You gotta hand it to Katherine Heigl. In the last two years, thanks to plum roles in Knocked Up and on Grey's Anatomy, she's gone from the forgotten child star from My Father, The Hero (forgotten by everyone except pervs, that is) to an Emmy winning actress who's bumping her way onto the A-List. But along the way, thanks to a string of questionable PR snafus like publicly lambasting Judd Apatow and emasculating her husband Joshua at every conceivable turn, she's racked up more than her fair share of detractors. But being the determined ball buster that she is, she's not going to let a little thing like criticism get in her way of becoming her generation's Julia Roberts. Today, Variety reports that she is set to star in and co-produce Escape, based on the true story of Carolyn Jessop, whose memoir of escaping her polygamist husband became a best-seller. While it remains to be seen if this role will earn her a nod at the 2010 Oscars (if it walks like Oscar bait and talks like Oscar bait, it probably is), we can confirm that she won't be accepting any awards at this year's Emmys. As Tom O'Neil of the LAT's Gold Derby blog reports:

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Oh Ellen Page. First you send your "power lesbian" publicist into a tizzy defending your heterosexual honor, then you make a fool out of poor Jay Leno in his own house of belly laughs. Have you really moved on to shun the potty-mouthed legend that is Jane Fonda? One stripper-scripted indie hit on your resume does not entitle you to divadom quite yet. In a scathing NY Daily News blind item today, a "rising young actress" is reported to have brushed off Fonda's desire to meet her at a party with a curse-laden remark, and as our detective skills suggest after the jump, all signs point to Page as the catty star in question.

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Knowing what we know about Spike Lee's constructively critical awards-podium jeremiads, we think the filmmaker doth protest too much this week about his lack of faith in the Academy Awards. Nevertheless, the sadist in us also appreciates his analysis of the vagaries of Oscar justice that we presume will embrace Lee one of these days:

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