An agreeably spirited piece by Radar Online‘s Shana Ting Lipton about the zen of Hollywood party crashing. It’s not really about crashing the Vanity Fair party at Morton’s, though, except for the tip about dressing like a fire marshall with a tuxedo underneath.

It’s mainly about Rex Reginald, “the self-styled ‘King of the Party Crashers’ who claims that his story outline and party-crashing handbook were co-opted by New Line Cinema when they made the film Wedding Crashers.” (What handbook? There’s no link in Lipton’s piece, it’s not on Google and it’s not being sold on Amazon.) “Gate-crashers in Los Angeles make up an exclusive society that boasts perhaps 50 ‘really elite’ members,” Reginald tells Lipton. “It’s almost like the mafia. You have to be brought in and become a ‘made’ crasher.”

Nikki Finke is also revealing that the Oscar telecast will kick off with “an inspired piece of CGI trickery.” Shocker! The Oscar show has been opening with inspired pieces of CGI trickery for years, since the Billy Crystal hosting days in the mid ’90s. Wait…has there been a year since ’97 when it hasn’t opened with inspired pieces of CGI trickery?

Sticking to form, host Ellen DeGeneres will reportedly be placed into various scenes (presumably those from Best Picture nominees). Obviously Ellen will be CG’d into royal robes of The Queen, if this is in fact the plan. What else? Jack Nicholson sitting down with Ellen at a back-room table and asking who’s the rat? Ellen clasping a hand grenade to her stomach and blowing her intestines all over the walls of an underground cave, a la Letters From Iwo Jima?

Finke says DeGeneres will be seen dancing with the Happy Feet penguins. (Warner Bros., the producer of both Happy Feet and Ellen’s syndicated series, spent “an enormous amount of money to make this happen,” Finke writes, including hiring Happy Feet director George Miller to coordinate.) Let’s see…have we ever seen a big-name TV star dancing with animated penguins before?

Another Nikki Finke Oscar-show spoiler: Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, 60ish graybeards all, will jointly present the Best Director Oscar to Martin Scorsese.

Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke is reporting Seven Oscar-Night Spoilers, the biggest one being that the Best Supporting Actor and Actress awards won’t be presented in the early portion of the show, as they always have. Instead, no acting awards will be given out until the last third of the telecast. The Academy is doing this, Finke understands, because Oscar viewership starts out strong and then wanes, and the only real cliffhanger is Eddie Murphy vs. Alan Arkin.

Please, Movie Gods…please don’t let Murphy win. You’re not pro-active and you don’t interfere as a rule, but you know what’s best and “right” and sometimes you step in and push the button anyway. You gave the Best Director Oscar to Roman Polanski for The Pianist despite a whisper campaign by the Polanski haters… bless you for that. Last year you knew Brokeback Mountain should have won and yet you inexplicably stood by and allowed the homophobic geezer contingent to overrun and conquer. You have to make it up to all of us because of that. Please don’t let a Bad Person win this year….please.

The best thing in N.Y. Times guy David Carr‘s Oscar prediction chart [click on “Juicy Subplots & Other Picks”] is the roundabout suggestion that if and when Little Miss Sunshine wins Best Picture, that the officially nominated producers — David T. Friendly, Peter Saraf and Marc Turtletaub — plus the film’s actual hands-on, Michael Arndt-hiring, Jonathan Dayton-and-Valerie Faris-hiring producers who weren’t nominated because of the Academy’s clumsy and insensitive rule-of-three — Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, of course — “perform a rear-guard action” and appear on-stage together as a quintet, arm-in-arm, all for one and one for all.

In a last-ditch attempt to squeeze intrigue out of a dying Oscar season, Rotten Tomatoes has put up an interactive feature called “The Best of the Best Pictures,” a list of 78 Best Picture Oscar winners ranked by how well-reviewed they are — not at the time of their release but (mostly) based on what today’s critics have written. The worst reviewed is Cecil B. Demille‘s The Greatest Show on Earth. The all-time best reviewed is Francis Copola‘s The Godfather; the second best is Elia Kazan‘s On The Waterfront.

“I know less and less about who I am, or who anyone else is.”

The problem isn’t that Warner Bros. marketers waited too long to start emphasizing Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Best Actor performance in The Departed in trade ads. (It was the problem but no longer, I mean.) The problem is that The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil, composing this comparative piece of art for an article he wrote about Leo’s once-upon-a-time Oscar hopes, didn’t properly tweak the November trade ad so it looks as sharply focused as the December one.

I realize that FORA is an acronym for something, but I don’t know what. (Federation of Ravenous Alpha-Dogs?) Obviously it’s a web TV thing. They sent me an excerpt of Little Miss Sunshine screenwriter Michael Arndt talking about how how and why he was briefly fired off the project. No, wait…there’s an entire program of Arndt talking about everything. You just have to click on it. It’s free to watch. (Apparently.)

In an interview with USA Today‘s Anthony Breznican, the reigning Oscar Night ladies — producer Laura Ziskin and host Ellen DeGeneres — are a study in opposite attitudes and sensibilities. DeGeneres is a brainy, free-associative, improvisational wit. Ziskin wants to be hip and alpha-like, but she sounds like an affluent ooh-lah-lah control freak who’s terrified (or at the very least alarmed) by spontaneity.

The Oscar show, I’ve just realized, is going to be a kind of war between the two. Ziskin will dominate, of course, being the big-shot producer in the control room, but many of us are going to be pulling for DeGeneres to somehow make things a little more loosey-goosey than Ziskin might prefer.

Freewheeling DeGeneres: “I came up with a really fun idea for the end of my monologue that I think is going to set this room off.”

Humorless control-freak Ziskin: “This is the first I’m hearing about it.”

Freewheeling DeGeneres: “I want somebody to do a one-armed pushup. I want somebody to streak.”

Humorless control-freak Ziskin: “Those days are gone.”

Freewheeling DeGeneres: “It’s just that everybody is so body conscious: I would streak, but I’m bloated.’ ”

Humorless control-freak Ziskin: “People are so nervous, so terrified, not just the nominees, but the presenters. She releases us, makes us happy and forget about ourselves.”

Freewheeling DeGeneres: “I didn’t realize that was my job. I’m going to have to change my entire monologue.”

And yet Ziskin says to prepare for a 210-minute running time, minimum. “You get your popcorn and invite your friends over. Or get in bed by yourself or with someone you like, and you wait to see what’s going to happen.”

Freewheeling DeGeneres: “We’re taking all the seats out of the theater, and we’re bringing in beds, popcorn and pajamas. We’ll pair everyone up, real nice.”