1. The nominees for the 54th Annual Grammy Awards have been announced, and Kanye West leads the pack with seven nods; hot on his heels are Adele, Bruno Mars, and the Foo Fighters, who each scored six nominations. View the full list of nominees here.

2. Nicholas Cage’s rare copy of “Action Comics” No. 1 — which was stolen from his house in 2000, and later recovered — has been sold at auction for a record-setting $2.1 million. Knowing Cage, he’s sure to spend the money wisely, perhaps on a second pyramid tomb or another castle. [via MTV]

3. Here is your first look at Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln, snapped while the actor was having some lunch while on location in Richmond, Virginia. Looks like Steven Spielberg made a good choice. There’s a rather striking resemblance, wouldn’t you say?

4. A Colombian court has ruled against Miguel Reyes Palencia, a man who claimed that Gabriel García Márquez used his life story as the inspiration for the main character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and as a result, wanted 50% of the royalties and a co-author credit. [via Guardian]

5. Film critic Roger Ebert says that the recently-revived version of his show At the Movies will be going on an indefinite hiatus in the new year due to financial issues. Funding the project through Kickstarter is one option being considered, but in the meantime Ebert asks, “Please have faith in us as we sort through the possibilities.” [via ArtsBeat]

Bonus Buzz: Modern-Day Garbage Pail Kids

1. John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky (Blades of Glory) are in talks to develop an animated film for Universal that’s based on the classic cartoon character Woody Woodpecker. Do the kids of today even know who he is? [via Slashfilm]

2. Steven Spielberg has decided to widen the focus of his Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which was previously devoted exclusively to the memory of Holocaust survivors, to also include testimonies on other mass killings, including those of Armenians and Cambodians. [via NYT]

3. Jeopardy! contestant Roger Craig recently had the most lucrative game in the show’s history. How’d he do it? With some help from a web app that he developed, and then trained himself on. [via Gawker]

4. NBC has ordered a pilot of Bryan Fuller’s remake of The Munsters; unlike the original show, his version will be “an hour-long series exploring how the monster house came about” and “will have a darker and less campy feel.” [via EW]

5. A few of the tracks that Will Oldham and David Byrne composed for the This Must Be the Place soundtrack — the crazy looking movie where Sean Penn plays a Nazi hunter who looks just like Robert Smith — are now streaming here.

Bonus Buzz: Why Pandas Are Black And White

We’ve made occasional mention of our love for the Fake Criterons tumblr, in which the striking graphics, clever designs, and isolated imagery of that preeminent cinephile line is applied to films that are, for the most part, entirely undeserving of inclusion among that “continuing series of important classic and contemporary films.” But that site has gone above and beyond this month, with their “Faked from the Dead” series, comprised entirely of fake Criterions for 1980s-era horror movies (From their challenge: “Summer camps, creepy basements, old caretakers, guys with improbable masks, dime store psychologists, abandoned insane asylums, broken down cars in the middle of nowhere- all of it”). Their many contributors risen to the occasion, and have created dozens of sharp, funny, and downright ridiculous covers. After the jump, we’ve selected a few of our faves.

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Today at Flavorpill, we almost projectile vomited over a concept photo for real skin stiletto heel implants. We made mental note of TIME’s Halloween costumes that everyone should avoid this year. We were excited to see that Faile is the next artist taking over the Bowery mural space — it will be a nice change of pace from JR. We learned how much money Paula Deen really makes, and for doing what. We wondered who at H&M thought it was a good idea to launch a line of clothes inspired by Lisbeth Salander. We thought it was totally creepy that Muammar Gaddafi had “Libya’s best composer” write Condoleeza Rice a love song, and that it was called “Black Flower in the White House.” We were happy to hear that the lovely Kerry Washington has landed the female lead in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. And finally, we wondered how George Lucas feels about Steven Spielberg’s recent interview with Empire Magazine; even though Spielberg refers to Lucas as his best friend, he also totally throws him under the bus for how much Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sucked.

Today at Flavorpill, we browsed the shelves at the People’s Library of Occupy Wall Street — which recently started its own public readings series. We tried to imagine coming across this giant Lego man while walking along a beach in Florida. We decided that this clever (and fully-functioning!) Nikon camera getup is definitely the most impressive Halloween costume idea we’ve seen so far this year. We were thrilled to hear that the animator behind the unofficial Tintin credits was invited to the film’s premiere and got a job offer from Steven Spielberg. We learned how toothpaste gets made alongside Mr. Rogers. We were happy that AMC has renewed The Walking Dead for a third season. We listened to Patti Smith do a cover of U2′s “Until the End of the World.” We were a tad bit concerned by Burger King’s “all the Whoppers you can eat in 30 minutes” deal in Japan — can you imagine if they did that here in the US? And finally, we printed out a Ron Swanson mask, just to randomly wear it around the office.

