The parents of students at the Lycée Français de New York have had to be restrained by their own schmancy school, the Observer tells us; it seems they lose it a bit in the presence of new fellow parents Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. The school's memo to parents: "Regretfully, I have seen some parents taking pictures, asking for autographs, talking to the media and even shouting at Ms. Jolie and Mr. Pitt for recognition." That is so uncouth! Everyone knows that New Yorkers are too cool to pay attention to celebrities. God, what is this, L.A.? Their poor child Maddox is apparently so troubled by Manhattanites' celebrity obsessions that when he and his fellow kindergartners were asked to bring in a picture of themselves, he started crying. Do you see what you terrible New Yorkers have done to him now, by forcing him into the limelight and also by selling those pictures of him to People magazine?

• The 'Hills' star dishes about the 'thoughts' that crossed her 'mind' right before her breast augmentation and rhinoplasty surgery: "Right before I went in, I was like, What if I don't wake up? Oh, this is scary. Then I thought, I don't care. If I don't wake up, it's worth it. I just wanted it so badly." [Us Weekly]
  

· In addition to providing entertaining footage of drunk chicks puking on Hollywood sidewalks, last night's TMZ TV debut blew the lid off what Maddox Jolie might be eating for lunch at his fancy-pants school.
· Learn more about Leave Britney Alone Guy, whose YouTube clip is rapidly approaching a million views and has inspired a new fragrance.
· Rosie O'Donnell thinks it's time for someone to grab a throw pillow from The View's sofa and hold it over a napping Barbara Walters' face until she slips off into retirement.
· K-Fed: This acting stuff is dope, yo.

[Note: video possibly NSFW] The release of the red-band trailer for Beowulf finally provides a promising demonstration of the powerful motion-capture technology director Robert Zemeckis has been trying to perfect over the last handful of years. While earlier versions of his moviemaking technique were able to produce nothing more impressive than disturbingly dead-eyed, animated children in The Polar Express and somewhat less disturbingly dead-eyed, animated children in Monster House, the director's mainframes can now generate computer-enhanced images of a naked, golden Angelina Jolie so compellingly lifelike that audiences will momentarily forget about all the fantasy-destroying, do-gooding baggage she's accumulated since acquiring her debilitating orphan-collecting addiction.

· Corey Haim's off again, on again appearance in the direct-to-video sequel to The Lost Boys is looking to be off again. Prepare for waterworks.
· You: "Asian Girl over 18 bleached Blond." Him: "FAMOUS." It's a match made in heaven!
· "I have come to Syria and Iraq to help draw attention to the humanitarian crisis and to urge governments to increase their support for UNHCR and its partners." That's fine and dandy, Angelina, but when are you going to tape a YouTube message with helpful tips for pronouncing Nouri al-Maliki?
· A cornucopia of those animated TV logos from the '70s and '80s.
· Ang Lee's latest film is listed by the Venice International Film Festival as coming from "Taiwan, China," and thus a political controversy is born. Brokeback Mountain was a gay cakewalk compared to this mess.

One set of celebrity children who will likely never stare back at you from underneath a magazine headline reading HELP! is Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's multicultural brood—unless, of course, the story in question seeks to expose how the doting parents are suffocating their orphan collection with too much love. The new issue of Life & Style boasts 10! pages! of exclusive! pics of the weekend-long celebration of Maddox's sixth year, which no less a source than Brad himself is said to have declared the tyke's "best birthday ever."

Since you're nothing in this world unless your likeness can be crushed onto an envelope with someone's dirty thumb, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie — this actor couple with some kids; you may have run across them once — must be incredibly relieved that their star status is now fully legitimized.

We realize with all the DUI and coke-in-pants excitement of recent days, it's all too easy to lose track of Hollywood's less selfish and better-adjusted luminaries. For example, we failed to investigate what the world's most famous orphan-collecting, bee-stung-lipped beauty, her aging pretty-boy lover, and their multi-ethnic brood did over their summer vacation. Thanks to the indiscretion of a French amusement center owner, however, the details of their afternoon bowling and air hockey adventures remain a mystery no longer:

This is so surely wrong—particularly as wire photos just showed the couple plus kids getting off a plane in southern France—but some Spanish-language MSN weirdness we've never heard of is claiming Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are separating. Our rudimentary high school Spanish, plus Babelfish, gives us this:

Forbes.com's Slideshows of the Rich and Famous series continues with their gallery of "The Most Expensive Celebrity Photos," featuring some of the largest sums ever lavished by gossip weeklies upon celebrities in exchange for the photo-exclusives to the milestone moments of their lives (first natural child, third adopted child, first European fairy tale wedding, last photo of deceased son, etc.). Pictured, Jolie-Pitt all-access chronicler People magazine pays a cool $2 million for touching photos of mother and newly abducted/rechristened family addition Pax Thien, a fee tied Dannielynn paternity sweepstakes winner Larry Birkhead for the first pictures of proud dad holding his darling bundle of cash joy.

