Tattle: Shania Twain to wed 'a dear friend'

IN A MOVE bound to have the makings of a gut-wrenching country song, one-time pop-country queen

Shania Twain

has gotten engaged to business executive

Frederic Thiebaud

.

Us Weekly broke the pseudo-news.

What's weird about the engagement, however, is that it sounds more like an episode of "Wife Swap."

Shania first confirmed in August 2009 that she was dating Thiebaud after her divorce from her hit music producer Robert "Mutt" Lange.

The aptly named "Mutt," it seems, was having an affair with Shania's BFF, Marie-Anne Thiebaud.

Now connect the dots.

Shania reached out to Marie-Anne's husband, Frederic, in the aftermath, and when Shania reaches, it would take a strong, cuckolded husband not to reach back.

She wrote on her website last year that she had found "a dear friend and true gentleman."

"Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under," indeed.

* Although Shania hasn't made music in a while, she has an autobiography coming out next year and will host a show on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Oprah also offered a hosting gig to U2's Bono ("Bono Appetite"?).

No word if he accepted, but if his Broadway "Spider-Man" doesn't open soon he may need a job.

Tattle stork

Vince Vaughn has become a daddy.

Vince's wife, Kyla Weber, gave birth to a girl in Chicago on Saturday.

Locklyn Kyla Vaughn weighed in at 7 pounds.

Said an unnamed friend with a standard quote: "Both of them couldn't be happier to welcome their sweet little girl into their family!"

Vince proposed to Kyla on Valentine's Day 2009.

Awwwwwwwwwwwww . . .

Flick flack leads to prison

Here, if you make a movie that some deem as anti-government, you get assailed on Fox News.

That's a heckuva lot better than what's going on in Iran.

There, two prominent opposition filmmakers have been sentenced to six years in jail each on vague charges of working against the ruling system, their lawyers said yesterday.

One of the two, internationally renowned filmmaker and opposition supporter Jafar Panahi, has won awards at the Chicago, Cannes and Berlin film festivals. Several of his films have been banned in Iran.

He has also been banned from shooting films or scriptwriting for 20 years and was barred from leaving the country for the same period, his lawyer Farideh Qeirat said.

Yes, Joe McCarthy is alive and well and living in Tehran.

"Panahi has been sentenced to six years in jail on charges of conspiring against the [ruling] system and is denied his professional rights including shooting films and scriptwriting," the semiofficial ISNA news agency quoted Qeirat as saying. "He has also been barred from leaving the country for 20 years and from doing any interviews with domestic or foreign media during this period," she added.

Qeirat said she will appeal the unusually heavy sentence.

Mohammad Rasulov, another opposition filmmaker, received a six-year jail term, his lawyer Iman Mirzazadeh said. Mirzazadeh said he will also appeal the sentence.

Both filmmakers supported the opposition in Iran's disputed presidential election last June. Reformists say that opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi was the rightful winner and that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the vote through massive vote fraud.

Maybe HBO should make an Iranian version of "Recount."

Tattbits

* Rotund Jack Black is going on a diet.

After nearly crushing hundreds of Lilliputians in "Gulliver's Travels," Jack made a resolution to start a strict exercise and diet regime in 2011.

He told "Access Hollywood": "I'm gonna drop fitty. I'm gonna drop fitty pounds.

"How many quarter-pounders with cheeses is that? I'm gonna drop 200 quarter-pounder with cheeses. (sic)"

He jokingly added: "Push-ups, sit-ups, and a strict diet of . . . raisins. That's my plan."

* Jake Gyllenhaal refuses to wear underwear when filming sex scenes.

"I don't know about you guys," he said, referring to love scenes in "Love and Other Drugs," "but I've never had sex with underwear on and it's an odd thing to watch an actor do. You can try but I wouldn't recommend it! So that was really important. We knew that if we did we would get somewhere in the audiences' unconscious that these were people who were actually in love and not just actors telling a love story."

* Nicole Richie had an elephant at her wedding to Joel Madden because they provide "good energy."

Sure, until they get a little tipsy and start dancing.

BANGShowbiz.com and Daily News wire services contributed to this report.

E-mail gensleh@phillynews.com.