Celebrity News:

LOS ANGELES -Reality TV's sacrificial lamb, Lauren Conrad, is sitting a nose away from me on a sofa. Her hair is deeply conditioned; her teeth, whiter than the NHL. The look, as a whole, is gofugyourself-proof.

Lolling in the VIP section of the L.A. club Area, as she waits to appear on the after-show that follows the omigod season finale of The Hills, someone offers her something from a cheese tray. Our Lauren -- our lovely, means-well-but-some-times-wee-too-judgmental Lauren -- looks tempted, but then lets out a dirty look. "Oh, I don't like that," she says. Reality! Check!

Oh, but goodness knows there's been more than enough fromage to go around. After a whole season of rotten first dates, sex-tape spec and first-rate frenemies, it is, after all, a close for MTV's much-hyped Gen-Y Fairy Tale. A Serengeti, as it were, for the totally hot and indubitably privileged -- where, as it's been described, "there is no other side of the tracks."

Not far from the dairy-defying Lauren stands Audrina, her sheepishly sexy roommate from The Hills. "I'm so cold," she whispers, pointing to the air-con that the poor, flimsily dressed thing seems to be stuck under. Also there, ready to flap her wings for this pop-culture hailstorm: Lauren's trusty cubicle colleague and tireless sounding-board, Whitney. Meanwhile, the most-hated-of-all, Heidi-- the North Korea to Lauren's South Korea -- comes by quickly, takes some pics but then blows this popsicle stand. (The geopolitical metaphor is not far off, considering the phalanx of publicists and back-and-forth negotiating it takes to avoid a red-carpet collision between these two sworn enemies!)

They're all here -- including boy-candy Brody Jenner, who arrives in what seems to be a shower cap -- for the three-hour bonanza that's part of this third season finale. The not-too-cool-for-school Dan Levy and Jessi Cruickshank from MTV Canada are the cheerleaders-in-chief, having gone Hollywood for this special, live-audience telecast.

Ah, but what's real and what's not? It's all so confusing, like being stuck inside reality's Rubik's Cube!Especially in this, a pseudo-scripted show which at times seems faker than Madonna's British accent. Last we saw Heidi, for instance, she'd ostensibly broken up with that rascal Spencer Pratt, and was wheeling away from him -- literally --in a top-down convertible. But here, after the show, I eye-spy the pair enjoying dinner-for-two at Hollywood hot spot Koi. (Not long after they leave, Lauren and her guy-pal Brody show up at the same restaurant -- narrowly avoiding a sushi collision!)

Much later on this inside-out night I'm having in L.A., I end up at that uber-celebrity boite Hyde on Sunset. There, as soon as I arrive, I see Audrina, who apparently likes to stand on banquet tables even when the cameras aren't running. Not long after that, I run into Adam Divello, who's the genius creator of The Hills. He reminds me that some scenes for the show were shot at this very bar last season.

"It's the only time they've allowed cameras in here," he tells me.

Well, of course. What's real? What's not? Alessandra Stanley put it best, perhaps, in a sign-of-times piece about the show recently in the New York Times. "The principals, whose romances and kitchen quarrels furnish plotlines, are not really actors," she noted, "but neither are they ordinary people exactly; they are a new hybrid of semiprofessional personalities who play themselves on camera."