Clint Eastwood's Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie, will compete for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival next month, festival organizers announced today (Wednesday) as they unveiled the titles of 19 movies, selected from 1,792 films submitted from 96 countries, that will vie for the prestigious award. (A 20th film, from France, is due to be announced soon.) Steven Soderbergh's four-hour Che, about Cuban revolutionary hero Che Guevara and made up of two films (The Argentine and Guerrilla), will also contend for the prized trophy. German director Wim Wenders will be coming to the festival with his The Palermo Shooting. U.S. screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) is also entered in the competition with his first film as a director, Synecdoche, New York, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. "There are films that are hair-raising because they break new ground," festival president Gilles Jacob told a news conference in Paris. Among U.S. films screening out of competition will be the Steven Spielberg-George Lucas production of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull; Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, starring Penélope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson and Javier Bardem; and the animated DreamWorks comedy Kung-Fu Panda, featuring the voices of Jolie, Jack Black, Lucy Liu and Dustin Hoffman. The festival runs from May 14 to May 25.

Robert De Niro's Tribeca Film Festival is due to kick off in New York tonight (Wednesday) with the screening of the comedy Baby Mama starring former Saturday Night Live players Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. The film concerns a single woman who hires a surrogate mother to give birth to her baby. While mostly small, independent, films are screened at the festival -- some 120 of them are scheduled, many of them shot in New York -- it will also feature the world premiere of the Wachowski brothers' big budget Speed Racer on May 3, the festival's closing night and a week before the film's domestic opening.

Paramount is planning to open its highly anticipated Iron Man at 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 1, instead of one minute past midnight as originally announced. The studio is apparently hoping that word-of-mouth will help boost box-office business for the weekend (early reviews have been exceptional), but it also raises the possibility of the Thursday showings cutting deeply into the weekend (Friday through Sunday) take. Many analysts had been predicting that the superhero film starring Robert Downey, Jr. would rake in $60-70 million, a huge figure -- except when considering that Spider-Man 3 opened with $151.1 million on the same weekend a year ago.

The Golden Globe Awards -- which fell to the threat of picketing by the Writers Guild of America in February -- plans to return next year on Sunday, January 11 -- the earliest the awards show has ever been held. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association said Tuesday that it will announce its nominations on Thursday, December 11. This year's awards winners, instead of being announced at a lavish dinner affair in Beverly Hills, were disclosed during a scaled-down news conference broadcast during primetime on NBC.

Regardless of whether the Screen Actors Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers reach an agreement on a new contract, actors hired on 95 independent movie productions will be allowed to continue working as a result of separate deals signed between the guild and the indie producers, the Associated Press reported Tuesday, citing an unnamed person with the guild. The person said that the completion deals will allow the filmmakers to find financing for their projects and begin producing them.

With ratings for last week's performance edition of American Idol falling to a five-year-low and its results edition to a four-year low, Fox barely managed to retain its ratings crown last week. The network averaged 8.8 million viewers for the week, just 300,000 more than CBS. Nevertheless, the two Idol telecasts remained at the top of the heap last week. Somewhat surprisingly, CBS's NCIS became the network's highest-rated show for the week, drawing 15.1 million viewers, despite the fact that it went head-to-head against Fox's Idol.

The top ten shows of the week according to Nielsen Research: 1. American Idol (Tuesday), Fox, 13.9/22; 2. American Idol (Wednesday), Fox, 13.4/21; 3. Dancing With the Stars (Monday), ABC, 11.3/17; 4. Dancing With the Stars (Tuesday), ABC, 10.1/15; 4. Desperate Housewives, ABC, 10.1/16; 6. NCIS, CBS, 9.4/15; 7. Law and Order: SVU, NBC, 8.8/14; 8. CSI: NY, CBS, 8.6/14; 9. Two and a Half Men, CBS, 8.5/13; 10. Criminal Minds, CBS, 8.2/13.

