Feeling bad for the museum, the Hollywood Foreign Press Time Warner Cable (who's teamed up with Ovation TV) have looked within their entertainment-loving hearts and are each donating give the museum $75,000 to keep the 40-year old program alive. And, as if that's not enough, Time Warner and Ovation are spending $1.5 million to market the program to the masses.

For its part, the Hollywood Foreign Press was "persuaded" by an open letter penned by Martin Scorsese.

So, rest easy, for the program's safe — well, for now: museum officials say they have enough money to last through the 2010 fiscal year. After that? Who knows...

Image via pedrosimoes7's flickr.

Ensnared in a vicious battle over 23 cents per customer, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Daily Show, South Park and the rest of Viacom's cable offerings may vanish tonight for 13 million Time Warner subscribers.

When the ball drops at midnight in Times Square, so has Viacom pledged to yank the plug on 19 channels along the TWC system if the cable provider doesn't re-up its contract with a $35.9 million increase in its carriage fee. The bump amounts to 23 cents per Time Warner subscriber, which Viacom says is a long-overdue remedy to the carrier undervaluing its content.

We'll say! We've long considered Spike's mind-numbing cocktail of UFC tilts and Late Night Strip to be one of television's finest narcotic bargains, but TWC isn't convinced. Nevertheless, Team Redstone clearly intends to win its battle for your quarter, waving fierce numbers at the AP ("Americans spend a fifth of their TV time watching Viacom shows but its fees make up less than 2.5 percent of the Time Warner cable bill") and, according to the Wall Street Journal, launching a media campaign featuring a despondent SpongeBob and Dora the Explorer.

Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, CMT, TV Land and their knock-off subsidiaries would be looped into the strike, with each channel's respective Web site interrupting visitors today with a pop-up ad encouraging them to lobby TWC with an appeal. And why not? New Colbert episodes start next week, and really, who among us has the fortitude to miss the next installment of Bromance on Sunday? Oh. OK, well besides you..

• 'Colbert,' 'SpongeBob' may go dark on Time Warner [AP]