From the mailbag: "The amazing thing about Angelina Jolie is, if you read her filmography, she's never been in a single movie of consequence. You can be completely literate in American movie pop culture and American film culture without ever having seen an Angelina Jolie film. I mean, you've seen the TV commercials for Mr. and Mrs. Smith, you're all set." [IMDB]

The Associated Press reports that the Nielsen measurement service will change the way it tracks online viewing habits.

· Paramount Vantage just can't win with A Mighty Heart: They curl Angelina Jolie's hair and slather her in bronzer so she seems less Caucasian-y, and they catch shit. They invite the Council on American-Islamic Relations to co-sponsor a panel discussion on religious tolerance, and a Jewish activist likens it to "David Duke co-sponsoring 'Schindler's List.'" At least Jolie isn't pissing off reporters by asking them to sign waivers demanding they don't ask questions about her personal life, because they hardly need another headache. [Variety]
· On the bright side, Jolie's performance in the movie is already generating Oscar buzz. [THR]
· Exec VP of corporate communications Janet Hill is leaving Paramount after two eventful years of throwing herself upon the steady stream of hand-grenades lobbed at frequently embattled Paramount emperor Brad Grey. [Variety]
· TBS buys the rerun rights to My Name is Earl and The Office, reportedly paying $600k-$700k per episode of each series. [Variety]
· Fox hires former NUTS executive Laura Lancaster as head of drama development, giving her the mandate, "Please, for the love of fucking God—and we don't care how you do it—find us a show that will last longer than Drive." [Variety]

"This picture brings up a lot of things about portraiture", says Director of Photography Amy Steigbigel. "It's a collaboration between photographer and subject. Who decided she was going to be blindfolded, how was this choice made? There is mystery associated with Angelina Jolie. Why is she wearing that blindfold? What is the meaning of that blindfold? It creates conflict right off the bat."

Taking aim at the celebrity profile in general—and Tom Junod's "cringe-inducing" Esquire story about Angelina Jolie in specific—Slate's Ron Rosenbaum unloads with both barrels.

• Christina Aguilera might be enceinte! Her theoretical zygote can have playdates with Nicole Richie's maybe-fetus! [Page Six]
  

On the occasion of the birth of her third child, we at Defamer would like to offer an apology to Julia Roberts, for we've been so consumed with one-time dabbler in biological reproduction Angelina Jolie's every orphan-collecting whim that we've allowed ourselves to fall tragically out of touch with the Most Powerful Womb in Hollywood, forgetting that Roberts was even pregnant. This oversight on our part is especially embarrassing, as Roberts, unlike Jolie, has never publicly commented on the overprivileged blobbiness of her "real" children or used the press to work through any complicated feelings about the difficult decision to choose her empty uterus over crowded Third World orphanages, a noble commitment to privacy that deserves far more media attention than it currently receives. We promise to do better with the next pregnancy, assiduously tracking it with our finest gigantic red arrows from the earliest Us Weekly baby-bump to eventual exclusive People announcement of its healthy birth weight.

Angelina Jolie went on The Daily Show last night to talk about her new movie, A Mighty Heart. Jolie addressed the recent exclusion of Fox News from her - yeah, you know what, we don't care either! We just want to know how many more lucky tykes from the Third World are going to join the crew. Host Jon Stewart obliges by asking the question, but chooses a rather unfortunate term to describe her brood. Memo to Brad Pitt: We know you're "waiting for the gays" before you put a ring on that finger, but sack up: They're talking about your kids.

Asra Nomani, the former Wall Street Journal reporter who's the "supporting character" in "A Mighty Heart," the Angelina Jolie film about journalists Danny and Marianne Pearl and Danny's murder in Pakistan, helped out on making the picture true to life. She made sure the cast even got the right notebooks that she and Danny used. But when she saw the glittery press photos out of the film's premiere at Cannes, she had a "duh" moment. The marketing, the PR, the celebrities: All of it was absolutely the antithesis of Danny, she realized. The studio publicists brought a screener of the film to her house in West Virginia: the on-screen Danny just looked so flat. So in an email to a producer of the film early this month, Nomani wrote: "I'm not going to be attending the premiere because, upon reflection, I just don't believe in the movie and the mythology of its marketing and PR campaign."

Today, Angelina Jolie's people responded to the brouhaha over the restrictive contract they'd given news outlets to sign before Jolie would agree to be interviewed on the red carpet at the premiere of her new film A Mighty Heart. When most news outlets refused to sign (and Roger Friedman got all indignant that Fox allegedly hasn't been invited), the damage control began. From the Times: "Ms. Jolie's lawyer, Robert Offer, said that the statement was the fault of a 'bone-headed, overzealous lawyer'—meaning himself—and that his client was unaware of the move." That's very nice of Robert Offer to take the blame; Jolie refused to comment. But a source tells us there's almost no way Jolie could not have signed off on the contract.