through the streets, at least any more than they usually do. And while we did request no Photoshop, one reader's submission so awed us with its erotic vision of the CAA Death Star getting the skyscraper-pounding it's long craved, we've included it above. The other photos are after the jump.

• Previously: Leaning Tower? [Defamer]

For all of Gordon Sumner's crowing about the environment, and about how if we all had Tantric sex for eight hours a day the Earth's alignment would right itself and global warming could be used to fuel electricity in the Third World (or whatever his particular thing is), it seems The Police's megabucks reunion world tour might have done him some damage when it comes to his position as an eco-warrior.

Worse for him, he wasn't beaten - in a list of eco-friendly artists - by Bono or Deep Forest, but by old scungy mitts himself, Pete Doherty.

Is there no fairness in the world anymore?

NME magazine commissioned a survey of rock tours, with zero "as carbon neutral as Bob Geldof's bathwater" and 10 "as good for Earth as an oil spill".

Babyshambles was given a four rating, with indie band the Cribs, due to playing small venues with fans not travelling too far.

Radiohead was the best of all five bands, listed with a rating of just two, after Thom Yorke pledged to reduce their footprint.

The Police came top with a rating of seven - the same as Kasabian.

John Buckley, of Carbonfootprint.com, said: "At Live Earth in New Jersey where the Police played, the biggest emissions weren't from the concert, it was the fans."

Must be all the mung beans and cocaine.

The Bill, for all but a select pocket of Australian television viewers, has always been the show that turns up when there's nothing else on, or the theme-song that sends you leaping for the remote after your favourite show is over, so keen are you not to sit through an hour of PC plods taking in unwed mothers from the housing commission flats and having hushed yet furious conversations in corridors.

However, did you know The Bill is also CURSED?!

Well, "cursed" in the same way that Nilsson's Without You is - it seems being sacked from The Bill can lead to very bad things indeed.

Veteran actor on the The Bill Jeff Stewart slashed his wrists on set in a 'cry for help' after he was sacked after 24 years on the show.

The 52-year-old who plays PC Reg Hollis desperately dialled for help from his dressing room after the apparent suicide attempt.

Security staff dashed to his assistance after the alarm was raised at the TV studios and he was taken to hospital.

*dramatic orchestral burst*

Kevin Lloyd, who played Detective Tosh Lines, was sacked in 1998 due to his drinking problem. Days later, he collapsed after a drinking session and died.

That famed siren-and-bad-'80s-guitar themesong is going to have sinister connotations from now on.

Pam Anderson and husband Rick Salomon are due on our sunny shores any moment now, with the pair apparently deciding the couple that gambles together stays together. ("Not so!" - Ben Affleck & Jennifer Lopez). Actually, it would seem gambling is what ignited their love in the first place!

From news.com.au -

The on-again-off-again couple's people contacted Crown this week requesting a berth in the Aussie Millions Poker Championship be reserved for card shark Salomon.

Salomon is said to be a definite starter in the tournament, with an appearance fee being negotiated yesterday to bring Anderson out.

...

The tournament's main event starts on Monday, with many local and overseas stars including Michael Vartan, Jennifer Tilly, Shannon Elizabeth, Shane Warne, Mark Philippoussis and Joe Hachem forking out $10,000 for a shot at the $10 million prize pool.

Anderson said last year that she and Salomon - the ex-hubby of actor Shannen Doherty and Paris Hilton's sex tape co-star - took their 17-year friendship to the next level during a poker game.

"I left the table and my driver played in my place," she said.

Anderson said she returned to find herself more than $280,000 "in the hole to Rick".

(bites tongue)

"Rick, being the gentleman, said he would wipe my debt if I gave him a kiss, so I have to thank Vegas for our relationship switching gears," Anderson said.

The couple wed in the casino capital in October.

We look forward to hearing/making up delicious gossip regarding card shark celebs from Monday onwards. We dare say the odds of Shane Warne having a crack at Pammy are rather good.

It seems the towering structure at Sunset and Vine, an accursed building that's fallen victim to fires and a tragic Transformers mega-billboard mishap last April, is finally getting some windows--but according to a Defamer operative, its biggest disaster is yet to come, and happening slowly before our eyes: "Having taken it down to the structural steel, they've started to put glass on it. There's just one problem: it's LEANING. Go check it out - very noticeable." Before any frantic Chicken Littles run into Amoeba Records to pronounce the sky is falling, we'd first like to throw it open to Defamer readers in the area to send us photographic evidence. And no Photoshop shenanigans--Giant Fucking Buildings Are Falling!

