O'Neil, for those unfamiliar, is the balloon animal-fashioning clown who runs the LAT's awards site and regularly freaks the fuck out or accuses actors who everyone loves of being total creeps.

Today, his insanity is less showy but nevertheless still amusing. In a post about a watermarked Quantum of Solace academy screener that's found itself on the web, O'Neil dances around the identity of the leaker, but makes sure to note this:

Reportedly, it was the DVD screener of a female academy member that was leaked on the Web, but it's not known if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences or legal authorities are prosecuting her or if her academy membership has been revoked.

This is why you can't have nice things, ladies. It's amusing that O'Neil would find it necessary to point out the gender of the leaker; would he have written, "Reportedly, it was the DVD of a male academy member?" Oh wait, it's Tom O'Neil, so he might, just to be bananas.

• Report: Oscar voter's screener of 'Quantum of Solace' leaked on the Web [LAT]

Peter Bart wrote a column of his own (Headline: "Will fiscal funk trip kudo contenders?" WTF) bitching about the lack of Oscar-related ads from the studios in Variety. Patrick Goldstein appropriately tells him to shut it:

Anyone paying attention to the outside world knows we're in the midst of a hideous global economic recession, with corporate profits plunging, the biggest U.S. carmakers teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and tens of thousands of everyday Joes being laid off from their jobs. But Bart, like most Hollywood insiders, lives a life of privilege, putting those nice Campanile lunches on his expense account. So when he hears that GE's hurting or Sony's having a tough time, his reaction? "Hankies, please."

Ha ha! He just told Peter Bart to shut up. And also told him his magazine is poor. Goldstein even gets a quote from Harvey Weinstein about why studios should buy lots of Oscar-related ads, then goes on to dismiss it:

Imagine how you'd feel if you were one of the hundreds of employees that's been laid off at a media conglomerate, only to see that your company's film division still has plenty of dough left to run Oscar ads in Variety or the New York Times or my newspaper.

Of course, the LAT started its section "The Envelope" for the same exact purpose: to get Oscar ads. But whatever. Dude has balls! He can go into porn when he gets laid off because his newspaper didn't sell enough Oscar-related ads to pay his salary. [LAT]

It was dark and drizzling when screenwriter Justin Marks did what many in Hollywood have fantasized during their bleakest career moments: He attacked his agent with a chain saw.

Marks hunched behind a wall, revved the chain saw motor and leaned forward. Next came the grinding, spinning sound of metal cutting through bone, the blood spattering, the agent's arm and head flying off. Marks grinned, unsheathed a shotgun and went in search of his next target: a reporter for Variety.

Marks was just doing his job — kill or be killed — in the video game Gears of War, which he plays from the comfort of a brown leather couch in his Los Angeles home. Every Thursday night, he and dozens of other up-and-comers in Hollywood turn on their Xboxes to engage in violent killing, mock each other and sometimes even talk shop.

Kudos for Marks & Co. for discovering a fun way to conduct a Hollywood mixer that doesn't have to take place at the Formosa. We hope this trend continues past its current group of up-and-comers; after all, while it's one thing for the screenwriter behind a Street Fighter movie to enjoy video games, what we're really waiting for is someone like Scott Rudin jumping online to "pwn some nOObs" at Halo 3.

[photo credit: Ringo H.W. Chiu / For the Los Angeles Times]

• Hollywood nerds turn video game night into networking opportunity [LAT]

"One day in prayer, all by myself, I asked myself the question: What if it's all not true?" Dutcher recalled. "It was an earth-shaking moment of spiritual terror, such a profound experience. It was such a sense of loss. I felt my faith leaving me and never coming back."

..."At the beginning, I was proud to say, 'Yeah, I'm a Mormon filmmaker' because then, I was defining what a Mormon filmmaker was," Dutcher said. "It quickly got completely out of my control. Now, no one wants to call themselves a Mormon filmmaker because you're associating yourself with a genre that's fallen into disrepute. It's like having porn on your résumé."

In fact, Dutcher is so intent on leaving the genre behind that he penned a blistering "farewell address" to the Provo Daily Herald, excoriating other Mormon filmmakers:

A few parting words: I urge you to put the moronic comedies behind you. If you're going to make comedies, at least make them funny. Perhaps you should leave the mockery of Mormons to the anti-Mormons. They've had a lot more experience and, frankly, they do a better job.

