Beloved comic actor and man-bro Paul Rudd proved once again that "the chillest dude" isn't just a movie role to him—it's a way of life. Okay, pregnant couple: You want a supporting actor from Knocked Up to announce your impending baby to the world? You got Paul Rudd! He doesn't mind one bit.

From writer/director/co-producer/key grip/ferret handler Judd Apatow comes This Is 40 — the highly (?) anticipated (?) sequel to 2007's Knocked Up.

Just in case you feared the giant swell in her belly was a tumor, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has finally confirmed her pregnancy. The French first lady and anal play enthusiast says she doesn't know the gender, and did not specify how many months along she is. Tabloids speculate her fetus is a week or two shy of six months. I'm not sure how they reached such a specific date, but suspect it had something to do with a hacked cellphone hidden under a mattress. Unless Nicolas Sarkozy's sympathy bump gave it away. [People, image via Getty]

This movie is an insult to the mouth-breathers who enjoyed "Epic Movie." The trailer for "The 40 Year Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It," is worse than you can possibly imagine. (NSFW)

So this Italian-American advocacy group, right? It says to MTV: "Hey, I think your show 'Jersey Shore' is racist against Italians." And MTV says, "Oh yeah? Why don't you come over and talk to one of our stars about this?"

Via the Copyranter blog, we bring you this ingenious, if kind of gross, marketing effort for an upcoming showing of Knocked Up on New Zealand TV. It mounts a living, breathing recreation of a sperm's penetration of the oocyte using a diorama incorporating tadpoles and a fish food-stuffed egg-sponge. And while we'd hate to see what kind of baby results from sperms that look like that, we do think this adverquarium could have a lengthy second life as a handy visual learning aid for Sarah Palin, available to wheel out every time she needs to explain to the American public when life precisely begins. Click the thumbnail to view the marvels of science at full size.

Judd Apatow's comedy-godfather status isn't quite translating overseas, The New York Times noted in a probing piece on Sunday. While the filmmaker-producer looks set for a late-summer spike in the States with the upcoming Step Brothers and Pineapple Express, his signature blend of pop-culture refraction and infantile male bonding has come to symbolize American cinema's rut in Europe and Asia. For disappointing starters, we hear France and South Korea have developed interests of their own outside our sex-and-drug romps, piling panic on top of panic as the dollar crashes and the world turns its back on Genius:

Katherine Heigl, so likable for those precious few days after Knocked Up, continues to encourage us to hate her. First the Grey’s Anatomy star publicly criticized Knocked Up in a Vanity Fair interview, saying that the film “paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight.” Whether that’s true or not (I think it might be), it read as pissy and ungrateful. It was an insight best left out of a national magazine. Then she appeared to be a bossy and demanding friend in a video of her and bestie/Grey’s Anatomy costar T.R. Knight. And now the Emmy-winner has declined to enter herself in this year’s Emmy race because she feels her material on Grey’s was just not up to snuff.

We've been poking fun at Katherine Heigl for months now, and with good reason: she just can't stop saying the darndest things about her emasculated husband Joshua Kelley, she is completely lacking gaydar ... frankly, this list could go on for hours. But after hearing the news that Heigl is pushing for an escape from the ratings-challenged Grey's Anatomy following a fiscally successful contract renegotiation later made public, we're inching towards Team Heigl for the first time. As a source tells MSNBC:

If you observe Judd Apatow's pervy rom-com assembly line with even casual frequency, you probably don't need a Wikipedia entry to remind you how accusations of sexism and misogyny have plagued the writer-producer-director over the years. At least we hope you don't, because an eagle-eyed Defamer reader points out this morning how a loyal defender / relative / Universal publicist has spent the better part of the last week expunging the dirty little non-secret from the Wiki record. From Katherine Heigl to Mike White, follow the jump for a few of the latest line edits.

New York Times rich people beat reporter, billionaire-marrier, possible orgy enthusiast, and over-sharing plastic surgery addict Alex Kuczynski is expecting! Expecting a surrogate mother to carry and deliver her baby, that is, according to Liz Smith. Alex and her ridiculously wealthy (and ripped) husband Charles Stevenson have reportedly tried "several times" at this child-having thing, to no avail. Stevenson has five children from other women, a set-up the Kucz has commented on with approval on other occasions. (All you have to do is cheer them on at graduation—no weight gain or unseemly marks or scars!) So, we ask you, the Gawker readership: who on Earth is currently feeding and growing the spawn of the Amazing Plastic Woman?