Mr Larnach-Jones - manager to the stars and all round entertainment industry heartthrob - isn't dead, so don't spy the word "memorial" and rush off to find his MySpazz page to leave a message of condolence lest you look like a right idiot. But he is the source of many of our YouTube Clips Of The Day and we thought today it would be nice to publicly acknowledge him and scream in front of the entire interweb "WE LOVE YOU, WILL! DON'T STOP THE CLIPS FROM COMING! GIVE OUR INBOX YOUR ALL, BIG DADDY!"

And now that's out of the way, on with today's clip!

Like cute things? Well, you'll eat this up with a frickin' spoon - it's a video celebrating The Winningest Cute of 2007. Booyah!

REMEMBER - IF YOU SPY SOMETHING WORTHY OF BEING A YOUTUBE CLIP OF THE DAY FEATURE HERE ON DEFAMER AUSTRALIA, SHOOT US AN EMAIL AND GIVE US A HEADS UP!

After watching the People's Choice Awards clip we posted a little while ago, a commenter points out that Favorite Leading Man honoree Joaquin Phoenix seems to have misspelled his own name--an error that serves to further illustrate the point about how utterly lost actors are without their writers. [Defamer]

Never one to be afraid of giving fans more information than they'd like to hear, Mel B has shocked her fellow Spice Ladies and punters at a London show by revealing she, erm, had a rather busy festive season.

Spice Girl Melanie Brown has sparked outrage in the U.K. for the second time in a month - by talking about her sex life onstage. The singer stunned young fans at the band's U.K. gig in London on Tuesday (08Jan08) by informing fans she had "too much clitoral stimulation" over Christmas. Brown's statement embarrassed fellow bandmates Geri Halliwell, Melanie Chisholm, Emma Bunton and Victoria Beckham, prompting them to tell her to be quiet.

We'll assume Geri, Mel C, Emma and Victoria's embarrassment regarding Mel B's revelation is more to due with them being highbrow types, and not because they're responsible for the pubic overworking and are mortified this saucy example of their top secret Spice Girl Tour Bonding Activities has been aired in public.

Brown stunned parents in the crowd at a gig in December (07) by thrusting her head between the legs of a male fan during her solo performance of Lenny Kravitz's Are You Gonna Go My Way.

Just sing Wannabe and hush up about what's happening in your knickers, Mel B, lest you scar the developing minds of even more children.

From deep within the bowels of Craigslist's Missed Connections section, where crazy hopes that love will somehow find a way are nurtured, a Judge Judy fan reaches out to try and find the courtroom spectator of his dreams: "judge judy lady in audience - m4w
lady in audience sitting behind defendent 1st seat 1st row by walkway wearing black shirt with white trim on judge judy aired in iowa jan 8 08 kristen capozzola white lady vs joshua currier black man seen you on show i found you very very attractive interested in knowing who you are hope to hear from you!" [Craigslist]

As the emotionally devastating cancellation of the Golden Globes has given us a newfound appreciation for every last awards show moment Hollywood finds a way to give us in this strike-crippled year, we'd like to take a minute to relive the silent acceptance speech Favorite Leading Man Joaquin Phoenix (an honor not to be confused with Favorite Male Movie Star) offered on last night's People's Choice Awards.

However, we suppose we'll have to wait and see if Phoenix and his SAG brethren will be willing to take the next step in supporting the writers' cause, joining WGA members in a planned, E!-televised toppling of the 50-foot Oscar statues outside the Kodak Theatre, an act that will officially bring to a close this historically turbulent awards season.

• People's Choice Awards
• Reconfigured People's Choice Awards Resembles Public Access TV With A Budget [Defamer]

· With the 65th Golden Globes Awards having succumbed to the strike plague, all eyes turn to its far wealthier and more powerful cousin Oscar, whose coughing up of blood into a lace handkerchief doesn't strike us as a good omen. [Variety]
· The loss of the Globes was the first real sting felt by the film industry since the start of the strike, resulting in studio executives demanding of a supposedly merciful God how He could have allowed them to go about all that For You Consideration campaigning in vain. [Variety]

· The Daily Show host and noted sympathetic unibrowist Jon Stewart would like to reach a deal with his staff the way David Letterman did, but because the WGA will only negotiate with show owners (like Dave), they'll only deal with Comedy Central. [Variety]
· The 11th annual Online Film Critics Society Awards blows their internet-based-reviewer wads all over the old men of No Country. [Variety]
· Finally, some good news: The Two Coreys, A&E's bold foray into the loosely scripted cohabitating has-been reality TV format, has gotten a second season pickup. [THR]

Is it 2009 yet? The hyperbolic rate in which bad news is proliferating through Tinseltown in the first nine days of 2008 is officially starting to freak everyone the fuck out. If it's not the Golden Globes cancellation putting a $100MM dent in local revenue, it's Warner Bros. getting ready to issue rosé slips to scads of employees. And then there's the sad story of Axium, the payroll company that shut its doors yesterday, leaving hundreds out of work and thousands without paychecks (tip: even if you got a paycheck from Axium, DON'T CASH IT -- chances are it will bounce higher than a superball). Tips have been flying into Defamer's virtual P.O. Box fast and furious; follow along for some of the lowlights, including a internal memo issued by Axium subsidiary Ensemble Chimes Global and a firsthand account of the goings-on in Burbank yesterday.

So there's that! And there's also this:

Hi fellow CoProers - I just wanted to share an account of what I experienced today when I visited Axium's office in Burbank.

Having no idea of what was going on, I stopped by there early this afternoon to personally drop off the last remaining timecards from a job I just wrapped yesterday. I live in the valley so I thought I'd save on a messenger and deliver them myself. When I got there, there was no one at the front desk and piles of unopened mail cluttered the space (including tons of envelopes from the EDD). After waiting a few minutes, a woman walked out and told me that if I was dropping off payroll I would need to take it somewhere else because the company went out of business. I thought she was joking. A week prior, we had turned in all the crew payroll for a commercial we had shot a few days before Christmas. We had even spoken to our paymaster yesterday morning who assured us that
the checks would be going out at the end of the day. Guess he didn't know he was about to lose his job.

More and more people starting walking out with their belongings and told me that they had received an email from the CFO yesterday afternoon telling them that they no longer worked there because the company had gone out of business. I was also told that I would not be able to cash the payroll check I had just received in the mail yesterday because their accounts were frozen and the check would be bounced back (along with a bank fee for attempting to cash a bad check). There were a few nice people who tried to gather up all the original timecards from my job so that I could process them at another company, but I was not able to get the ones in which a check had already been issued. Oh yeah, I was told that they were trashing all the timecards! Luckily I was able to get the majority of
mine back.

The moral of the story is... if you have recently received a check from Axium/Avalon DO NOT CASH IT or it will be bounced and you will be charged a fee. If you have already cashed a check, call your bank and see if it has cleared. If it has not - it won't, and the funds will be withdrawn from your account soon and they will charge you a fee. If you have recently submitted timecards to Axium/Avalon and your paymaster didn't think to take the originals home with him when he left, they are most likely garbage. I think we can expect this situation to screw up our Unemployment and our 2007 tax filing since the last of the employees were leaving today. This sucks!

We hadn't thought of Eminem for quite a while, but then the other week we caught some of Eight Mile on the telly (we'd forgotten how dirty that scene where Brittany Murphy spits in her hand for lubricant "during" makes us feel) and wondered "What the hell is he up to these days, anyway? Married? Divorced? Penning ditties about Britney's current condition?"

The answer is - he's been in hospital!

Eminem is recovering from a bout with pneumonia that sent him to the hospital.

"Over the holidays, Marshall Mathers, aka Eminem, was under doctor's care at a Detroit-area hospital for complications due to pneumonia," the rapper's publicist, Dennis Dennehy, said Tuesday. "He has since been released and is doing well recovering at home."

So there you have it.

As much of the geeky-gened moviegoing world tries to decode the mysteries of Cloverfield, obsessively connecting the push-pin dots on bulletin boards covered in maps and radioactive monster imagery, our friends at LAist had the novel idea to approach director Matt Reeves directly. It turns out he was extremely forthcoming, offering oodles of fanboynip, including background on the project's history, its buzzy, pre-Transformers trailer, and even the origins of its ambiguous title that sounds like a margarine brand:

LAist: Tell us the real story behind the title Cloverfield?

Matt Reeves: When we started the project there was going to be an announcement in the trades. In this case, they wanted to keep everything under wraps. So the movie was going to be made under this outside corporation that was basically a property of Paramount. That corporation had a name that I don't know the name of. I think Clover was the first part of it. Maybe it was Cloverdale. When Drew [Goddard, LOST writer] was putting a name to the project, there was supposed to be a name for the project like there was for The Manhattan Project. So he said, "I am going to use that weird mysterious thing," and he misheard it. He didn't even understand that it wasn't Cloverfield, it was Cloverdale. Maybe that was because of the street by J.J.'s old office, but the truth is he just misunderstood it.

