Oprah ends a 25 year run that puts hers up with Fidel Castro and Muammar al-Gaddafi as one of the most durable dictatorships of our age. According to Variety, Oprah broke the news to her staffers today and will inform her subjects in the television audience on the air tomorrow that the dream will come to an end in less than two years. On September 9, 2011, Oprah will broadcast her last syndicated show.

She leaves to focus on the fledgling Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) which has been struggling without the presence of its namesake since it launched in partnership with Discovery.

We are some fucked up people, yo.

I mean, believe me, I totally see the appeal in the universe breaking LA off the coast and hiding it 4,000 feet under the sea, like the afikomen of God that will never be cashed in and found, because—sorry, LA—it's LA. Though apparently some people got teary during the part when the Kogi Truck gets swallowed up by an acid-spewing mutant volcano, so I guess it's a complicated emotion. But why are we so desperate to see what the end looks like? Because we're sadists? Masochists? Because we'd like to imagine a world in which only we exist and everything else just doesn't? [Related: Welcome to Lower Manhattan.] Because we want it all to just be totally fucked and end, and we want a hand in it, like that kid who spends five hours building a beautiful sand castle only to "Godzilla" it out of existence for six seconds?

Or because it looks sick? Which apparently, it did. To the tune of $225M.

The 162-minute disaster epic...blew away the competition and took in $65 million in North America in its opening weekend and $160 million worldwide. All totaled, the Roland Emmerich movie, which cost $200 million to make (and tens of millions more to market) grossed $225 million.

That's gotta be it. When the world ends, it's not like we're going to be able to watch it being so awesome. Also, we're all gonna die and it's gonna be crazy but, like, will it really look that cool? Hell to the no, BobbyBrown! It'll probably look like The Road or something. Gray and stupid and dusty and boring. But that's life, you know? Less Roland Emmerich, more Cormac McCarthy. Besides, only in Fakeland can anybody give a shit about Amanda Peet living through the end of the world. OH COME ON.

And then there's this Precious movie. The critics HATED it. Like this one:

Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious. Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken), it is a sociological horror show.

Ha, oh, just joking, that's batshit Armond White from the New York Press. This guy eats the innocence of children for breakfast and snacks on Labrador puppies for lunch. Also, he hated Up. But! Precious, which is a "the world sucks" movie of a different stripe, did well, too. Look:

The indie movie "Precious," which Lionsgate bought at Sundance, took in about $6.1 million in just 174 theaters in nine cities. That's an impressive $35,000 per-screen average.

Now, granted: 2012 was on about 40 bazillion more screens, but seriously, compared to the other top per-theater take ($19,095 for 2012), it's a pretty incredible number, and a 200% increase from last week's Precious take. That 200% number is not a joke.

Lesson, learned. It goes something like this: when I make my autobiographical epic, I Hope They Smoke Adderall In Hogwarts, I'm going to make sure to append the words "Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey Present." If only real-Hollywood were so smart. Dumbasses. Imagine if they did that to 2012. They would've made enough money to destroy the world for reals. Until then, we have LA's fake-comeuppance to go see again and again and again. Basically, yes:

[Photo of The Great Alderaan Explosion of '77: "Complicated Feelings," Mixed Media, provided by the artist.]

With the contract on Oprah's show running out, and with her fledgling Oprah Winfrey Network struggling to get off the ground, the entertainment world has been speculating wildly about her next move. To most, however, it seemed unthinkable that Oprah could walk away from her ATM machine of a TV show — contemplating the fate of daytime TV minus Oprah is like Cold War strategists trying to imagine a world without the Soviet Union.

The Big O has been developing the Oprah Winfrey Network for some time in partnership with Discovery Communications, but the network has had trouble getting off the ground without the presence of its namesake's own show. Finke reports that Discovery's chief finally demanded that Oprah go all in and bring her show over or give up on the network entirely. If after much vacillation, which reportedly included several canceled phone appointments with Les Moonves to break the news to him, it would be a big change of heart for Oprah to base her empire on her own cable channel rather than a mere syndicated show.

