Mumford & Sons yesterday released the music video for "Hopeless Wanderer," the latest single off their second studio album Babel, and it has everything you could ever want in a music video: Jason Sudeikis, Jason Bateman, Will Forte and Ed Helms.

· Oscars web traffic is expected to be higher than ever this year—possibly even higher than the TV ratings themselves. Why? We're suspecting it has everything to do with convenient, private access to Helen Mirren's rack. [NYT]
· Babel and The Departed tied for this year's Eddie—the American Cinema Editors award. The Eddies anticipated Crash's Oscar win last year, so when Babel and The Departed tie for Best Picture this year, don't say they didn't tell you so! [Gold Derby]
· Emmanuel Lubezki won the top feature honors for his work on Children of Men at the 21st Annual American Society of Cinematographers' Outstanding Achievement Awards. The ceremony itself took Longest Name at the Guild Award Awards. [Variety]
· With still no clear favorite in the Best Picture race, campaigning has reached a "fever pitch," with every movie adopting their own tagline, including Little Miss Sunshine's catchy, "No movie featuring a heroin-OD'd grandpa in a trunk moved you more." [LAT]
· The Cinema Audio Mixing Society, comprised of "550 sound mixers and associates in the film and TV industries," awarded Dreamgirls its top award for excellence in bringing Jennifer Hudson's heffer-lunged belting down to the same levels as her co-stars. [THR]

· The Academy has finally caught wind of the blogowebs, and they'll just as soon set their petticoats on fire than let Oscarwatch.com confuse readers who might be searching for the official Oscar® blog that updates once every couple of weeks. [The Envelope, Oscarwatch]
· More tidbits from this year's Oscar luncheon: A record 139 nominees showed up, Peter O'Toole got a standing ovation, and the entire cast of Babel can be clearly seen giving the shocker in the class portrait. [Variety]
· The Secret Black Oscars, which Forest Whitaker hinted at in a Newsweek interview, is "not a protest or a statement," he told a reporter at the luncheon. [Reuters]
· 19-time Oscar-nominated bridesmaid Kevin O'Connell, a sound mixer once again recognized for his work on Apocalypto, told fellow nominees never to give up: "I've saved all my acceptance speeches, all the ones I've written on the backs of napkins and programs. They are all in a drawer at home." Martin Scorsese smiled and nodded his head as he listened politely, then leaned over to Mark Wahlberg to whisper, "Do me a favor. If I become that guy, shoot me in the back of the head, will you?" [Hello]
· Thank you BBC, for bothering to report what they actually lunched on: "They dined on a menu of smoked salmon canape with dill mousse, Italian herb marinated breast of chicken and sorbets in a chocolate cup." As Abigail Breslin dove into the final course, Greg Kinnear leaned towards his Little Miss Sunshine co-star to warn her that the frozen dessert will make her too fat to win on Oscar night. [BBC]

According to a press release that just landed in our inbox (which confirms this earlier Slate story), it seems that the Academy's Executive Committee on Whether Or Not To Ignore All These Annoying Recommendation Letters About Why Brad Grey Deserves To Get A Producing Credit On The Departed has finally ruled on the Paramount emperor's appeal to get a piece of the Warner Bros.' film's Oscar glory, deciding to crush Grey's "uncouth and distasteful" double-nomination dreams. Even though he's now freed from the embarrassing possibility of having to brush by his own defeated Babel crew on his way to deliver a potential victory speech for a competitor's movie, he should still spend some time practicing suppressing the politically ill-advised urge to point to himself and mouth, "That's my movie, assholes," should the camera pan to him following the annoucement of a Departed Best Picture win.

When the ominous words "nominees to be determined" accompanied the announcement of The Departed's nomination for Best Picture, industry tongues reflexively clicked, heads were gravely shaken in disapproval, and the eyes of vulnerable children were shielded as if in the presence of a well-endowed drifter who unexpectedly exposed himself near a grade-school crosswalk, for it seemed clear that Paramount emperor Brad Grey had appealed the Academy for a producer credit on the film of rival studio Warner Bros (a credit recently denied by the Producers Guild), a prideful sin compounded by the fact that his own studio's Babel is also in the race for the shiniest Oscar of them all. Today's LAT reports that Academy officials are keeping quiet on the matter of Grey's presumed petition, unconvincingly asserting that they have no idea why their fax machine has recently been clogged with missives from esteemed members of the Hollywood community noting that, "For like an entire year, Brad just wouldn't shut up about how much time he spent producing this Departed thing":

Hollywood's Christmas Morning is finally here, the time when eager Oscar hopefuls rise at an obscenely early hour, rush downstairs in their footie pajamas, and hope to find the previous year's good career behavior validated with lovingly wrapped awards nominations left under the Academy's gilded tree; those deemed good enough for recognition spend the day fielding phone calls from the media, who ask difficult questions about how it feels to be on the receiving end of the golden shower of adoration offered by one's peers (invariably, it feels good! And it's an honor just to be nominated!), while the snubbed quickly retreat back up the stairs to their bedrooms, where they self-medicate their soul-crushing disappointment by swallowing handfuls of prescription painkillers, sobbing through their publicist's assurances that they're still so very, very pretty, and that in this day of the YouTubes, no one watches the Oscars anyway.