Mystery solved: The movie was named after a misnomered incorporation, possibly inspired by a mid-Wilshire avenue near J.J. Abrams's old production offices, and not because the sum of the numeric value of the letters in Cloverfield equaled 169, i.e. the number of nipples on the underside of H. P. Lovecraft's mythical beast, the Cthulhu.

• LAist Interview: Matt Reeves, Director of Cloverfield [LAist]

Fulfilling the prophecy foretold by octogenarian gossip-oracle Liz Smith in the entrail-reading that yielded her June 2007 item on the couple's trial separation, Paramount's Brad Grey has been served with divorce papers by his wife of 25 years; with the filing, the studio boss now moves one step closer to completing the mandatory Hollywood rite of passage represented by the dissolution of a power-player's first marriage. [CelebTV.com]

Did upward-failing NBC Universal Chief Executive Golden Boy Jeff Zucker, enraged at the galling disloyalty of striking SNL writers who planned to participate in the delivery of a Top Ten list on hated CBS talk-show rival David Letterman's WGA-sanctioned return to the airwaves last Wednesday night, threaten to dispatch a flock of ravenous, flesh-craving demon-peacocks to eat the defenseless babies of anyone who dared betray their corporate family by appearing on a competing network's late-night telecast? Sources tell Slate's Kim Masters that once Zucker got word of the impending treachery, Warnings Were Issued, and a hasty retreat beaten by some of those reminded where their bread was buttered:

The writers were in the Letterman's lair, waiting to record the list, when someone at NBC got hold of them, our sources say. Zucker's displeasure was threatened and they were convinced to book out of there just before the cameras rolled. (Conan O'Brien writer Chris Albers stood his ground and did the list.)

An NBC spokesperson denies that Zucker made that call or caused that call to be made. "We would not want our people on Letterman but Jeff Zucker is not meddling," this executive says. "This is happening on a lower level." Someone at NBC simply invoked Zucker's name in trying to stampede the writers off the show, the spokesman contends, adding, "I do it all the time when I need clout."

The flack additionally denied a report that Zucker, in an attempt to dissuade 30 Rock's Tracy Morgan from jilting NBC's Jay Leno by appearing on The Late Show to promote upcoming film First Sunday, quietly had one of those "lower-level" functionaries suggest to Morgan that it would take "no more than one phonecall" from the network boss to have a SCRAM-style cuff similar to the one he recently had removed from his ankle attached to Morgan's genitals, a device that could "accidentally" explode if Morgan had so much of a sip of Letterman's green room booze.

• Behind Enemy Lines [Slate]

Add Tracie Rice, a passenger in the vehicle chased down by Lindsay Lohan's Denali in the infamous high-speed cokepant arrest, to the growing list of traumatized victims suing the road-rage-prone starlet. She's seeking damages to cover expenses from spending "$7,000 on medical bills, including a therapist who charges $175 per visit, and [losing] her $60,000 per year job because of the incident," plus $11.75 for what she spent to see I Know Who Killed Me. [breitbart.com]

According to the helpful countdown clock on their website, the next People's Choice Awards is but 364 days and some-odd hours away, which hopefully will be enough time for them to find their balls again after being castrated behind the awards barn as a sacrifice to the writers strike gods. Still, the ceremony we've not entirely reverentially referred to in the past as Oscar's Chain-Smoking, Lupus-Afflicted Aunt with an Internet Gambling Problem limped its way into American living rooms in an odd, greatly compromised CBS telecast last night, bereft of a studio audience, live star appearances, and awkward acceptance speeches from recently dumped actresses wondering how they can be all of America's favorite if they can't even be Justin Timberlake's.

Instead, we got Queen Latifah introducing an interminable string of pre-taped acceptance speeches and answers to fan questions. The big winners included Favorite Movie Pirates of the Caribbean: The One We Didn't Bother Seeing, Favorite TV Comedy Two and a Half Men (beating out The King of Queens and My Name is Earl), and Favorite New TV Drama Moonlight, beating out a shortlist of every other series to premiere and die within weeks of the fall 2008 TV season. A full list of the winners is here.

