If it seemed like everyone was ganging up on James Franco, Anne Hathaway, and the Oscars yesterday, it’s because they were. In one of many brutal takedowns, Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers said, “The stirrings I felt from the 83rd annual Oscar show made me want to puke. How could so many stars bore so many people breathless?” Few critics could find anything positive to say about the ceremony, and many echoed the same declaration of “Worst Oscars Ever.” But that phrase may sound familiar – it’s been summoned on several occasions in years past (it’s also somewhat accepted that 1989′s show was really the worst ever). Here, a look at how reviewers of the annual spectacle have summoned the same refrain:

Mail.com Media Corporation (MMC,) the parent company of Nikki Finke‘s Deadline.com, has issued a cease and desist against The Wrap, the industry news and gossip site created by Finke’s sometime friend and longtime rival Sharon Waxman (pictured). Merely Googling “Nikkie Finke Sharon Waxman” brings up a laundry list of articles breathlessly (and, often, sarcastically) covering their ongoing feud.

Nikki Finke is often referred to as the “most feared” or “most hated” woman in Hollywood, not only for exclusive gossip she publishes on her industry news site, Deadline.com, but also because, using come combination of wilyness and blac magic, she’s managed to accomplish that rarest of feats in today’s online age: make it through her career with only two photos of her available online, one from a college yearbook, and the other her fairly ubiquitous black and white headshot. Well, Rupert Murdoch‘s fledgling iPad news source, The Daily, may have changed all that.

Universal Studios is taking heat from both Hollywood insiders, bloggers, and even Anderson Cooper over the new Ron Howard movie The Dilemma. And, no, it’s not about the fact that they want us to believe Vince Vaughn and Kevin James could pull Jennifer Connelly and Winona Ryder, but rather the trailer which opens with a gay joke. Now Deadline Hollywood is reporting that Universal will alter the offending preview.

It’s official. NBCU and Comcast announced today that Steve Burke will replace Jeff Zucker when he departs after the Comcast merger takes place. Burke is currently the COO of Comcast and formerly president of Comcast Cable. Nikki Finke, meanwhile, would like you to know she’s been predicting it all along.

As the New York Times reports today, Hollywood trade publications have been slowly dying for years—due mainly to ever-decreasing ad revenues and stiff competition from blogs like Nikki Finke‘s Deadline Hollywood. The Hollywood Reporter, however, isn’t going down without a fight.

Vanity Fair has released its 16th annual ranking of the 100 most influential people of the Information Age. Spoiler alert: They are all white men. Other than that the top five is full of the usual suspects, though further on the list gets more interesting.

Today, HollywoodReporter.com reveals that HBO has started developments on “Tilda,” a half-hour comedy series centering on the exploits of a ruthless Hollywood gossip blogger with an unmissable resemblance to Nikki Finke. Will Finke’s onscreen avatar will be faithful to the mix of bodilessness and omniscience that has defined the Finke of real life?

Yesterday we asked “When Will Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show, And NBC Bashing, End?” Well according to a piece today by Kim Masters in The Daily Beast, Conan’s days at NBC appear to be over very soon, writing “the late-night nightmare is almost over. Conan O’Brien is leaving NBC and receiving a payout—and he’ll be free to appear on another network before his contract expires.”

When Mail.com bought Nikki Finke‘s Hollywood bible of a industry gossip blog, Deadline Hollywood, for an undisclosed heaping pile of money last summer, the new pair also announced they would be expanding east. Now, Finke has announced that the forthcoming Deadline New York will be edited by 20-year Variety “superstar” Mike Fleming. And the Old Guard migration to the Web continues.

Newspapers are dying, magazines are dying: this is the story of 2009 where the media is concerned. However, the future of media, such as it is, does not look quite so dim. Or dim at all, really. Obviously, the brave new media world that we are slowly moving into (some at a quicker pace than others!) will look entirely different in twelve months’ time, likely in large part due to the efforts of the folks we listed on our online editors of the year poll. So who gets the final nod? Our picks below: feel free to add yours in the comments section.

If 2009 was a tough year for magazines and newspapers — and boy, was it ever — it was a bang-up year for the editors of the blogs listed here. Now we are asking you, our loyal, smart, and attractive readers to share your thoughts on who had the biggest year in the Online Editor category:

Leave it to Nikki Finke to chastise the impure, start firefights with other journalists (cf: The New Yorker), and leak out a bit of personal correspondence to boot. In an unrelenting post, she accuses Bill Carter of “having [never] met a network boss whose knob he didn’t shine” and casually makes mention of a (possibly joky) email Carter sent her in July about his hopes of making bank on a blowout Jay Leno show. How’s that going, btw?

The New York Times is reporting that Oprah Winfrey will announce tomorrow that she is ending her syndicated talk show in 2011 at the end of her 25th season.

Earlier this month Nikki Finke reported that Oprah would close up shop and move to cable in early 2011. It looks like she knew what she was talking about.

Earlier this morning there was speculation that Glenn Beck was the new Oprah Winfrey of the book world, due to his ability to affect the sales of fiction thrillers. Well if Nikki Finke is right Winfrey may be contemplating a move into Glenn Beck territory, namely, cable TV.

Yesterday, the news that former News Corp. heavyweight Peter Chernin had been advising Comcast in its bid for NBC Universal sent shockwaves throughout the media world. Before the speculation as to what this means gets out of hand, it’s worth bringing up one key data point: both of Chernin’s top deputies, Katherine Pope and Dylan Clark, are former NBC/Uni execs.

Shortly after news of the Letterman scandal broke (you may recall that it was broken by intrepid reporter David Letterman), Nikki Finke theorized that CBS wouldn’t investigate it because CBS boss Les Moonves and his boss, Sumner Redstone, had both had adulterous affairs, and so they wouldn’t be too keen on digging into Letterman.

But as the New York Observer‘s Felix Gilette reports, CBS will be looking into the sex-and-extortion saga the way they know best: with a crack investigative reporter.

You’ve got to hand it to Gawker for turning the process of writing blog posts into fun and profit for all. They’ve complained in the past that the photo of Finke to the left is the only one available on the Web. Rather than resign themselves to that fact, they’ve made a contest of it: the first person to bring them a recent photo of Nikki Finke wins $1000.

Yesterday Sharon Waxman “exclusively” reported on Comcast’s plans to buy NBC-Universal from GE. Rival blogger Nikki Finke, who doesn’t like letting a Hollywood exclusive slip past her if she can help it, fired back that “Comcast tonight is denying an Internet blog’s bullshit that a “deal was done” (and the blog has already backtracked from that inaccurate claim).” She wouldn’t even name or link to The Wrap! But it looks like the facts (and the Internet) are on Finke’s side.

That is today’s topic of interest for Gawker investigations editor John Cook, who this morning delivered a hilarious rundown of the well-documented unreliability of Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke. Fine for a self-employed blogger, but will sick days cut it under new management?

Oh the irony. Reports surfaced yesterday that two stalwarts of show business Variety and The Hollywood Reporter are changing their business models in a fight for survival. This was exclusively reported by Nikki Finke, the premier showbiz blogger who many see as the prime reason for the trades’ decline in both relevance and viability.

Many of the news outlets which reported that Disney was buying Marvel noted that the deal was worth $4 billion, tacked on a few Disney-Marvel mashup jokes,(“Spider Mickey,” etc.) and left it at that. Fortunately, Nikki Finke‘s Deadline Hollywood Daily has been on the scene, netting exclusive after exclusive and combining superb, deep-digging reporting with insightful commentary.

If you’ve seen Funny People — or read tech blogs — you know about the MySpace scene, where Adam Sandler‘s bigshot comedian character is hired to do standup at a big MySpace event (for a whopping $300, 000 — probably not a Rupert-friendly sum these days). Seth Rogen is his sidekick, an aspiring comedian whom Sandler taps first to write him jokes, then to be his BFF. Together they mock MySpace, like wondering what would happen if Tom from MySpace and Craig from Craigslist got in a fight. MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson even makes an appearance, asking Sandler: “Do you actually use MySpace?” Says Sandler: “I fuck girls, Tom. I don’t have time for that.” Zing

So after news broke this morning that Ben Silverman was leaving NBCU, more than one person in the office wondered a) how come Nikki Finke hadn’t been the one to break it, and b) what would Nikke Finke blog about from now on. Nikke Finke has subsequently solved both mysteries for us in what could be referred to as The Finke-Silverman Experiment Ends, A Play in 5 Acts.

Mail.com, the innocuously named website owned by Jay Penske, has seemingly appeared out of nowhere and begun scooping up some big names, two of which have landed New York Times profiles in the last 24 hours courtesy of David Carr.

In the last two weeks Penske has surprised the media world by adding both Bonnie Fuller and Nikki Finke to his roster. What’s going on?