Ms. Davis came on after Bill Maher, who himself was all fired up about various issues (Republicans, Michael Phelps, Kellogg's, A-Rod, American obesity) but the heretofore unknown (to me) actress managed to upstage Bill's earlier hysterics and carefully-rehearsed punchlines, with topics including growing up in Rhode Island, Sanford & Son, second-hand bikinis and urination accidents. Half the time I had no idea what she was talking about - it was late! - but I was left with two distinct thoughts: 1) I hope she wins the Oscar, if just for the awesome speech she'll give, and 2) the Tonight Show greenroom must have some serious Pinot grigio.

As Winfrey revealed to a shocked Meryl Streep, she lobbied aggressively for the Doubt role that eventually went to Viola Davis (and is a sure lock to secure Davis an Oscar nomination). According to Winfrey, Shanley listened to her pitch, then turned her down with a flat "no." Unsure what his word usage meant, Winfrey consulted confidante Gayle King, who instructed an intern to inform Oprah that this meant she would not be receiving the part. As a stoned, Keanu Reeves-channeling Streep says from her Skype-enabled college dorm room, "Whoa." Indeed. [Oprah]

Patrick Goldstein notes today that the studio has retracted its innovative if controversial "hybrid blurb" from print-ad circulation effective immediately, meaning New York Post critic Lou Lumenick will at last have his own personal, decontextualized praise attributed to him alongside his peers. The bad news: Lumenick's Post colleague and former blurbmate Cindy Adams lost her berth to that monolith of critical integrity Roger Friedman. Hopefully they corrected his spelling.

• Miramax pulls fudged blurb from 'Doubt' ad [The Big Picture]

NY Post critic Lou Lumenick complained Thursday that Miramax had blended a portion of his Doubt review with that of his colleague Cindy Adams, resulting in yesterday's ad blurb in the NY Times: "This is what movies used to be and should be. Doubt is heart-stopping. A feast of great acting.'' Naturally Lumenick was a little disappointed with this unprecedented awards-season license, but we love the audacity and hope to see more — and more creative — instances of its usage in the months and years to come.

In that spirit, we've formulated a few of our own multi-party blurbs for some of last year's reviews and commentaries on Defamer. Feel free to borrow at will, Hollywood, or just compose your own with the handy links provided:

· The Dark Knight: "So ambitious and epic and so expensive-looking. The Departed with bat-gadgets. I want overturned big rigs!"

· Revolutionary Road: "Screenwriter Justin Haythe digests Richard Yates's piercing dialogue into compact, Oscar-clip-compatible bursts. A quasi-pedigreed patina reveling in excruciating emotional turmoil. $40 million of DreamWorks' money!"

· Milk: "Well-made prestige Oscar bait. Sean Penn deserves credit for appearing likable on screen! I'm a gay man, and you're not."

· Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: "It was engaging-ish. This is no ordinary quartz skull that looks like an alien head! What about the cactus-LaBeouf-cockballtorture sequence? I mean, my friend liked it."

Must! Credit! Defamer!

• Reviewing the Movie Ads: Doubts About 'Doubt' [NYP]

This was made abundantly evident in Harry Knowles's review of Doubt, in which he admitted that a dark chapter from his past rendered John Patrick Shanley's intricate morality puzzler all the more resonant:

I absolutely do not believe Father Brendan had improper contact with the boy in question, but I do believe he had some manner of scandal in his life prior to this station and he did not want it brought out into the open.

BUT I COULD BE WRONG. And that's the delight of this movie. There is no rock solid evidence. No teary confessions, only innuendo and supposition.

Of course I sympathized with Hoffman's character - as there was a point in my life where I caught a ranch hand on my mother's ranch stealing tools and guns, and had to go to school. By the time I returned from school, the ranch hand told my mother that he saw me molest my sister - and my mother being an alcoholic emotional wreck, had the ranchhands beat me with riding crops till my back bled while being forced into brutal manual labor with a post-hole digger.

The next day I told her what had happened, the ranch hand in question had left and she discovered that I was telling the truth (as many of her guns had in fact been stolen and tools taken) and I was proved innocent. BUT that doesn't take away the rather terrifying experience that the mere whisper of wrongdoing did and the harsh memories that I will always carry from that experience.

