A SIGN OF INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE
Out actress Lily Tomlin (A Prairie Home Companion, The West Wing, and my personal favorite, 9 to 5) is set to star in a new HBO hour-long comedy called 12 Miles of Bad Road, the premium cable channel announced this week. The series is created by husband-and-wife producers Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason (Designing Women and Evening Shade), and stars Tomlin as Amelia Shakespeare, the head of a real estate company and matriarch of a wealthy Dallas family (Mary Kay Place plays Amelia’s sister and Leslie Jordan plays a cousin). An air date has yet to be set, and HBO didn’t indicate how many episodes of the show it had ordered.

An out lesbian cast as the lead in a comedy? Someone forgot to tell HBO that lesbians don't have a sense of humor! Well, except for Lily. And Ellen. And Rosie. And Jane Lynch. And Judy Gold. And Karen Williams. And Marga Gomez. And...wait, remind me again why people think lesbians aren't funny?

OH YEAH: MOVIES LIKE THIS ARE WHY NO ONE THINKS LESBIANS ARE FUNNY
The Academy Award nominations were announced this week, and Judi Dench has been nominated for an Oscar for her performance as the predatory lesbian in Notes on a Scandal (the film has also been nominated in the Best Adapted Screenplay category).

This is terrific news, really, because I've been wondering when we're going to get another Oscar-nominated film full of bad lesbian stereotypes to balance out all the Oscar nominees with great lesbian characters, like Monster and The Hours (if only The Black Dahlia had been nominated!).

In related news, Melissa Etheridge received an Oscar nomination in the Best Original Song category for "I Need to Wake Up," the theme song to The Oscars An Inconvenient Truth.

I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN SOMETHING WAS UP WHEN BEN AFFLECK WAS LISTED AMONG THE CAST
Remember how I reported awhile back that Alicia Keys is playing a lesbian assassin in the new action flick Smokin' Aces, which opens this weekend?

Turns out, according to some AfterEllen.com readers who've seen the movie, Keys' character Georgia isn't a lesbian, after all. Her partner-in-crime (Taraji P. Henson) is, and she has a crush on Georgia, but it's unrequited. Not only does Keys not end up with Henson's character, she hooks up with a guy. How does the actual lesbian character end up? Mouse over the text between the spoiler tags to find out: [spoiler] dead [/spoiler].

No, I wasn't smokin' something when I originally reported this in my column, or when talked about it in the latest episode of She Said What? The folks behind the movie, and Keys herself, have been marketing Keys' character as a lesbian. Maybe they can't tell the difference between a lesbian and a woman who hangs out with one? More likely, they don't care, and just want to exploit lesbianism for profit (it might even get them an Oscar nomination!). Or maybe they're assuming we'll never actually see the movie and find out they're full of crap.

Well, they're right about that last one, at least. And judging by all the bad reviews the movie is getting, no one else is likely to see it either.