The Emmys, Oscar's Paste-Eating Cousin™, will broadcast live on ABC this Sunday, presided over by a Frankenhost monster conceived in a test tube by devious tinkerers from the science wing of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. The Creative Arts portion of the awards, however, were held Saturday at the Nokia Theatre. It was an evening for some of the year's more specialised TV achievements—from those of Matt Damon-fornicating singer-songwriter Sarah Silverman to the hairdo Michelangelos of Mad Men, spinning beehives into gold—to receive their due. Kathy Griffin took best reality program for her second year in a row, this time eschewing acceptance speeches commanding the Prince of Peace to "suck it" in favour of less blasphemous shows of appreciation. From Gold Derby:

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So Mad Men creator/EP/spiritual shepherd Matthew Weiner realises he's sitting on something pretty special with his cast of desk-hopping, Brylcreemed creatives over at Sterling Cooper. Perhaps it was the 16 Emmy nominations that tipped him off. ("Don't think of them as Emmy awards," his inner Don Draper will intone on the big night, "Think of them as tiny angels, flapping their pointy wings to a place where fear doesn't live. They're saying, 'You are OK, Matt...It's all...OK.'") Weiner's contract with the show's studio, Lionsgate TV, is up at the end of this season, and Variety reports he's been shopping himself around town to the highest bidder:

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Comeback Comeback: Britney Spears's ongoing flirtation with this year's VMAs has progressed past the stage of hanging out near an elephant while Russell Brand played Itsy Bitsy Spider up her inner thigh. She's going to open the show—though great care is being taken not to have a repeat of last year's performance, a still of which now appears next to the word "train·wreck" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Instead, MTV Networks Music Group President Van Toffler said it will be something "fun and unexpected." Britney said in a statement, "MTV has long played an important role in my career. How can I not be there to kick off their 25th VMAs? I'm excited to open the entire show, to say hi to my fans and to be nominated." [AP/Yahoo]

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A recently unearthed artifact from 1988 offers a mass celebrity humiliation on a scale so staggering, the mind quite simply reels. The setting was that year's Academy Awards ceremony—and what better way to celebrate the most glamorous evening in entertainment that with a nine-minute-long musical number peopled by Hollywood's "brightest young stars," in which they express through singing, dancing, fencing, and moonwalking their, um, desire to become a "super duper pooper scooper" Oscar winner.

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· Attack of the Show producer Gavin Purcell is leaving G4 to co-produce Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. He'll presumably user-test some of his edgier, hot-dog-deep-throating ideas on the web-only show before Fallon's NBC debut. [Variety]
· Bad news: Stargate: Atlantis will not get a sixth-season order from SciFi Channel. Good news: Stargate: Universe, a whole new Stargate series, is set to begin. Even better news: Stargate: Babies can't be far behind! [THR]
· Neil Patrick Harris and Sarah Chalke will host the Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards Sept. 13th, to be aired on E! one week later. Britney Spears will be a last-minute guest-patterer, in a performance Harris will backhandedly compliment on the talk show circuit. [Variety]
· Nicolas Cage will star in Kick-Ass, to later be renamed Awe-Some in pursuit of an all-important PG-13 rating. [THR]
· Freeze, sucka! Regina King, Kevin Alejandro and Michael McGrady have been cast in NBC pilot LAPD. [THR]

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Feast your eyes now upon those buzzy promo spots for the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards—featuring host Russell "Big in England" Brand, 2007 VMAs catastrophe Britney Spears, and a giant elephant in the room (not white, but you get it). 10 first impressions:

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Though Steve Carell is a perennial Emmy nominee for his work on The Office, he's never taken home a trophy of his own (even as the show itself won the Outstanding Comedy Award in 2006). Now, the LAT's easily excitable Tom O'Neill thinks he's nailed the reason why: Carell is just too darn creepy in the role.

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After last year's Ryan Seacrest-in-the-round extravaganza, today comes more exciting news about a significant shakeup in the Emmy Awards format: This year's ceremony, scheduled for September 21 at the roomy Nokia Theatre, will be presided over by the five nominees in the new category of best reality host. (The shape of the stage is still under wraps, but we hear ABC is toying with an M.C. Escher-inspired endless staircase design that will provide raked seating for days!) Seacrest, nominated for his hosting duties on American Idol, will be joined by Survivor's Jeff Probst, Dancing with the Stars's Tom Bergeron, Deal or No Deal's Howie Mandel, and Project Runway's Heidi Klum. We've run promotional photos of all five hosts through our Defamer Combine-O-Tron 2000 (patent pending; any similarities to Late Night's If They Mated completely coincidental) to see what the host would look like if they melded them into one. The result? A not-particuarly-telegenic überhost, and distant cousin of the rare and wonderful pigkey!

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Our heartiest congratulations to Alec Baldwin on earning his amazing seventh Emmy nomination—and the second for his consistently inspired work as 30 Rock's Jack Donaghy, whom last we saw hovering over Rip Torn's hospital bed and praying for a coma-rousing miracle. To honour the man who is well on his way towards becoming the country's first Baldwin President, we provide this excerpt from a new THR.com interview.

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· We defy you to watch Tyra Banks's Daytime Emmys acceptance speech for Best Talk Show (Informative) without getting a little bit moist-eyed. We especially liked her shout-out to Oprah, whose crown she's clearly claiming. You usurp, girl! [Tyra]
· Well, that was fun while it lasted: "This site has been closed. LucasFilm has asked us to remove this site. We have enjoyed seeing the tens of thousands of users over the past several days, and thank you for your interest." [StarWarsCrawl.com]
· Vassup! 105 people were invited to become voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, including Sacha Baron Cohen and Judd Apatow. [oscars.org]
· Dody Goodman, aka the fumbling Rydell High P.A.-system-xylophonist Blanche from Grease, also passed yesterday, at age 93. [USA Today]
· Heidi Montag has a single called "Fashion." It's the "greatest song of my life," says partner Spencer Pratt, who suffers from a rare neurological disorder which causes him to love the sound of a cat being cranked through a Vocoder-equipped meat grinder. [Us Magazine]

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