Obviously looking to stir up some trouble, an anonymous tipster dropped us this note about the conspicuous table-hopping activities of Paramount emperor Brad Grey, whose various fiefdoms came away with awards for Dreamgirls and Babel:

Because it's never too late to start your Oscar pool prognosticating—especially with the all-important Canadian take to factor in—we offer another year-end awards season round-up:
· The Toronto Film Critics Association chooses to give its big prize to the woman who still appears on much of their local, bird-covered currency, The Queen, with Helen Mirren, Michael Sheen (who plays Tony Blair) and screenwriter Peter Morgan also getting nods. Just to show they aren't entirely Commonwealth monarchist snobs, Sacha Baron Cohen wins best actor for his teabagging-related work in Borat. [Variety]
· The Chicago Film Critics Association Awards announced their nominees, with Babel leading the pack at nine (including one for Brad Pitt, bringing us one step closer to those magic words, "Oscar Winner Mr. Angelina Jolie"), with The Departed and The Queen pulling in six apiece. Little Miss Sunshine and United 93 round out the best picture category. [Chicago Tribune]
· What would happen if Oscar campaigning took a cue from politics and went negative? Probably full-page Variety ads reading, "It's simple: You're either a racist who approves of gay cowboy marriage, or you think Crash was this year's Best Picture. The choice is yours." [The Envelope]

· A distribution of nominations according to studio puts Paramount Pictures at the head of the pack with 15, not including Paramount Vantage's 7 for Babel. You can bet the hugs were flying at Vantage today! [GoldDerby]
· If you caught a replay of the nomination announcements this morning (or, heavens forfend, actually woke up to watch them), then you probably caught an ethereal Jessica Biel's shimmering cascade of giggles as she twice had to read the words Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. You then fell back to Earth with a thud when permanent grouch-face Matthew Perry approached the podium to cough up his list of nominees. [Reuters]
· Nominee quote orgy! The Gloater: "I'm just going to sit and bask in people's envy." -Justin Kirk. The Anhedonic: "Our film is really about enjoying the experience of life...and not getting caught up in the contest." -Jonathan Dayton, co-director, Little Miss Sunshine. The Liar: "It is a privilege to be mentioned in the same breath with actors like...Will Smith..." -Leonardo DiCaprio. [AP]
· Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry describes the typical writers' room post nomination announcement celebration: "I will probably toast my writing staff with Diet Coke and we'll spend about 10 minutes talking about it and then we'll just jump back into work," putting their celebration at roughly five times the duration of the one Teri Hatcher and Eva Longoria have planned for their nominated co-stars, Marcia Cross and Felicity Huffman. [AP]

With no Golden Globes story line as compelling as last year's tension over whether or not the Hollywood Foreign Press Association would pit Heath Ledger's mumble-mouthed rancher against Jake Gyllenhaal's dreamy-eyed-yet-mercurial cowpoke (or, more accurately, "sheep-poke") bottom, we suppose we'll have to settle for the one you're going to be reading about all day: the double nominations of Clint Eastwood in the directing category (for both of his World War II movies) and Leonardo DiCaprio's dual Best Actor nods for The Departed and Blood Diamond. For those so inclined, squeezing one's eyes shut and imagining the steamy Leo-on-Leo action of DiCaprio's Boston cop and South African smuggler wrestling over the gilded Globe statue while grunting in passable Southie and Afrikaner accents might fill the erotic void left by the celebrated gay cowboys. In other multiple nominations news, Helen Mirren was recognized for playing both Elizabeth I in a TV miniseries and Elizabeth II in The Queen, an achievement that we genuinely hope you won't use to concoct transgressive, cross-generational fantasies that sully the monarchy. Leave the queens alone, sicky.

We here at Defamer love the holiday season for no other reason than the bounty of movie critics' year-end lists and awards it brings us, like decrees handed down from on high from our pull-quote producing, thumb-direction-assigning cinematic sages. The Broadcast Film Critics Association adds another layer of intrigue to the process, dragging things out heightening the suspense by first releasing a list of nominees in every category, and later announcing the winners at the E!-broadcast Critics' Choice Awards—a mini-Oscars, as it were, only with the added feature of having Ryan Seacrest backstage to helpfully offer select Best Actor and Supporting Actor nominees stress-relieving lower back rubs. A partial list of the nominees, from The Envelope:

Sometimes, the pressures of working on a Big Important Picture get to be just a little too much; it then falls to the star to help loosen the mood of a challenging production, using anything and everything at their disposal to raise the spirits of cast and crew. And while George Clooney is considered a master of the genre, concocting elaborate ruses that can take months to unfold, his frequent Oceans co-star Brad Pitt tends to go for the easier laugh: