The Academy has the full, looong slate of nominees, naturally, but we've narrowed our interests down to 10 easy storylines for our own Emmy dramedy — conveniently outlined after the jump!

1. Mad Men joined Damages as the first basic-cable programs to earn a nomination for best dramatic series. Its 15 other nods led the pack among all nominated dramas, while 30 Rock led all shows with 17 noms.

2. For the last time (literally), the Academy has snubbed The Wire for a dramatic series nomination. Critics at the TCA press tour will be symbolically immolating themselves by lunchtime.

3. In other snubs, FX is wondering this morning who it has to blow to get Denis Leary, Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver back on the list after nominations in 2007. Hint: It might be a bribe-friendly exec at AMC, which scored a kind-of-stunning two dramatic actor nods this year.

4. Silverman, Emmy Darling (Part 1): "I'm Fucking Matt Damon" was nominated for Outstanding Original Music And Lyrics. Silverman's competition is Flight of the Conchords and MADtv. As such, it bears saying aloud: " 'I'm Fucking Matt Damon' is going to win an Emmy."

5. Sarah Silverman, Emmy Darling (Part 2): Denied an actress nod for her own show, she earned a guest actress nomination for her turn as Marci Maven on Monk.

6. Amy Poehler's supporting-actress nod for Saturday Night Live is the first for an SNL actress since Gilda Radner and Jane Curtin were each nominated in 1978. Radner won.

7. There's apparently a formula for earning a few dozen Emmy noms: Just make a loooong historical epic like HBO's John Adams, which pulled in 23 mentions including outstanding miniseries — as Variety notes, the third consecutive year a period miniseries has drawn the year's biggest haul. Awards-bait film stars like Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney — both nominated as well — can't hurt either.

8. Come to think of it, film actresses on cable dominated dramatic categories in general, with four Oscar winners (including Susan Sarandon and Holly Hunter) and three Oscar nominees (Linney, Catherine Keener and Glenn Close) among the ten performers recognized. We presume Sally Field got Katherine Heigl's spot.

9. Speaking of whom, we're guessing ABC had higher hopes for Grey's Anatomy than two supporting-actress nominations and "Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup For A Series, Miniseries, Movie Or A Special."

10. If we must split up the reality and reality-competition categories, surely the Academy can find a way to further separate things like A&E's grueling Intervention from trifles like Extreme Makeover Home Edition and Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List. Really.

• The 60th Annual Emmy Award Nominations [Academy of TV Arts & Sciences]

Fine — except Wright didn't write the scripts. Or did he? And did Simon and Wire collaborator Ed Burns fudge his screenwriting credit on five episodes? According to one report, excerpted after the jump, Wright could be hatching a plan for the forthcoming Generation Kill: 50% More Evan Wright Above The Line special-edition DVD:

Last summer, after HBO cut the series from eight episodes to seven, emails flew back and forth last summer from Baltimore, where Simon lives, to Baghdad, where Wright had returned to report for Rolling Stone. Wright was worried, correctly it turned out, that Simon was about to kill one of his scripts. Simon resolved the matter by giving joint credit to Wright and Burns. Again two months ago Wright had to request further credit in the wake of still more active input, and Simon agreed.

But Simon denies that Wright was responsible for half the scripts with his or Burns' name on them. "If he told you that, he's genuinely incorrect," Simon said this evening, from a screening for Marines in California, where Wright was also in attendance. He added: "Nobody wrote any of the scripts by themselves. There's stuff in Evan's script written by me and Ed. There's stuff written in total by me and Ed. There's stuff in our scripts written by Evan. That's what happens in every serialized show."

The two appear to have reached an amicable agreement, with Wright humbly acknowledging Simon's gracious Kill stewardship in exchange for the opportunity to work in this town again after a mandatory five-year probation. And seeing as that's just about as long as we have left in Iraq, a well-reported follow-up seems like an ideal re-teaming. Glad it worked out, guys.

• Who Really Wrote 'Generation Kill'? [WaxWord]

• 'Generation Kill' [LAT]

boomp3.com

Actor Idris Elba and his publicist would like to inform the general public that while he may have played the character, "Stringer Bell" on the critically acclaimed series, The Wire, his name is actually Idris Elba. Elba and his publicist in the future hope with the aid of this campaign to curtail the number of people shouting "Stringer Bell."

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• EW.com lists the 15 Most Brilliant Moments and manages to find some joy in the ending.
• New York Magazine has exhaustive, point-by-point commentary and a list of unanswered questions.
• The Baltimore Sun, which was heavily (too heavily, perhaps) focused on this season, was unhappy with this "once great" series' finale. Seems they maybe didn't like being depicted as Pulitzer hungry fabulists.
• The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley loved the ambiguity and uncertainty of the series. Oh, and she manages to bizarrely equate The Wire to that show Numb3rs.
• Slate counted down their Top 13 Moments.
• The Onion's AV Club has an interview with David Simon, who talks about his new miniseries Generation Kill, and waxes dramatically about The Wire's connections to Shakespeare, O'Neill, and Chekhov.

Season 1, song: "Step by Step" by Jesse Winchester

Season 2, song: "I Feel Alright" by Steve Earle

Season 3, song: "Fast Train" by Solomon Burke

Season 4, song: "Walk On Gilded Splinters" by Paul Weller

Season 5, song: "Way Down In The Hole" by Blind Boys of Alabama

First, Simon has turned his focus on his former employer, the Baltimore Sun; in newspaper terms, he's too close to the story, and the latest season's parable on the decline of the press, complete with irredeemable journalistic fabricator and empty-souled news executives, is leaden. Maybe the dockers and gangsters of earlier seasons were also less textured than the real Baltimore personalities on which they were based, but they didn't have an outlet for their complaints. Journalists do, and that has colored the reception to The Wire's latest storyline.

There's a deeper problem, which should establish why a feature, even a prequel, is such a bad idea. The saving grace of The Wire was the series' leisurely, meandering, convoluted plotline: Simon had no deadline for his political diatribes; his righteousness never overwhelmed the essential drama of crime and corruption in America's decaying industrial cities. But now the crusading former journalist has only a condensed final season, three episodes shorter than he'd hoped, in which to make all his remaining points, and demand recognition for a show which has never won a major award.

The result: embarrassingly improbable plot points, such as the fake serial killer conjured up by McNulty to shake down the mayor for police funding; absurd caricatures, particularly of journalists (see below); increasingly heavy-handed lectures on the bankruptcy of government, the press, heck, everybody; and a cascade of newspaper columns by Simon as part of the show's last-ditch marketing campaign, belaboring points which viewers should arrive at themselves. It's painful to admit: The Wire's creator has turned into one of those didactic lecturers who simply rattle out the script and raise the volume when they feel the audience slipping away from them, and the clock running out.

David Simon has struggled to compress his concluding remarks into the 10 episodes of the HBO show's fifth run. Imagine how painful it would be for him to fit his morality play into two hours of a feature movie. It would be better for him, and fans of earlier seasons, if he didn't.