DreamWorks Animation has ended its partnership with Britain's Aardman Animation after taking enormous losses on Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which won the Oscar for best animated film of 2005, and last year's Flushed Away. The latter film reportedly cost DreamWorks $142.9 million but took in only about $50 million at the box office. In a statement DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg said, "While I will always be a fan and an admirer of Aardman's work, our different business goals no longer support each other." Aardman spokesman Arthur Sheriff told the London Times that the company wanted to return to making "claymation" films. (It used computer animation for Flushed Away.) He added: "We always knew that America would be a hard task for us -- we're a very English company. ... We think part of our strength is our English sense of humor and we want to continue with that."

The Berlin Film Festival on Tuesday revealed the titles of the 22 movies that will compete for this year's top Golden Bear award. They include Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd, starring Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie; Steven Soderbergh's The Good German with George Clooney; and Gregory Nava's Bordertown, starring Jennifer Lopez and Antonio Banderas. The festival opens on Feb. 8 with a screening of Olivier Dahan's La Vie en Rose about the life of singer Edith Piaf and concludes on Feb. 18. Among films that will be screening out of competition will be Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima, Richard Eyre's Notes on a Scandal, and Paul Schrader's The Walker.

A New York actor who had actively campaigned to pressure the film and TV industry to hire the disabled has been sentenced to 44 months in prison for possession of child pornography. Ed Jupp, 51, a wheelchair-bound victim of cerebral palsy who had appeared in such films as Born on the Fourth of July and A Beautiful Mind as well as Law & Order, NYPD Blue and other TV shows, had pleaded guilty to charges that he had amassed a large collection of child pornography, including hundreds of photographs and 45 videos, on his home computers between 2002 and 2005 and that he had used peer-to-peer programs to share the collection online. In 2003 New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, signing a bill providing a taxi service for New Yorkers who use wheelchairs, singled out Jupp, who had pushed for the legislation. The taxi service, Bloomberg said, will help Jupp "land roles that match his talents."

A series of publicity photos for the revival of the play Equus showing 17-year-old Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe nude has angered parents in England, where the play is to be performed. In several of the photos, Radcliffe is seen with co-star Joanna Christie, who also appears topless. They also appear nude in several scenes in the play. The London Daily Mail quoted from letters written to Radcliffe's fan sites. "We as parents feel Daniel should not appear nude. Our nine-year-old son looks up to him as a role model. We are very disappointed and will avoid the future movies he makes," one parent wrote. (His younger fans generally expressed opposite opinions.) A spokeswoman for Radcliffe said, "Daniel does not want to step away from Harry Potter but he does want to show he is a rounded actor capable of very different and diverse roles."

Fox clobbered its network rivals with a knock-out one-two punch Tuesday night by combining American Idol with House. The result: an enormous 19.3 rating and a 28 share for Idol (33.29 million viewers) followed by a 17.1/25 rating (27.75 million viewers) for House.For the most part, the other networks simply threw in the towel, programming a slew of repeats against Fox's juggernaut. Nevertheless, CBS's NCIS, one of the few shows that has been able to produce solid ratings against Idol, turned in a strong 8.2/12 against the talent contest Tuesday night. On the other hand, NBC brought Dateline's "To Catch a Predator" series back with little effect. The show, which lures predators to a hidden-camera-bedecked home where they expect to meet sexually active teens, scored only a 4.6/7.

With football -- both college and professional -- out of the picture last week, Fox's American Idol had only itself to compete against for the top spot in the ratings, and the outcome was close. Wednesday's auditions show from New York captured 33.87 million viewers, while Tuesday's from Memphis came in second with 32.6 million. No other TV show during the week came within 11 million viewers of equaling those figures. (No. 3 on the Nielsen list was ABC's Grey's Anatomy with 21.5 million viewers.) Nevertheless, CBS was able to eke out a slim margin of victory for the week with an overall household rating of 7.5/12. Fox was close behind with a 7.4/11. ABC placed third with a 5.2/8, while NBC brought up the rear with a 5.0/8. (Beginning this week, Nielsen Research will begin including college students living away from home in its ratings reports.)

The top ten shows of the week according to Nielsen Research: 1. American Idol (Wednesday), Fox, 18.9/28; 2. American Idol (Tuesday), Fox, 18.0/26; 3. Grey's Anatomy, ABC, 14.0/21; 4. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CBS, 13.2/20; 5. CSI: Miami, CBS, 12.1/19; 6. Deal Or No Deal (Monday), NBC, 10.7/16; 7. Two and a Half Men, CBS, 10.0/14; 8. Cold Case, CBS, 9.4/14; 9. 60 Minutes, CBS, 9.3/15; 9. The Valley of Light, CBS, 9.3/14; 9. NCIS, CBS, 9.3/14; 9. Shark, CBS, 9.3/16.

Wrestling has once again replaced football as the most popular sport on cable TV. And USA Channel, which carries WWE matches, replaced ESPN, which carried football, as the most-watched cable TV network during the past month. Half the top-20 shows during January were WWE wrestling contests.

At least four 30-second commercials created by amateurs will be featured during the CBS telecast of Sunday's Super Bowl game, the Washington Post reported today (Wednesday). The newspaper observed that while some ad agencies may spend as much as $1 million to create a commercial that will air during the big game, a spot for Doritos created by a 22-year-old North Carolinian who recently opened a small ad firm with three buddies cost only $12.79. General Motors, the Post said, partnered with CBS to create a reality-show-like competition among five university video teams to develop a commercial for Chevrolet. "Consumer-generated ads, in the age of the Internet and YouTube, have truly come front and center," Ed Peper, manager of GM's Chevrolet division, told the Post. Meanwhile, Britain's Scotsman newspaper, reported that Time Warner Cable has purchased a video created by Aberdeen student James Provan and posted on YouTube for use as part of an ad campaign for the company's RoadRunner broadband service.

An Australian doctor who looked after Survivor contestants and has been hired by film and TV companies to work on other productions has admitted buying pharmaceutical cocaine for his personal use, the New York Post reported today. Dr. Adrian Cohen of Sydney is also being investigated for allegedly using patients' names to write prescriptions for cocaine that he used himself and selling some of the drugs on the sets of TV shows. "I have admitted it was inappropriate," Cohen told the Post. "We made money from it, [but] I certainly didn't make myself rich by doing it."

Sidney Sheldon, a prolific writer of Broadway plays, movies, TV shows, and novels, died Tuesday of pneumonia in Rancho Mirage, CA at age 89. In his later years, he gained fame as a best-selling novelist with such titles as Rage of Angels, The Other Side of Midnight, Master of the Game and If Tomorrow Comes. Sheldon was also a TV producer, generally writing the shows he produced, including dramas and miniseries based on his novels. Among his most successful TV series were The Patty Duke Show and I Dream of Jeannie.

Bob Carroll Jr., who with Madelyn Pugh Davis, wrote all 180 episodes of I Love Lucy, died on January 27, reports said Tuesday. He was 87. Carroll was credited with co-creating the show with Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, and producer Jess Oppenheimer in 1951. He and Davis also worked together on The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, Here's Lucy and Life With Lucy, as well as numerous other series through the mid-'80s,