Ratings for Fox's American Idol rose Tuesday night from last week, as the show posted a 14.5 rating and a 23 share in the 8:00 p.m. hour. Once again, CBS's NCIS also provided strong competition as it drew a 9.0/14. At 9:00 p.m. the results show for ABC's Dancing With the Stars, which saw the exit of Marlee Matlin, took over the lead with an 11.9/18. NBC moved to the top spot at 10:00 p.m. as Law & Order: SVU posted an 8.2/13. In the same hour, CBS's Shark, which took over the time slot from Jericho, continued to perform worse than its predecessor, posting just a 3.4/5.

While CBS News executives continue to point out that it took Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings a long time to climb to the top of the ratings, the latest Nielsen results show Katie Couric climbing in the wrong direction. In fact, her numbers fell to a record low as she averaged just 5.39 million viewers last week. It was not a good day for Couric Tuesday. Besides learning about her falling ratings, she also learned that the North Carolina debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, which she had been tapped to moderate, had been called off. And, in apparent response to rumors that Couric was hoping to jump to CNN and replace Larry King if she left CBS, CNN announced that it had extended King's contract through 2010. Meanwhile, NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams extended its lead over ABC World News with Charles Gibson by nearly 600,000 viewers. The NBC newscast drew 8.17 million viewers, while the ABC newscast drew 7.51 million. Some writers suggested that the gap -- the two programs had been running neck-and-neck for more than a year -- might have been the result of viewer anger over ABC's handling of last week's Democratic presidential debate. message writers on blogs had posted such comments as: "We should all just erase George [Stephanopoulos] and Charlie [Gibson] and not just for a day but at least through the election;" "There's now no point in watching ABC news. Brian Williams, here I come!;" and "Fire these two scumbags! I will no longer watch ABC."

Turner Broadcasting's TBS.com has begun streaming four episodes of Seinfeld, thereby making the popular TV series legally available online for the first time. The episodes are titled, "The Yada Yada," "The Truth," "The Muffin Tops," and "The Millennium." The network said that it plans to offer additional episodes on a rotating basis. However, The Silicon Alley Insider website pointed out that the episodes are only available to Windows users since they employ Microsoft's copy-protection software. Michael Learmonth, who edits the digital business site, comments that by excluding Mac users, TBS thereby encourages them "to get their Seinfeld fix from illegal sources, such as BitTorrent. Which really doesn't help TBS much, or Sony Pictures Television, which owns the show, does it?"

The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences announced on Tuesday that it has added a new category to its Emmy awards presentations: Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality-Competition Show. Since the Academy already hands out Emmys for Outstanding Game Show Host, the new category apparently is limited to hosts of shows featuring other types of contests -- like Survivor and American Idol. The next Emmy awards show is scheduled for September 21.

Not-yet-healed wounds incurred during the writers' strike when several writers of soap operas went fi-core (that is, chose to leave the WGA permanently but continue to pay dues) were reopened Tuesday when the WGA East made the names of those writers public and urged that they be "held at arm's length by the rest of us and judged accountable for what they are -- strikebreakers whose actions placed everything for which we fought so hard at risk." At the time of the strike, several of the writers named by the guild on Tuesday expressed fear that their shows would go off the air for good without scripts and that they would be left without jobs. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) immediately came to their defense, charging that the WGA is seeking, in effect, to blacklist the fi-core writers. "It is clear that the WGA leadership is seeking to deny employment to these writers in the future," the AMPTP said in a statement as it filed a charge of unfair labor practices against the guild.

The newly remodeled and reopened Newseum in Washington announced Tuesday that it will hold a special discussion about "the life and legend of Edward R. Murrow" on Saturday, April 26, the day after what would have been Murrow's 100th birthday. The discussion will feature Marvin Kalb, the last correspondent hired by Murrow at CBS, and Bob Edwards the former host of NPR's Morning Edition and the author of Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism. Murrow died of lung cancer two days after his 57th birthday in 1965.