This year's Oscar nominations produced an equally noteworthy list of omissions who'll be quietly turned away at the Kodak Theater doors, should a ceremony ever materialize. (Tazering to follow if they get insistent.) Our analysis of the 2008 Snubees:

Right off the bat, let's get something straight. We are ALL for pre-marital sex. In fact, if pre-marital sex didn't exist, well ... we don't even want to think about a world where pre-marital sex doesn't exist. But really (and we ask this out of curiousity more than anything else), does anyone else find Hollywood's recent spate of high profile out-of-wedlock baby announcements the least bit peculiar? We know the WGA strike has freed up a lot of time for a lot of us, but that doesn't explain why notoriously toxic bachelors like David Spade and Matthew McConaughey decided to throw caution (and their condoms) to the wind. So then, what can we attribute this (sorta joyous!) news to? As with most of ills permeating our society these days, we're gonna place the blame squarely on the shoulders of Juno.

Unlike Judd Apatow's last movie, which was hailed by 40-year-old virgins the world over as being the first sensitive portrayal of their shared predicament ever committed to screen, Knocked Up was less embraced by potential knocked-uppees, who felt the female lead had greatly settled for a less-than-ideal lot in life. Star Katherine Heigl addressed her misgivings with some of her character's choices in a recent Vanity Fair, a statement that sparked much debate, and one that she now feels the need to qualify:

A Vanity Fair quote in which Katherine Heigl dared to offer her honest, not-entirely-glowing assessment of the movie credited with graduating her to full-fledged stardom instantly became the source of much debate: One faction—let's just call them the "Apatow loyalists," cried, "Katherine Heigl can't say those things! Who does Katherine Heigl think she is? Doesn't Katherine Heigl know Knocked Up made her, and Knocked Up can just as easily destroy her?," while the other—let's just call them "women"—simply replied, "You go, girl behind the questionably motivated character written so as to service the whims of a very peniscentric screenplay!" New York magazine's Vulture blog approached the film's lauded writer-director for his own take:

"I think the characters [in 'Knocked Up'] are sexist at times, but it's really about immature people who are afraid of women and relationships and learn to grow up. If people say that the characters are sexist, I say, yeah, that's what I was going for in the first part of the movie, and then they change," director Judd Apatow told New York mag's Vulture blog. Okay but that's kind of besides the point because 'Knocked Up,' is so fully sexist, not because its male characters say immature and demeaning things about women, but because all the women in it are portrayed as one-note, unfunny, vain, self-absorbed hormonal crazies. It's also a hilarious movie, so you know, whatever.

If you're one of those Knocked Up audience members whose bullshit-sensing adrenal glands went haywire watching Judd Apatow's blockbuster paean to chubby, jobless, weed-huffing types and the attractive, upwardly mobile women who drop everything to carry their accidentally conceived children to term, then you are not alone, as even the actress called upon to bring such an improbable scenario to life has expressed her own misgivings about taking the role in the current issue of Vanity Fair:

In what is quickly escalating into a bitter, Riggs vs. King-esque volley played out on the cement courts of the media—first Deadline Hollywood Daily claimed Warner Bros. president of production Jeff Robinov was scrawling "DEEP TURNAROUND" in pink hi-liter on any project with a female lead, then Robinov fights back by listing every chick-flick he's ever made, will make, or hopes to remake for Variety—now Salon enters the fray, assembling an impressive panel of industry women to weigh in on the state of the Hollywood sexes. While the discussion takes several interesting turns, we join them in the midst of a lively debate over the feminist merits of beauty-and-the-schlub megahit Knocked Up:

Bad news for randy college co-eds: Drug companies have stopped selling subsidized contraceptives to universities. Who's at fault? The government, of course!

The celebrity nude scene website MrSkin.com has seen a bump in traffic since it was featured in Knocked Up, and its CEO tells the Times that "when he scanned subscribers' e-mail addresses, 'I see '.gov' and '.edus' all the time," the e-mail domains for governmental agencies and post-secondary schools. "But it is an R-rated site, not a porn site, so hopefully men aren't too embarrassed to tell their wives.'" [NYT]