Opinion: LA loses another round to New York, Hollywood-style

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Awww, maaaannnnnnn.

And on Oscar Day, too.

LA’s lost Fortune 500 companies galore. We’ve lost movie productions, and our locally branded department stores have been supplanted by Macys and other carpetbagger brands.

And now one of Hollywood’s senior gossip websites, the venerable Defamer.com, has been absorbed by its New York flagship gossip site called Gawker. The Gawker Media president blogged on Sunday that ``the movie industry stories will remain showcased on Defamer.com but the sites will be staffed and managed as one.``

I think Nikki Finke is right that http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/goodbye-defamer-editors-and-writers-fired-site-will-be-merged-into-gawker/ Defamer lost a good bit of its smart sizzle when founder Mark Lisanti decamped.

Defamer usually managed to be snarky without being skuzzy, and was, refreshingly, polysyllabically clever. I was partial to the black-and-white photograph illustrating Defamer’s home page. I am all but certain that it was Charles Boyer, an elegant face you would never see on other gossip sites whose idea of the last word in glamor is Paris Hilton.

When I checked the new co-joined site, there was a farewell photo of Boyer in virtually the identical pose, but with his eyes -- well, one eye was all you could see -- closed.

Bonne nuit, sweet prince.