In a similar vein, Ben Lyons recently admitted that his gushing review of The Love Guru may have actually been the result of psychic repression—a fact that became all too clear when he was flooded by the memory of certain unspeakable acts perpetrated upon him in a Marriott suite by Mike Meyers, all in exchange for a chummy snapshot addition to his ever-growing Lyons Den gallery.

• Harry has no doubt about DOUBT! [AICN]

Among films, Doubt leads the SAG field with five nominations for Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis and for the ensemble performance as a whole. Benjamin Button and Milk picked up ensemble noms of their own, with Brad Pitt and Sean Penn recognized in the Best Actor category and Taraji P. Henson and Josh Brolin singled out for their supporting roles.

Elsewhere: Robert Downey Jr. and/or Slumdog Millionaire's Dev Patel usurped the Supporting Actor nomination that Michael Sheen should have earned for Frost/Nixon, though the latter film did draw an Ensemble nod, which it still won't win, especially against Doubt. 30 Rock, The Closer, Mad Men Boston Legal and John Adams accrued three nominations apiece on the TV side, with awards-season regulars Glenn Close, David Duchovny, Jeremy Piven and Recount making appearances as well.

Back at the Academy, the year's Best Original Song candidates were pared down to just over four dozen — nearly a quarter of which came from High School Musical 3, virtually assuring it representation (and a performance ZOMG!!!) on Oscar night. They're joined most notably by fellow frontrunners Mariah Carey (Tennessee), Miley Cyrus (Bolt), Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino) and Bruce Springsteen (The Wrestler), with Bond theme-mates Jack White and Alicia Keys on the outside looking in. Tough year, tough break, you two.

• 2009 SAG Scorecard [The Envelope]

• 
  49 Songs Eligible For Oscars [IW]

Speaking to fellow Oscar-winner Whoopi Goldberg about the icky mechanics of awards-season campaigns, Streep makes an impassioned plea for the good old days — that halcyon era of a generation ago, when Academy Awards were something that tottering old ladies arbitrarily bestowed on crap like Ordinary People, Dance With Wolves, Driving Miss Daisy and Streep's own Kramer vs. Kramer for no reason besides their own middling taste. Goldberg clearly agrees, proving her immunity to those tacky campaigns by overlooking "first-timer" Adams's 2005 nomination for Junebug. But we don't hold it against Whoopi; in fact, if there's room for us under her rock, we wouldn't mind moving in with her for a couple months. [The View]

WHAT'S NEW: There's no wanting for prestige or variety this weekend, with Fox's remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still leading a saturated box-office charge on 3,600 screens. This time around, Keanu Reeves arrives from space to portend our imminent doom, evincing a timely environmental-awareness message with the aid of Jennifer Connelly and fitfully clusmy CGI. And if there's anything holiday moviegoers love, it's a Keanu apocalypse; expect Earth to pull around $38.3 million.

The next biggest opening is something called Delgo, the sci-fi quasi-Romeo & Juliet rendered with discarded Pixar 2.0 software and the budget voice talent of Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Malcolm McDowell and Burt Reynolds, among others. We like this one for about $3.2 million en route to Flopz™, neck-and-neck with the Latino ensemble (plus Debra Messing for gringa kicks) laffer Nothing Like the Holidays at around $3.3 million.

Doubt, meanwhile, opens small this week against fellow Oscar groveler The Reader; the former is faring far better with critics than the latter (unfairly, we might add), but the Kate Winslet lookie-loo factor won't disappoint the Weinstein Company when the numbers come in Sunday night, probably around $41,000 per screen. Also, if you've got four and a half hours and a seat cushion to spare, pack a lunch and check out Che in its one-week-only Academy qualifying run. It's the kind of thing you can tell your grandkids about years from now when they tug on your sleeve and ask you to regale them with stories of cinema's good old bloated days.

A few stars are actually smattered elsewhere in the mire: Ethan Hawke and Mark Ruffalo's Beantown gang drama What Doesn't Kill You opens on three screens, while Michelle Williams's spare girl-loses-dog indie Wendy and Lucy arrives on two. Also opening: The noirish Dark Streets; the animated fantasy Dragon Hunters; the stop-motion Oscar hopeful $9.99; the Chinese vanity project Waiting in Beijing; the Kim Basinger revenge flick While She Was Out; and the polish Holiday tale Hania. Whew.

THE BIG LOSER: Not so much a "loser" as an example of what we wish there was less of in the world, Timecrimes is an acclaimed Spanish thriller that nevertheless orbits around the genre conventions of time travel. Not to be arbitrary about it, but dear film industry: Please let the time-travel movie die. They're ultimately the same hoary stunt performed again and again, illogically at worst (Primer) and amusingly at best (Back to the Future), and almost always forgettably. Let Timecrimes end it. Please.

THE UNDERDOG: Speaking of going out gracefully, Clint Eastwood says his performance in Gran Torino is his last. And why not? Eastwood's late-career revisionist streak has knocked off its last myth: The vigilante hero, a man who'd sooner revolt in Dirty Harry than keep pace with the degradation of social order. Torino's grizzled Korean War vet still takes the same vengeance on Hmong gangs and black thugs overtaking his Detroit suburb, but essentially in the service of a multiethnic utopia perceivable just over the horizon. (He even gives his Silver Star and titular vehicle to the tormented young man he's taken under his wing, a little more optimistic bellwether than Harry Callahan's climactic badge-tossing in 1971.) As a straight drama, Gran Torino isn't especially good — sort of a violent, profane revenge epic crossbred with an afterschool special — but! Viewed in context with the last four decades of Eastwood's mercury, it's a strikingly rich, funny, elegant and utterly fascinating valedictory.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's this week include The Dark Knight, the thrilling, Oscar-chasing doc Man on Wire, the first four seasons of Happy Days, and holiday-ready complete-series box sets of The Wire, Get Smart and Deadwood.

"Grand Mamma Mia! I like it! I'm up for doing a sequel, as long as you can get those fabulous boys - Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard and Dominic Cooper - back!"

"It's so gratifying that it has been this phenomenon around the world. It says there's an audience for something that appeals to a lot of women - something that might make them some money too!"

As happy as we are that Streep is back on top, the idea of a Mamma Mia sequel — let alone one that's limited to the roughly four ABBA songs left untouched by the original film — feels like it could be her Waterloo. Let's not subject poor Pierce Brosnan (or America) to a poorly warbled, shirtless rendition of "When I Kissed The Teacher."

• Meryl Streep enjoys the ride back up [LAT]

• Meryl Streep Wants Mama Mia Sequel Role [Female First]

As you'll soon learn from the junket audio above—in which a reporter gallingly demands of the actor, "How important was it to you to know what really happened?"—the results are not pretty. His response: "My whole issue with that question is that I think everyone's trying to get me to say what it is. And I think it's so selfish. Soo selfish. Of course I have to fill in the blank of that character—you know that, right? You know that? (Stunned silence.) Say 'yes.' (Nervous laughter.)"

Yes, that's it exactly. This greedy, self-absorbed reporter wanted to trip Hoffman up and have him reveal the truth about what happened between his character and the impressionable African-American schoolboy with whom he developed a suspiciously intimate bond. Had Hoffman fallen for the ruse, it would have instantly rendered the title Doubt utterly obsolete, and ruined the molesty surprise!

We think he's been spending a little too much time under a naked lightbulb in Sister Aloysius Beauvier's interrogation room. We get it. It's all very doubtful. We don't know if you did it. That's what drives the drama. But c'mon—try a poker face next time. Hoffman got so defensive, we're just going to assume he diddled John Patrick Shanley's screenplay in his trailer between takes.

• PHILLIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN NEEDS A HUG (OR SOMETHING) [hollywoodoutbreak.com]

Some roles just don't suit Natalie Portman. At the junket for the film version of his "Doubt," playwright John Patrick Shanley was asked how Amy Adams won the role of an emotionally conflicted nun. "I'm trying to think of what the etiquette is on this," Shanley chuckled, blushing a bit. Urged on by a blogger for gossipsauce.com, he continued, "Well, we asked Natalie Portman, and Natalie was very interested but kept saying she had a problem. And we finally nailed down as to what the problem was. She basically said she didn't understand celibacy."

Sounds like someone's taking tarty cues from her former costar, the sexually generous Scarlett Johansson! Still, we hardly think Portman's ideals were at odds with the role — has she never heard of the "sexy nun" concept before? Nat, check in with Megan Fox next time and call John Patrick Shanley in the morning.

• ALIEN CONCEPT [NY Post]