Back in 1998, when Oprah was poised to take over cable as one of the three "founding mothers" of the Oxygen network, she dangled the possibility of her talk show airing on the new cable station:

She also said she intended to provide ''input and ideas'' in the short-term before she is free from other commitments to produce more programming for the channel. Specifically, she said she had never sold rerun rights to the huge library of editions of her daily talk show and, ''This seems like the perfect place to release them.''

A decade later, when Winfrey announced her OWN network in January 2008, she tried to distance herself as much as possible from the disappointing Oxygen: "I was not a participant in the development of the channel... That's why after a couple of board meetings I took myself off the board."

The ultra-low budget film about an overweight, abused girl in Harlem won huzzahs last year at Sundance, and raves at the traditional Oscar race kick off in Toronto.

But since Toronto, the little film has been plagued by nothing but questions, with some Oscar pundits ready to declare it dead in the water before it's even been released.

The trouble for Precious started last week when the film which had all but been anointed an Oscar lock failed to get a nomination for the Gotham awards. The oversight prompted the NY Post's Lou Lumenick and The Envelope's Oscar savant Tom O'Neil to question whether the film's prominent endorsements by Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry had sparked a backlash; the Brokeback precedent holding that Oscar voters hate having winners foisted upon them and will do crazy things, like give the Best Picture trophy to Crash when someone tries.

Eyebrow raising statements from director Lee Daniels, coupled with the star Mo'Nique's seeming unwillingness to properly schmooze the press, were beginning to coalesce into storm clouds suggesting an ill-starred campaign ahead.

Well, now there's a backlash against the backlash. On O'Neil's own blog, his survey of pundits said phooey to any backlash talk. While over at thehotblog, sagacious industry watcher David Poland sputtered in disbelief at such early chatter. He writes:

It is the profound arrogance of the entertainment media to delude ourselves that we, not the real movie goers or even the privileged awards voters, decide what should be praised and how intensely. It is the same pathetic mindset that happens when Variety pans a movie like The Road or AntiChrist and other media monkeys line up to suggest that this is a meaningful moment in the history of the film and future audience reaction.

There can be no backlash against Precious because, so far, the entire definition of how the movie plays has been based on a breathless media and Oprah... not necessarily in that order. Some fools are even wondering aloud whether Lee Daniels is costing himself a Best Director win by being honest in public... when he is a long ways away from getting a nomination, much less a win. (This is true of all the filmmakers in play, not just him.)

STOP!!!! Get some perspective. And stop damaging a movie like Precious by treating it, months before the response to the movie from real people and real voters will be heard, like the Holy Grail.

And there's just five months to go until Oscar night.

Tragic as it was to witness the heartbreak as the Buble uprising ripped out of Gene Simmons' painted hands the Billboard trophy he had labored his whole life to earn, we took solace believe it was a mere aberration, shortly to be corrected. But there was no surer thing in recording history than the soundtrack to New Moon, the second film in the Twilight series. The album which features tracks by the biggest bands of our times including Muse, Death Cab, Thom Yorke and The Killers was an event before the artists even entered the recording studio.

But all that was not enough to beat out Buble, whose collection of standards Crazy Love sold almost double the New Moon total.

To indie nation, this is a stunning blow. Hadn't we all locked hands and agreed that popular music now exists on a spectrum that runs from Arcade Fire through Lady Gaga to Miley on the bubblegum end? Sure now and then we'll let a golden oldie like Streisand take a final victory lap around the charts, but for Michael Buble to become the biggest recording star on Earth? Who asked for this?

Certainly not America's press corps, the music writers of which sacrifice vast forests to write paean to the latest Arctic Monkey release but can barely see fit to acknowledge Buble.

So who is this Buble? And how did he come to rule us? Some bullet points on the rise of giant of showtunes.

• The Buble march to destiny began in 1975, when he was born in British Columbia, the son of a salmon fisherman.

• After singing as a young boy, at age 18 Buble achieved his first taste of the greatness that was to come when he won the Canadian Youth Talent Search.

• After a long struggle to breakthrough, Buble finally stepped onto the world stage when he scored a gig singing at the wedding of Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's daughter. On the Mulroney's before the power elite of the world his Mack The Knife caused one guest to sit up ramrod straight in his chair. That guest was David Foster. And Buble's recording career was born.

• After success abroad, Buble's second studio album It's Time reached #7 on the Billboard charts. While America slept, the album went on to sell 3.2 million copies. His second album put away 1.9 million.

• One can never ignore in all things American the power of the Oprah, who had Buble on the show two weeks ago, fueling this latest rise up the charts.

• Buble also speaks to an older demographic, who are still tied to that quaint tradition of buying albums instead of just stealing them off the internet.

• And hipsters everywhere should take heed. Buble's success demonstrates the enormous power of that not-yet-banished sector of entertainment consumers: uncool people. While their tastes may account for zero percent of the stories America's hipster-obsessed music press writes , they still control a vast swath of the actual music spending dollar.

• It's interesting, as a little thought experiment, to imagine what might happen to dying newspapers if they covered the entertainments that the greatest numbers of American people actually consumed....Now say if you were a newspaper seeking to not die by attracting readers and you knew there were millions of people interested enough in Michael Buble to spend money on him versus dozens of people willing to shell out for the Arctic Monkeys, wouldn't you think that writing more articles about the big-following artist as opposed to lots of articles about the tiny following artist would lead to more readers? Naaahhh...that there is just crazy talk.

The stage had been set; a six month lead-up to their return kicked off by a celebrated appearance at the American Idol finale, Gene Simmons sharing the mike with Adam Lambert. Their first album release in 11 years was being backed by the current gold standard of record releases — a Walmart exclusive. With the album tracking in the 150,000 sales range, the music press had all but proclaimed it a lock on the #1 slot.

And then today, somewhere out there in KISS' tour bus, Gene Simmons stepped over passed-out groupies and the bodies of decapitated farm animals from last night's victory party. He made his way towards the front of the bus where today's Billboard had just arrived, pausing to roll his cow tongue up and down the cooling strippers' pole, giving himself a little bracing jolt before he took in the new issue which would feature his made-up face under the banner hed "#1!"

And then he looked down and saw...Michael Fucking Buble.

Today the numbers were tabulated and KISS placed a distant second to crooner Michael Buble's Crazy Love album. As explained on Hitfix, all the world's music gurus neglected to take into account the one power in the Universe stronger than Walmart — Oprah herself, who invited Buble on last Friday, sending his collection of olde timey ballads soaring off the racks over the weekend and earning him the top slot.

If it's any consolation to the face-painted army, at least they missed losing to Streisand by a week.

• It's a waiting game to see whether Vivendi will exercise its put option on its remaining 20 percent stake in NBC Universal, possibly sending the network studio hybrid into the fabled lands of IPO. While the anticipation mounts, Vivendi's chair said the company would take the next few months to make up its mind. [Variety]

• Oprah's Harpo Productions, Sam Mendes and Focus Features are teaming up to bring Joseph O'Neill's celebrated cricket pot-boiler Netherland to the big screen. [Variety]

• Spike Lee and Robert DeNiro announced plans to make a series about Alphabet City for Showtime. Alphaville will be an ensemble drama set in the 1980's. [Hollywood Reporter]

• With a mere two months until its release, pre-sales of tickets for New Moon the second installment of the Twilight saga have been brisk, with many locations reporting showings have already sold out. [Hollywood Reporter]

• What you won't read much about in the trades is the rumors about the trades themselves. Yesterday, Nikki Finke declared Variety was planning to take its website behind a pay wall and the Hollywood Reporter to cease publication entirely. The Wrap attempted to find the truth behind the rumors. It quotes a "high level" Reporter exec reacting "with amusement" to Finke's item, while Variety remained oblique about its online plans. [The Wrap]

The monologue was horrific, and included a joke about how men like to control the remote while watching TV. Thanks for that original observation, Jay. A follow up segment with Dan Finnerty of The Dan Band singing to a girl in a car wash was tremendously unfunny. This show has been in the planning stages for months, and with the world watching for his first episode, this was the best that Leno could do?

His interview with Jerry Seinfeld was the highlight of the hour, with Seinfeld firing jokes off about the show, not knowing when it was on, and how when he quit his show he really quit the show. Jay should have taken his lead. Having Oprah do a taped segment and not even once acknowledge Jay is about as close to genius as the show got.

Speaking of Oprah, Leno then trotted out Kanye West, in the midst of the brou-ha-ha concerning his bad behavior at the Video Music Awards. Unfortunately, the scandal means that this clip will be show all across the internet for the next day to hear what Kanye had to say. It was something about how his mother's death and too much touring made him act like a dick. We're saving our reaction for a different blog post.

This one concerns the quality of Jay's broadcast, and other than Seinfeld, Oprah, Jay Z, and Rhianna, it wasn't very high. Even the familiar Headlines segment at the end of the show contained far too many penis, poop, and vagina jokes to make anyone other than a 14 year-old boy and your crazy uncle Mort chuckle.

This first episode was Leno's chance to shine, when he should have gotten out his best material and the funniest segments that he's been compiling for months. Instead, the best thing about it was another comedian and an apology that he lucked into. We don't know how this experiment is going to last through the month, nonetheless another year.

• No big deal has yet come out of the acquisitions market at the Toronto International Film Festival, but buyers are said to be circling a fairly large number of films, including the one outings from indie darling directors Atom Egoyan, Todd Solondz and Werner Herzog. The Israeli film Lebanon which took the top prize last week in Venice is said to be the subject of intense jockeying. [Variety, THR]

• Meanwhile the star wattage has burned bright. The weekend belonged to George Clooney who as anticipated, sent the press into a titter supporting his pair of new films. Next up: Drew Barrymore with her directorial debut Whip It and Mariah Carey and Oprah supporting perhaps the most buzzed about film of the fest, Precious. [The Wrap]

• At the Toronto International Film Festival to promote his new film, The Informant, Steven Soderberg has sold the financing for his next film, to be entitled Knockout from Lion's Gate and Relativity Media. [Variety]

• Knockout may, however, prove to be the last Steven Soderbergh film ever. Speaking to The Daily Beast about his plans to retire from directing and take up painting, the director said of The Informant and his desire to go out on top, "If everyone in America will go see it, and make it a hit, then I PROMISE I will retire." [The Daily Beast]

• As expected, the box office weekend belonged to Tyler Perry, America's most reliable deliverer of 20 million dollarish opening weekends . I Can Do Bad All By Myself was Perry's third highest opener taking in an estimated $24 million. The animated 9 took in $10.9 in a smaller release. America, clearly turning its back on quality in entertainment, passed on Sorority Row which earned a mere $5.3. [Box Office Mojo]

• All eyes are tuned on NBC's ratings tonight, after the bow of the new Jay Leno show, with seemingly all of Hollywood praying for disaster. [THR]

With the premiere of his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, looming on September 16th at the Toronto Film Festival, normally you'd expect to find Moore filling up every inch of media, shocking the bourgeiouse with his trademark Angry Guy Banging on the Palace Walls shtick, providing Matt Drudge with a new outrageous quote every news cycle.

But Moore has been strangely silent in this run-up and the LA Times' Patrick Goldstein has learned that he plans to keep a lid on it for weeks to come no less.

When Goldstein called Overture Films, Moore's distributor to arrange an interview, he was told that the filmmaker would sit for interviews after the premiere, but the pieces would all be embargoed Sept. 23rd, the day the film opens in New York and Los Angeles.

Why? Because Moore is doing a sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey, which won't air until Sept. 22. And if Oprah wants an exclusive, she gets it, since when it comes to books, movies or music, no one offers a better promotional platform than La Winfrey.

There is perhaps no bigger winner here than Barack Obama, who is trying to persuade America that his health care package is not a socialist takeover of their lives. He will get a precious few weeks wherein Michael Moore is not clogging up the airwaves with his caricature of Middle American GOP fears. A conspiratorial mind might even wonder of Miss Winfrey is slyly doing her old pal on Pennsylvania Ave. a solid.

But for Moore himself, it turns out, even when you are peddling an attack on the entire economic underpinnings of our civilization, there is no place to get that message out like the couch of the Grande Dame of the Midwest, Our Oprah.

A great number of celebrities have found Twitter is a great way to communicate directly with the public, without filtering by the news media or a record company. In Reznor's case, his fan base consisted of a few too many angry, depressed people to make Twitter a pleasant experience.

It turns out the industrial rocker's fans weren't too happy when he started Twittering about the joys of being in love. And so he warned that he was going quit the Internet: "You are right, I'm not the same person I was in 1994 (and I'm happy about that). Are you?"

Rather than fade away as Dave Matthews seems to be doing, Reznor followed up on his threat by just cold deleting his account sometime within the past few days (he posted as recently as July 17). Which is especially startling since Reznor has been a pioneer in using the internet to distribute his music and connect with fans. He's now discovered that it's possible to connect too closely — and unlike internet fameballers trying to convert online fame into real celebrity, he doesn't have to pretend otherwise.

Mark Wahlberg's Boston dream tough guy project The Fighter has finally found its footing. Jilted since Matt Damon, then Brad Pitt, then Darren Aronofsky dropped out, the film has landed on Christian Bale as costar and David O. Russell as director. The movie, about Boston boxing half-brothers Mickey Ward and Dicky Eklund, will begin production in July. Way to go, Wahlby. [Variety]

Screenwriter Jenny Bicks is one busy broad. After slogging through years of Sex and the City she was stationed on Men in Trees, then wrote the Ellen DeGeneres comedy Mother Nature, is doing a rewrite of pilot Washingtonienne, and has now landed a gig writing the pilot for an HBO project called Modern Love, which, yes is based on the New York Times feature. It's Bicks' first time writing a male lead, so wish her luck! Or, don't. Whichever. [Variety]

Here's America: more people watched the Lifetime Movie Network feature Natalee Holloway—about the Alabama teenager who disappeared in Aruba all those years ago and was most likely sold into white slavery—than have ever watched the net in its 11 year history. 3.2 million people, to be exact. Because everyone can relate to having their high school student daughter snatched or murdered or stolen off into the sea while she's on a chaperoned vacation. Either that, or people are just horrible creatures who point and coo at car accidents and search YouTube for footage of plane crashes and homicide investigations. So, congratulations LMN. You've found your stride. Can't wait for the Molly Bish movie. [Variety]

Just when you thought you'd finally seen the last of her, the Starter Grace may be back on your TV screens, shuffle dancing and mugging for your mild delight. Debra Messing may see her new single-camera comedy series picked up by NBC. Seems like a long time ago that Ned and Stacey got canceled, doesn't it? [THR]

Hm, there may be hope for bloodthirsty voyeuristic America yet. Oprah Winfrey has pulled a Columbine-themed episode of her show, saying it focused too much on the perpetrators of the school massacre, rather than their victims. So, that's regular decent of her I guess. Sucks, though, for Dave Cullen, who wrote a new book called Columbine that is apparently quite good, that he plugged on the never-to-air episode. That's like having a million dollars snatched right out of your hand. [THR]

Jena Malone has joined the cast of Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch!, as has the increasingly-busy Jamie from The Real World: San Diego. Evan Rachel Wood and Emma Stone are, unfortunately, out. [THR]

Photo via Bauer-Griffin

She's already set up an account. Ashton Kutcher, a big Twitter user, is scheduled to appear on the show Friday to talk about Twitter. Ex-dating columnist Julia Allison is trying to recruit other Twitterers for the show. And videoblogger Robert Scoble has posted that Oprah is going to be doing her first tweet.

With so many Internet celebrities on board, how can it not be happening?

From what we can gather, it involves consuming a variety of birds, followed by large quantities of cheese, topped off with unlimited desserts, and all washed down with a bucket of rendered duck fat. We mean, Mario (that's Batali, celebrity chef and her Spain...on the Road Again co-star, stupids) will tell you how much she eats. Trust her. It's tons. And how does she keep off the weight? Easy—by not thinking about her weight. It's that simple.

Until this moment, God bless her, Oprah had been keeping it together by chanting the word "OK" after every hateful word to spill from the corners of Paltrow's gravy-saturated mouth. But this—this "denial diet," this "positive psychic body reinforcement" or whatever you wanted to call it, was too much to bear. A quick neck-swiping was all it took for all the cameras in the studio to switch off, at which point the audience respectfully looked away as Winfrey launched herself at her guest with the strength and fury of ten life-fulfillment gurus denied adult-sized fried chicken portions for far too long. [Oprah]

Sadly, Oprah's favorite cleric never got the memo, and thus, his rejoinder to a self-effacing Oprah monologue about her weight was to imply she was a couch potato. Though Oprah pretended not to hear (criticism does not penetrate her aura, only affirmation and jellybeans), we fear for Dr. Oz; when Gayle goes in for the after-show hug while hiding a loaded Walther PPK inside her sensible J.Jill peacoat, he can't say he wasn't warned. [Oprah]

An explosive National Enquirer exclusive features excerpts from a book written by Randolph Cook—an alleged ex-lover of Oprah Winfrey—in which he claims his esophageal cancer was caused by countless romantic nights smoking crack with Oprah in the 1980s. [Ed. note: Smoking crack can do that? Fuck.]

They detail how he became a card-carrying member of Oprah's Rock Club:

Cook, 51, also claims the media mogul taught him how to smoke crack cocaine, and the two "freebased" the drug regularly during their passionate six-month romance and the talk show titan "was still under the influence while doing her show." ... Court papers back up Cook's shocking drug allegations about Oprah!

The document, titled "Defendant Oprah Winfrey's Answer to Plaintiff's Amended Complaint At Law," reveals: "Defendant admits that she and Cook had sexual relations." And it also says: "Defendant admits that Cook used cocaine in her presence and that she used cocaine while Cook was present."

According to the Enquirer's story, Oprah had already admitted to audiences that she had tried the drug in the '70s. These new freebasing allegations, however, suggest the unthinkable: That the talk show host was high on synthetic potato crisp crack as she was beamed into millions of U.S. homes. If there's even a puff of truth to this, we can only hope she's long since overcome her addiction—as the last thing we need to find in our mailbox is an all-crack-themed issue of O touting, "THE TIME IS NOW: GET THE MOST OUT OF EVERY HIT," and "ARE YOU AN EMOTIONAL CRACKER? TAKE OUR QUIZ."

• OPRAH SECRET LOVER TELL- ALL SEX & CRACK COCAINE BINGES [Nat'l Enq.]

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]

Is she grappling with the idea itself, who's saying it, or the notion that a black mama somewhere named her boy "Sedrick"? Sedrick, who dialed into the show via Skype, merely blinks as Oprah's preachermen guests declare the giftiness of his gayhood. And then he says he has a "renewed vision." Presumably from the tears distributed over his cornea by the blinking.

From Broadcasting & Cable: "Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films and HBO have inked a multiyear deal to develop and produce scripted programming for the pay cable network. Potential projects include series, miniseries, movies and documentaries."

We can't wait for Dr. Oz to bare more than just his upper arms, or for Nate to respond to a homeowner's query, "Isn't that taupe-colored living room kind of boring?" with a terse "Fuck no." [Broadcasting & Cable]