Arts and entertainment reports from The Times, national and international news services and the nation’s press.

TELEVISION

A Little Sisterly Competition: Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell may be bosom buddies, but they’ll be battling each other for viewers Friday when the Maternal One gives her first television interview since the birth of her daughter Lourdes to . . . Oprah Winfrey! The “Oprah” show airs on KABC-TV Channel 7 at 3 p.m., opposite O’Donnell’s syndicated talk show on KNBC-TV Channel 4. But Winfrey’s coup doesn’t mean there has been a falling-out between the pals. It’s apparently only a matter of timing for the new mother, who only last week flew the short but Lourdes-less hop from L.A. to Las Vegas to accept a Billboard music award. Winfrey is traveling to Hollywood to interview Madonna, while O’Donnell remains in New York working on her show. Give her a month and Madonna will travel to New York and will “do Rosie’s show the minute she hits town,” around Jan. 9, said a spokeswoman for Warner Bros. Telepictures, which produces the freshman talk show. Madonna called O’Donnell to inform her about the Winfrey interview “and everything is cool with them,” the spokeswoman said. In recent weeks, Winfrey’s show has become more celebrity-oriented in an apparent direct challenge to O’Donnell, who features several celebrity guests. Today, for example, O’Donnell welcomes the man of her dreams and much on-air adulation: Tom Cruise, promoting his new movie, “Jerry Maguire.”

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A Rosie Coincidence?: Still, rumors continued to circulate Monday that the firing Friday of Daniel Kellison, the executive producer of O’Donnell’s show, may have been triggered by “Oprah” getting to Madonna first. But sources said the move had been in the works for months, and that O’Donnell wanted to hire someone with more daytime television experience than Kellison, a former producer with “The Late Show With David Letterman.” Telepictures executive Hilary Estey-McLoughlin will share executive producer duties with O’Donnell.

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HBO’s Hook to the Stars: HBO executives are hoping that what Tom Hanks did for Universal’s “Apollo 13” (big box office, countless award nods) will rub off on them. The cable network announced production plans Monday for its “most ambitious original programming venture” to date, a space-exploration anthology called “From the Earth to the Moon.” Hanks will executive produce the 13-part series of one-hour films--and will direct one of them. The project, tracing America’s Apollo space missions, is boasting a high pedigree of space adventurers all-around: Ron Howard, who directed “Apollo 13,” Brian Grazer and Michael Bostick will produce. “In the course of working on ‘Apollo 13,’ I found out that truly amazing things happened during the Apollo project that the public is unaware of,” Hanks said. “We want to be as faithful as possible to the facts, but also tell compelling stories.” The series is based in part on Andrew Chaikin’s book “A Man on the Moon.” Chaikin will act as a consultant on the project, which begins shooting in Florida in mid-February and is set to premiere in December 1997, the 25th anniversary of the completion of the Apollo space program.

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Pole Markers: The networks are definitely mining the “Home” out of the holidays. Just two weeks after Thanksgiving night when NBC reran “Home Alone,” Fox’s TV premiere of the sequel “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York” scored the highest movie rating in the network’s history. Preliminary results from major cities metered by Nielsen Media Research showed Sunday’s telecast attracting 23% of available homes, eclipsing Fox’s previous high garnered by “The O.J. Simpson Story” in January. Meanwhile, the overlapping telecast of the original musical “Mrs. Santa Claus” delivered CBS’ highest movie rating since April. The network started the movie at 8 p.m.--the same time period that its star, Angela Lansbury, once occupied with “Murder, She Wrote.” Figures are not yet available for a cable telecast of another hyped Sunday night movie, TNT’s “Samson and Delilah.”

ARCHITECTURE

Top-Drawer: Richard Meier, the designer of the $1-billion Getty Center in Los Angeles, has won the American Institute of Architects’ 1997 Gold Medal, the institute’s most prestigious award. As an unrivaled champion of the corporate modernist aesthetic, Meier long has been regarded as one of architecture’s great luminaries. His light-filled spaces, often sheathed in signature white enameled panels, include the City Hall and Central Library in The Hague, Netherlands, and the Museum of Television & Radio, which opened in Beverly Hills in March. The Getty Center is scheduled to open next year.

QUICK TAKES

A federal judge in Los Angeles Monday dismissed a lawsuit brought against MTV and “Beavis & Butt-head” creator Mike Judge by a sometimes-roofer and box boy who claimed he created the cartoon characters. U.S. District Judge Dickran Tevrizian’s written ruling noted that James Kodadek registered for copyrights on drawings of the “atypical teen-aged boys” in 1995, more than two years after the cartoon series first aired. Meanwhile, the characters (in some form or another) are set to appear on David Letterman’s “The Late Show” Friday night to promote their upcoming movie, “Beavis and Butt-head Do America.” . . . John Gielgud, 92, a longtime knight who can be seen as a piano teacher in the movie “Shine,” has been appointed a member of the Order of Merit, an honor conferred directly by Queen Elizabeth II. The only other actor to receive the honor was Laurence Olivier. . . . The Hollywood Walk of Fame is being heavily tread upon this week. Sunday night, the 16th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder, about 100 devotees sang “Give Peace a Chance” around his star. In front of nearby Capitol Records, an artist drew a sidewalk chalk mural of the former Beatle. On Thursday at 11:30 a.m., Clint Black will be honored with a star. He becomes the fourth country singer to get one. . . . Bob Barker’s price is right for “Something So Right.” NBC, pleased with the game show host’s November sweeps appearance on the sitcom, said Monday it will bring him back as Mel Harris’ father for the February sweeps.