Some interesting news from our friends at The Playlist: Peter Jackson has confirmed that following his work on The Hobbit movies, he plans to direct a sequel to The Adventures of Tintin, which begins opening internationally tomorrow. While the fact that he, and not Steven Spielberg, would be the one helming the second film is nothing new, talk of the project had all but petered out recently; now, in the wake of positive critical response, it seems that Jackson is feeling pretty confident that a sequel will really happen.

Good buzz aside, as Spielberg explained to The Hollywood Reporter, nothing is definite yet: “[Sony and Paramount] were willing to do one movie with us and then give us the financial werewithal to develop a script, do all the visual storyboards and get it really in launch position. So we can launch pretty quickly on a second movie. The script is already written.” While we can’t imagine the first film being a total flop given its pedigree, American audiences are notoriously fickle, and Hergé’s Tintin is a more beloved character overseas. Also important to note: regardless of how The Adventures of Tintin performs at the box office, The Hobbit films will keep Jackson busy for the next few years, making any follow-up a distant, if exciting, reality.

1. Word is that Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook is planning to unveil its latest iPhone on October 4, and that the new device will go on sale in the weeks to follow. [via The Daily Beast]

2. This sounds promising: Jeremy Renner has signed on to star in King of Heists, an adaptation of J. North Conway’s book about one of the greatest bank robberies in American history; he’d be playing George Leslie, the man who spearheaded the 1878 heist. [via Deadline]

3. Gordon Ramsay is going to have another Fox reality series. Hotel Hell will be a makeover show along the lines of Kitchen Nightmares, but not necessarily cooking-centric. “These are stories that everyone can relate to, because virtually all of us have had a bad hotel experience that’s turned a holiday or business trip into a total disaster,” says Ramsay. “It’s time to put the hospitality industry to the test.” [via Inside TV]

4. Thom Yorke has confirmed to BBC Radio 1′s Giles Peterson that Radiohead will be on the road throughout next year; he’s also busy finishing up an album from his supergroup side project Atoms for Peace. [via NME]

5. Steven Spielberg is delaying the release of his forthcoming Abraham Lincoln biopic until after next year’s election, because he says that he doesn’t want the movie to “become political fodder.” The film stars Daniel Day-Lewis alongside Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and John Hawkes. [via Movieline]

Bonus Buzz: Embryonic Superheroes

Here at Flavorpill, we’ve learned (and continue to be reminded, on an almost daily basis) the pros and cons of making a good list. On the plus side, people love to see pop culture artifacts piled up and stacked against each other; it starts conversations and stirs passions. On the minus side, selecting and ranking beloved films, television shows, albums, books, musicians, etc. is just asking for trouble — what begins as starting conversations and stirring passions can become a melee of second-guessing, judgment, and sometimes even name-calling. So our sympathies and admiration go out to the fine folks at Popmatters, who have spent the past several weeks compiling a list of “the 100 essential directors,” and thus opened themselves up to the inevitable Monday-morning quarterbacking of film fans, a notoriously hard-to-please bunch.

The site’s editors wisely avoided the most bitter arguments by running the list alphabetically rather than in a ranked order; it’s a move that also spread out the angry “What about…” comments throughout the series’ run, rather than all at the end. But now that we’ve had a chance to look at the whole thing, as you have, there are some, well, puzzling choices.

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Ah, fall. The fall movie season is when we film lovers do our very best to shake off a summer’s supply of Transformers, ‘80s remakes, and wilted comic book heroes, and open our arms to the “prestige pictures”: the smart movies for grown-ups that studios trot out as close to Oscar time as possible, so that they can pretend like these are the kind of movies they make all year long.

Of course, those studios still have bills to pay, so it would be a mistake to presume that quality and intellect will be the sole flavor of the season. Too often, your fall movie previews tend to focus on the most promising releases, as though Oscar bait is all we’re going to see this autumn. Make no mistake: there will still be plenty of dumb comedies, mindless action, and copious amounts of 3-D. So in order to present the most complete picture of fall 2011 at the cinemas, we’ve assembled a comprehensive list of the major fall releases, good and bad alike. Of course, that’s quite a big list of movies, so we’ve boiled our comments down to the basics: who’s in it, what it is, who it’s for, and if we’re in or out. Break out your calendars and join us after the jump.

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Andrew Ainsworth, the British prop designer who made the stormtroopers’ helmets for George Lucas’s Star Wars back in 1977, won a Supreme Court case in Britain today that gives him the right to sell replicas of the costumes (which go for around $2,500 a pop) without permission from the filmmaker or his studio — as long as he doesn’t ship them to the US.

According to ArtsBeat, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, and Steven Spielberg, all wrote letters hoping to help tip the odds in Lucas’s favor, but ultimately had no impact on the court’s final decision: the helmets were props, not works of art, and as such, are not subject to British copyright law. “I am proud to report that in the English legal system David can prevail against Goliath if his cause is right,” Ainsworth said in a statement. “If there is a force, then it has been with me these past five years.”