Damn, Richard! Wait, can we say "damn" around you now? In all seriousness, Falling (playing right now at a one-week engagement at Laemmle's Music Hall in Beverly Hills) just shot up to the top of our screening lists, or at the very list, our Netflix queues. While we can't yet attest to Dutcher's skill behind the camera, he's at least nailed the next most important part of being a filmmaker: causing controversy.

[photo credit: Lori Shepler / Los Angeles Times]

• Richard Dutcher leaves the Mormon church and a genre [LAT]

Some little birds at the LAT tell us that venerated entertainment journalist Patrick Goldstein will expand his Big Picture column with the launch of a new blog Tuesday morning.

The LAT hopes to put Goldstein's knowledge and sources to work in a blog that brings responsible journalism to the faster-than-pulp pace of 24/7 online entertainment reporting.

Terrific — except those little birds at the LAT must have missed the part where Goldstein has already been blogging for weeks now (to be fair, it takes about that long to navigate the LAT website). Still, thank goodness we've got Goldstein on the "faster-than-pulp" blogging beat; his edgy, current musings like "Wal-Mart rocks" and "The National Anthem needs to be sung this way, not that way," will surely leave Hollywood insiders quaking in their Prada boots.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• BREAKING: Patrick Goldstein Goes from Journo to Blogger [FishbowlLA]

"Market forces are affecting the agencies," said Scott Harris, the head of Innovative Artists, a boutique outfit that represents top Broadway actors (Patti LuPone, Adam Pascal) and a number of established names, including Frank Langella, Ving Rhames and Marilu Henner. "Sometimes we have to manage expectations down. What someone made five years ago, the market may no longer bear." ...

Several managers — and more than a few agents — said the recent poaching is having a deleterious impact on the business. Rather than focusing on carefully building a career, these people say, some agents nowadays favor high-profile deals over strategic advice.

It's one thing to get a client a private jet and a fat cut of a film's profits, said UTA partner Jeremy Zimmer, "but it's also really exciting and emotionally satisfying to see someone's first movie premiere at Sundance or put someone to work who hasn't worked in a year."

We're encouraged to see moral rewards reclaim their status among dealmaking considerations — especially at UTA, where the recent defections of comedy super-agent Nick Stevens, Ben Stiller and virtually anyone who has had his name on a movie poster with him since 2003 promise a brave new era of phone-line sharing, cubicle consolidation and unisex bathrooms on every other floor. Next to go: Private e-mail, thus requiring a trip to Kinko's for agents faxing anonymous, client-hating poems to Nikki Finke.

• Behind the talent-agency shakeups [LAT]

Reporter Chuck Philips and his supervisor, Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin, issued statements of apology Wednesday afternoon.

"In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job," Philips said in a statement Wednesday. "I'm sorry."

In his statement, Duvoisin added: "We should not have let ourselves be fooled. That we were is as much my fault as Chuck's. I deeply regret that we let our readers down."

The humiliating gaffe is but another notch on the scoreboard for the LAT's chief rivalry in the ongoing East Coast/West Coast newspaper wars; members of the NY Times's thug posse are reportedly having copies of the apology mounted in every department, where it will hang alongside their framed Platinum "Most Dangerous Motherfucker Paper of Record" Pulitzer.

• The Times apologizes over article on rapper [LAT]

In fact, however, Sabatino was little more than a rap devotee, a wildly impulsive, overweight white kid from Florida whose own father once described him in a letter to a federal judge as "a disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug.

[A]n examination of the three documents revealed that the bodies of the respective "302s" were actually created on a typewriter...[but] agents ceased using typewriters about 30 years ago. [...]

Riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, the purported "302" documents vary sharply from standard FBI reports in terms of phraseology and use of certain acronyms. [...]

Most telling, though, are the obvious similarities...between the purported "302s" and certain court filings created by Sabatino while he has been incarcerated at Allenwood.

Well Diddy told us it wasn't true. LATimes.com now prominently features a story headlined, "Validity of Tupac documents probed," in which they cite TSG's investigation, and report that "Editor Russ Stanton said today he will launch an internal investigation into the authenticity of [the] documents." Sabatino, meanwhile, has managed to accomplish what he set out to do: become a supporting player in the Tupac mythos. That he had the wherewithal to dupe veteran investigative reporters using nothing more than an Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex-issue typewriter suggests to us that this is just the beginning of a beautiful career, with "Script Docta" Sabotino becoming Hollywood's go-to guy for gangsta-cred punch-ups.

• Big Phat Liar [TSG]
• L.A. Times to investigate validity of documents in Tupac report [LAT]