• People's Choice
• People's Choice Winners List [CBS]

Though Hitler-hating box office juggernaut Will Smith has long been cagey about whether the "introduction" to Scientology he says he received from Tom Cruise was merely a delicious, innocuous Sunday brunch at the Celebrity Centre, or a more in-depth primer including a grueling, three-day auditing session that ended only when the broken former Fresh Prince star tearfully confessed to murdering Alfonso Ribeiro's career, Smith may have finally tipped his hand about the extent of his alleged involvement with the Church.

In what would probably represent the cheapest wrap gift in Hollywood history, Smith reportedly offered the crew of inevitable 2008 summer blockbuster Hancock a coupon for a free personality test at the Scientology E-Meter Outlet Store of the recipient's choice, reports Gatecrasher:

Big stars traditionally distribute "wrap presents" to crew members after completing a film. His recent gift after wrapping next summer's comedy "Hancock" was a card good for a personality test at your local Scientology center.

Fun!

Never mind that such tests are given free by the church anyway. The quiz is designed to convert people to the religion by identifying personality flaws that - surprise! - Scientology can fix right up for you.

For a fee, of course.

While the simple distribution of a Get Out Of Thetan-Jail Free card is not as drastic a move as, say, instructing his lawyers to include a clause in his next contract mandating the establishment of massage-assist tents and Dianetics stalls on the set of Pursuit of Happyness 2: Back on the Streets, perhaps Smith is trying to gradually let his fans know that he's having a Hubbardian spiritual awakening. Still, his gift will probably open the flood gates to the kind of tabloid rumors that inevitably accompany a prominent Hollywood star's high-profile assumption of a spot within the Church, with the first National Enquirer REPORT: JADA PINKETT SMITH SECRETLY INSEMINATED WITH TOM CRUISE'S NEXT BABY headline likely now no more than a month away.

[Photo: Getty Images]

• Will Smith boosting Scientology [Gatecrasher]

While our proprietary, patent-pending VirtuaPhil™ technology allowed you to experience what a showdown between the KingWorld tough-love swami and a Britney Spears well-past the verge of a nervous breakdown might have looked like, the actual footage from their historic meeting will never air. (Save, perhaps, for repeated 4 a.m. screenings on a rickety Super-8 projector in the doctor's home library, popping cashews into his mouth as he obsessively relives every moment of the intervention that got away.) Now the Spears family, whose only means of dealing with a situation involves relaying their problems to the nearest national media outlet, is on the attack, with frayed matriarch Lynne Spears and fecund tween daughter Jamie Lynn having dispatched a representative to The Today Show to insist they had never authorized a Britney-themed Dr. Phil episode.

The representative further castigates the celebrity therapist for having made "inappropriate" public statements regarding Britney's mental state. A betrayal of trust does appear to have occurred here, as of the approximately 16,000 licensed mental health professionals currently working in California, the one the Spears family painstakingly selected to help a relative deeply in need, with nothing to gain from going public with this access save for perhaps a massive ratings boost on his nationally syndicated show, marks a clear breach of TV-therapist / bottomed-out-pop-star-patient confidentiality.

• Watch Video
• The Today Show

Read More »

Safely on the other side of the holiday season, when pink-slips tucked into stockings hanging above smoldering Yule logs would have put a further damper on an already gloomy Christmas in Hollywood (not to mention the SHITCAN CLAUS VISITS WARNER STAFFERS headlines in the trades that would've accompanied such a badly timed move), Warner Bros. has announced to employees that it will kick off the new year with a cheery wave of strike-related layoffs. In a legally mandated, but still heartfelt, letter to studio workers, a WB VP said that an unspecified number of cutbacks--the good news: they may be temporary! The bad news: Did we mention that "cutbacks" means we're firing a bunch of people?-- will go into effect by January 18th, according to Variety:

"We anticipate these cutbacks will be temporary, and that many employees will be called back to work once the strike concludes," she added. "We regret that we must take these actions; please know that we have delayed as long as we can. We appreciate the focus and teamwork you've all shown during this difficult time."

As if this development weren't depressing enough, Var notes employee-reduction initiatives at Walden Media and Innovative Artists (and more are sure to come now that Warner Bros. has broken the ice--get excited), and adds the fact that there's only one scripted television series still in production in L.A. Please join us in issuing a resigned sigh as we helplessly await the faint sound of the 2007 television season's soul-chilling death-rattle immediately following the final take of an October Road location shoot.

• Warner sets layoffs due to strike [Variety]