We hope 2012 is enjoying its 15 minutes. Sure the movie had a humongous weekend at the box office, but even a Mayan-prophesied can not withstand an assault by a certain group of of teenage vampires.

Hollywood's power list got a little more diffuse Monday when Diablo Cody, Marion Cotillard, Judd Apatow and Sacha Baron Cohen were among 105 new invitees to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The number is the lowest since 2004, when the Academy instituted its "Riff-Raff Rule" limiting the annual invitee total to 137; that said, we're not sure what kind of internal politics and/or pledge drives would necessitate inviting Michael Haneke and Jet Li to assume even 1/6000th of the Oscar vote. Follow the jump for more of this year's celebrated AMPAS Cub Club!

· Renee Zellweger will star with Viggo Mortensen and Ed Harris in the western Appaloosa, which we hope will provide ample opportunity for a spunky, bonnet-rocking Zellweger to fire a shotgun and exclaim, "You git outta my town, ya hear?" in the direction of the movie's "renegade rancher" antagonist. We love it when she does period gritty. [Variety]
· Fox's apocalypse-quickening reality TV guru Mike Darnell consolidates his power within the network by signing a new multiyear deal, officially giving him more autonomy to launch unscripted programming without the interference of other executives who believe that shows like Are You Smarter Than This Recent Massive Head Trauma Victim? might push the envelope a little too far. [THR]
· New Line's Russell Schwartz is ankling as the studio's head of marketing. We just hope that his replacement demonstrates a similar level of vision that will allow future, groundbreaking online promotions involving the performance of virtual cunnilingus on their movie heroes' wives. [Variety]
· Local news icon Hal Fishman, KTLA's anchor of more than 30 years, dies at 75. [THR]
· AMPAS is banning the mailing of For Your Consideration film score and song CDs, decreeing that the music needs to be evaluated in the context of the movie. Composers and studio music execs have begun the process of formally expressing their outrage, possibly by the mass burning of FYC screenplays in protest of the "out of context" principle that might limit voter access to their work. [Variety]

Var reports that the Academy has officially demanded the immediate removal of all unauthorized clips from Sunday night's Oscars telecast from the YouTubes, dealing a severe blow to modern-dance fans wishing to experience Pilobolus' kinetic, silhouetted interpretations of popular films over and over again. The purge has already claimed the racy footage of Clint Eastwood's wife's now-infamous crotch-swipe, and we suspect it won't be long before the joint YouTube/AMPAS copyright task force removes the historical record of our new favorite Oscar moment: when triumphant Best Foreign Language Film director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck taunts vanquished frontrunner Guillermo del Toro by wiping his hindquarters upon the back of the Pan's Labyrinth also-ran's head.

Today's NY Times updates us on the progress of the ongoing legal feud between producer Bob Yari, the Crash producer suing the Academy for denying him the opportunity to take the stage after the film's Best Picture win last year and bask in his share of the heavy-handed racism fable's Oscar glory by emotionally declaring, "Tonight, I won't need to drive my SUV into the side of a van full of illegal Chinese immigrants just to feel something," and the whole fucking system trying to keep renegade, studio-eschewing producers like him down, sharing with the world excerpts from an e-mail exchange between Yari's camp and a defiant Bruce Davis, executive director of AMPAS, who says that Yari can pry his next Governors Ball invite from his cold, dead hands:

During this holiday season, Defamer is committed to giving a voice to readers wishing to blow the whistle on the mirth-killing party practices of their employers, whose exclusionary invitation policies, Scroogey alcohol-consumption-throttling mechanisms, or other generalized Grinchery threaten to make staffers forget what end-of-year events are all about: getting drunk enough to forget the pain of the past 12 months (and, hopefully, to have an ill-advised, spiked-eggnog-fueled tryst with a co-worker in a darkened hallway). An anonymous AMPAS worker files this report about the Academy's upcoming Christmas bash: