Many were in the race to become America’s Next Top Godmother. Beyonce and Jay-Z had a hefty list to choose from.

Gwyneth Paltrow could have been that intellectually stimulating godmother that teaches the kid about veganism and yoga. Kelly Rowland (remember her from Destiny’s Child?) could have been the stylish godmother, taking the kid shopping on Rodeo Drive.

According to Media Takeout, the new parents have picked Oprah as Blue Ivy’s godmother. This is a reasonable selection because doesn’t Oprah feel like she’s everybody’s godmother? Jay-Z’s close friend Tyran Smith is the godfather but he’s obviously eclipsed by the Lord and saviour that is Oprah.

This further proves that Blue Ivy Carter will rule the world when she turns 18.

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At last, there is one thing that Oprah is not dominating! It seems as though Shakira bumped Oprah off the Twitter top 10 list this week.

Here’s the list:
Lady Gaga (10,307,549 followers)
Justin Bieber (9,849,628)
Barack Obama (8,169,294)
Britney Spears (7,940,896)
Kim Kardashian (7,578,928)
Katy Perry (7,451,618)
Ashton Kutcher (6,803,738)
Ellen DeGeneres (6,712,058)
Taylor Swift (6,475,026)
Shakira (6,156,469)

Oprah Winfrey came in at 11th with 5,856,790 followers.

You’d think with all the attention surrounding her final shows that Oprah would climb in followers. Maybe her demographic isn’t vested in the twitter world, though. Most of her fans are older woman, so I’ll give her some slack. Well, congrads to Shakira for beating out Oprah – doesn’t happen very often.

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Oprah Winfrey heavily endorsed Canadian ‘popera’ group ‘The Canadian Tenors’ on an episode of her show, ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show.’ Way to represent Canada, Oprah!

The group had been invited to appear on an episode billed as ‘The Next Best Thing,’ in which Winfrey introduced her audience to a hot new fashion designer, chef and singing group.

Winfrey also invited their idol Celine Dion, who was about to surprise them onstage as they sang their version of ‘Hallelujah.’ When it happened, the crowd went wild, and the tenors were stunned.

“The moment was so big that I kind of just lost reality,” Clifton Murray recalls of the February 2010 taping. “I just kind of glanced up at her face and it didn’t register for at least 30 seconds.”

The double whammy of a Dion/Winfrey endorsement catapulted the young group into stardom, generating an instant 10,000 Facebook friends and 50,000 CD sales.

Since then, they’ve been on a whirlwind of international tour dates, publicity stops and newfound fame.

“It’s just been a roller-coaster ride, it really hasn’t stopped since that day we appeared on ‘Oprah,’” says Murray.

It makes me so happy when Canadian artists get the recognition they deserve. Leave it to Oprah to make it happy – she’s a saint.

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An Ontario man is facing a felony charge in Chicago for allegedly making up a story about being robbed of tickets to the final Oprah show tapings, reports CTV.

44-year-old Robert Spearing told police he was beaten and robbed of the tickets on Tuesday by two men. However, the police said he later admitted to making up the story to avoid telling his wife they had travelled to Chicago without tickets.

Police allege Spearing cut his own forehead with a rock and scraped his hands on the sidewalk to mimic injuries.

Spearing was charged with felony disorderly conduct for allegedly filing a false police report and was ordered held pending a hearing next week.

This is so ridiculous. I mean, really? You’d cut yourself with a rock to avoid telling your wife you didn’t get Oprah tickets? Jesus, celebrities definitely bring out the crazy in people. I’m sure your wife would have forgave you. Would she be a little pissed? Yes. It’s Oprah’s final show. But a mad wife is better then a crime charge. Good job.

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The men and women of Forbes’ annual Celebrity 100 list have been revealed, and Lady Gaga, Oprah, and Justin Bieber are just a few who made the top ten.

The list of celebs, which highlights the most powerful people in the entertainment business, earned $4.5 billion collectively over the last 12 months by starring in films, making music, modelling clothes or playing sports.

Lady Gaga took the No. 1 spot this year, beating Oprah Winfrey who came in at No 2. Oprah’s only given up the No. 1 spot three times in seven years.

Gaga made the top of the list because of the $90 million she earned with her monster tour, and her 32 million Facebook fans and 10 million Twitter followers. She also generated 1 million digital downloads of her recent single ‘Born This Way’ in only five days.

Oprah earned $290 million last year, earning big from her syndicated show and the stars she’s spawned, including Dr. Phil, Rachael Ray and Dr. Oz. She is now starting her own networnk OWN, so no wonder she’s still deemed powerful.

Canadian-born Justin Bieber came in at No. 3, debuting on the list at the young age of 17 with $53 million earned over the last 12 months. This major profit is thanks to concerts, music sales and a 3-D documentary movie that grossed $100 million at the global box office. He can thank teenage girls for this.

Surprising stars that made the list include reality TV star Bethenny Frankel at 42nd place and Tiger Woods at No. 10, despite his recent love scandals. Notable absentees include Britney Spears, who ranked sixth in 2010, and Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe, who ranked 82nd last year.

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There has been much speculation over who will be the last guests on ‘Oprah,’ and now they have been finally revealed. Will Smith and wife Jada Pinkett Smith will be the last guests on the legendary talk show, reports The Daily Mail.

The episode will air May 25 and bids farewell to the show, marking its finale episode after 25 years.

Previous options had included Oprah’s long term boyfriend Stedman Graham, Tom Cruise, Jennifer Aniston, Gabrielle Giffords or Dr Phil McGraw. Thank god it’s not Dr Phil.

Smith and his wife and children have been on Oprah’s show many times in the past, with ‘Karate Kid’ star Jaden and ‘Whip My Hair’ singer Willow previously joining their parents on the famous couch.

The multi-billionaire announced in November 2009 that she was going to end her popular talk show. She has since then launched her own television network, called OWN – Oprah Winfrey Network.

Ratings have not been great for the network, though, which pulls in a fraction of the audience figures she is used to on her nationally syndicated show. She has vowed to focus more time and energy on it once she finishes filming the talk show.

And there you have it. I’ll definitely miss the emotional Oprah episodes, but I’m sure she’ll stir up lots of new things on her network. I’m also kind of surprised she picked the Smiths to appear on the last episode – I would have thought she’d pick someone bigger, but hey.

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It looks like Oprah’s going to be doing more than just taping a few shows during her trip to Australia this week.

Radar Online is reporting that the queen of middle-aged women everywhere took a break from her show’s special taping schedule in the land down under to take a yacht cruise with the ever-charming Russell Crowe.

O and Crowe took a quick sail through Sydney Harbor followed by a flotilla of smaller boats carrying the hundreds of lucky women and fans. The ladies were winners of the talk show’s dream trip giveaway and were invited to accompany Oprah on the landmark trip and taping.

We imagine this was a segment for the show and not just some spontaneous yachting jaunt…right?

Fellow Aussies Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban are also due to hang with Winfrey during the trip, though what exactly they’ll be doing with her and her guests is unclear.

Come on, Nicole! We want to see Oprah go scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef!

Brace yourself for sky-high ratings amongst your Australian audience, Ms. Winfrey!

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Even billionaires are doing it!

Radar Online is reporting that Oprah Winfrey and BFF Gayle King have decided to get away from it all with a nice camping trip to Yosemite. A fellow shopper spotted the talk show queen and chatted her up about her purchases.“She was super nice and said they had never been camping before together so she was excited,” the eyewitness added.

We’ll never understand why people with more money than God feel the desire to leave it all behind for a pop-up tent and some fanny packs. Can’t you pay someone to do your camping for you, O?

Winfrey and King spent about an hour in the store perusing before settling on an unearthly amount of camping gear. The entire outdoors experience will be taped for the final season of Oprah’s talk show and should air sometime in late October.

Can we come too? We want to hear a ghost story from Oprah! We promise we make the best smores ever! Pleeeeassee???

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On the season premiere of the 25^th season of her talk show, Oprah announced to her entire audience that she was taking them all to Australia.  Better yet, Oprah has also made it clear that she’ll be picking up the tab on the taxes too.

According to TMZ, the last time Oprah gave away something huge—a car for everyone in her audience—it wasn’t such a great experience, as the “lucky” audience members got slapped with up to $7,000 in gift taxes.

TMZ also spoke to Larry Edema, one of the lucky audience members going to Australia, who said that a certified public accountant was at the taping of Oprah and was also told that all of the taxes for the Australia trip will be “handled by the Oprah show.”

All we can say is that these people are extremely lucky.

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Oprah announced this week that she will be taking a plane load of fans to Australia to tape some final episodes of her show.

Popeater reports that the Australian tax payer will be picking up a large part of the bill, roughly $3 million ($2.7M USD). The money will come from Quantas Airlines and the annual tourism budget, according to the nation’s tourism minister.

“I think it’s money well spent,” Martin Ferguson told reporters after making the announcement in Sydney. “This truly represents an amazing opportunity to showcase Australia, the warmth and hospitality of our people and the depth and breadth of everything our country has to offer visitors from around the world.”

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The ninth season of American Idol will come to a close next week and Simon Cowell is ready to move on, reports MTV.

The infamous Idol judge sat down with Oprah on her show Thursday to talk about why he’s going to leave the show after this season.

“Time’s up,” said Cowell. “It feels like the right thing to do.”

After a long nine seasons, Cowell says that he has grown tired of the show.

“After a while, you start to go on automatic pilot. Too many times I was sitting there [at the judges' table] bored. The audience deserves more than that … and I can’t hide when I’m bored.”

Cowell is moving on to host a U.S. version of “X Factor”, another talent show that will not have an age limit and will also feature groups of singers.

When Oprah asked him why he was staying in the reality TV business, Cowell responded, “I like the buzz it creates. You want to be part of something people are talking about. I love that feeling.”  He hopes that the differences in the format of his new show will keep him excited.

There don’t seem to be any hard feelings, though.  “The final night will be quite emotional,” said Cowell.  “I’ve had a great time.”

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We wait for it all year, and no it’s not Christmas time. But it is Time’s 100 World’s Most Influential People, and this year some of our favorites made the cut.

Hollywood stars Lady Gaga, Conan O’Brien and Kathryn Bigelow were the top three in the artist section and others like Taylor Swift, Ashton Kutcher and Robert Pattinson closely followed behind. Sandra Bullock, Lea Michele and Marc Jacobs were also on the list.

There were some obvious ones like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Clinton. Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva topped the leaders list.

Ben Stiller was near the top of the heroes list for his charity StillerStrong.org, to help build schools in Haiti.

So is it fair to put Lady Gaga in a list with Barack Obama? Her fashion sense was only a small part of why the magazine put her on the list. “Lady Gaga’s art captures the period we’re in right now,” they say.

A young 20-year-old Taylor Swift made the list and Stevie Nicks reminded us why. “Taylor is writing for the universal woman and for the man who wants to know her…It’s women like her who are going to save the music business.”

It’s also a time when other celebrities actually have nice things to say about one another. Here are a few other stars weighing in on the list, according to E! Online.

Olivia Newton-John credits Michele with “inspiring young people to get involved in musical programs in schools and encouraging communities to fund them.”

New Moon director Chris Weitz raved about Pattinson, describing him as seeming “to answer Freud’s rhetorical question, ‘What do women want?’ “

Sean “Diddy” Combs was gracious about his friend Kutcher. “Most people use it to promote themselves, but [Ashton] uses Twitter to connect, to strike up conversations, to send positive messages to the millions of people who read his words. This guy will show us the future. And it’s gonna be a blast.”

See the whole list at Time.com

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Didn’t think we would ever be writing that as a headline – but here we are. Kitty Kelley, who is currently writing a biography on Oprah, says that the TV host was molested as a child.

PerezHilton reports the biographer said the following:

“Her family, I think, is in great denial of her sexual molestation. I believe Oprah. Now, her family doesn’t believe her, but that’s part of her life story. That she wasn’t believed, that there was nobody she could confide in. I happen to believe she was and that comes through in the book.

We’re talking about her secrets and at one point in her life, she was ready to get rid of some of those secrets when she was writing her autobiography. She was going to talk in detail about the men who had abused her, and she was going to name all of her abusers. And she was going to lay great blame on her mother for not taking better care of her. And she was also going to reveal that she was, in her words, a prostitute. I felt that was really a very harsh description that she would give herself.

She was literally saying that she was a prostitute. You know, she had talked about her sex abuse and her promiscuity in the past, but she had never used the word prostitute.”

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We’ve all had our share of disloyal friends, but none tops grieving country-music star Shania Twain’s longtime friend and assistant. She says doing a reality show on Oprah Winfrey’s new cable network is another step toward her recovery after heartache, reports People.com.

“I feel like in a way I’m starting over, with everything,” Twain, 44, told Winfrey in an interview at an event in New York on Thursday. “This is a very personal experience that I think is important to share. This is an experience of recovery. I was in a very deep, dark slump, and I needed to find a way to get myself out of it. I had to force myself back out into life, back out into experiencing things.”

The Canadian-born singer’s 14-year marriage to Robert “Mutt” Lange ended in May 2008 due to Lange’s infidelity with Twain’s longtime friend and assistant, Marie-Anne Thiébaud. After the situation surfaced there were times when Twain had no passion or interest in anything, she said.

“There were moments when I really just thought, I don’t need anything and I don’t need anyone,” she said. “I just want to go away and disappear. So, that was a bad slump.”

Her upcoming reality show, Why Not? With Shania Twain, follows her life as she emerges from that slump in the process of recovery. The title is a reference to the first step she took down her journey.

“One day, someone said to me, ‘Do you want to go jump out of an airplane?’ ” she said. “I felt like I had nothing to lose anymore, so I said, ‘Why not?’ And every day since then, I ask myself that question.”

Twain has an 8-year-old son named Eja and emphasized that she is still in the healing process. Perhaps it helped that she is now dating Thiébaud’s ex-husband Frédéric.

“There’s a lot of recovery to accomplish,” she said. “I’m not there yet. I’m on my way there. I’m not sure I’ll ever be there.”

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We know Oprah fans have been emotionally distressed with the announcement of Oprah’s show going off the air, but don’t worry, Oprah has another show in the works.

Oprah is laying the groundwork for an evening show on her own network – OWN. The show is called ‘Oprah’s Next Chapter’ and will being sometime in 2011.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, she explains “I’m going to take viewers with me, going to take celebrities I want to interview with me.” Full details of the show will be announced later today.

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MTV may have found their new reality couple and they didn’t have to look too far. It looks like Whitney Port and Ben Nemtin are an item, reports PEOPLE.

Reports surfaced last month that The City star and The Buried Life star were “hanging out.” However the relationship has stepped to the next level with Nemtin celebrating Port’s 25th Birthday recenlty .

Port also accompanied Nemtin to Chicago last weekend where he was a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show, which airs April 9th.

Later that evening the couple were seen making out at Chicago hotspot The Underground.

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Although millions of women (and certainly some men) will be sad to see Oprah leave TV, not everybody is shedding a tear.

Apparently local TV station affiliates are happy to see “O” call it quits. According to an article in Broadcasting & Cable, Oprah’s replacement will undoubtedly save station and ownership groups cash.

“Oprah’s ratings have eroded so much that the image of Oprah is much stronger than the reality of Oprah, either as a news lead-in or as a money-maker,” says one station executive. “In many cases, Oprah is a stunning loss leader. There are people who are deeply thankful she is calling it quits.”

The article further explains that although Oprah’s replacement will unlikely attract Oprah ratings, the replacement will nevertheless be much cheaper.

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TMZ is reporting that Oprah has settled a defamation lawsuit with the former head mistress of her school for girls.

Nomvuyo Mzamane claimed that the talk show host made falsified and defamatory comments about her after a sex abuse scandal at the girls school in 2007, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa.

The trial was supposed to begin Monday in Philadelphia and Oprah was expected to take the stand.

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Oprah fans: no need to fret! Network executives have found you a possible replacement: Rosie O’Donnell. After the legendary talk show host announced that she was pulling her show in 2011, network executives have been scrambling to fill the spot on the daytime talk show circuit, reports E! Online.

O’Donnell, now 47, hasn’t been up to much recently, after leaving The View in May 2007, unless you’ve seen her guest spots on shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Nip/Tuck and Drop Dead Diva. She also launched the daily show, Rosie Radio on Sirius XM, which she hosts in New York in a custom-built home studio.

If all goes as planned, the comedian has big shoes to fill, but based on her previous success, she may be a hit. The Rosie O’Donnell Show for a while, as she won 25 Daytime Emmy Awards, including the award for Outstanding Talk Show every year between 1998 and 2002.

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The Big O? More like the Big J. According to ratings, stone-faced Judge Judy draws in the most viewers on weekday afternoons – leaving Oprah Winfrey high and dry.

According to MSN Online, Judge Judy’s civil court debauchery has drawn in a bigger audience than the Oprah Show for the past 11 of 14 weeks. In the pool of courtroom dramas, Judge Judy has been the most popular for the past 700 consecutive episodes.

That’s a lot of velour track suits.

Judge Judy, known by friends as Judy Scheindlin, is the Oprah antithesis. There’s no free cars, gushy stories, or Gayle King. Instead, Scheindlin takes a no-bullshit approach to cases, often ripping apart guests with her sarcastic quips and sharp tongue.

“At my age, I’ve heard it all,” Judge Judy told MSN Online. “I think that’s the reason the program has legs and longevity. People like the fact that the right thing happens at the end of a case. There may be a small nucleus of people who are very verbal, who will PC you to death, but if I call someone an idiot, they’re an idiot. I don’t care if they’re a boy or a girl or black or white or green or chartreuse.”

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