This post was part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst of 2007 feature. Voting has now closed and readers have chosen Oprah Winfrey as the most overpaid celebrity of the year. Be sure to let us know in the comments if you are pleased with this result.

Oprah Winfrey returns to our Most Overpaid Celebrity category after having lost the title to Paris Hilton last year. For 2007 she is joined by overpaid celebrities Madonna, George Lopez, and Russell Crowe.

Winfrey, Madonna, and Lopez all made the Forbes Celebrity 100, a ranking of Hollywood players by pay, influence, and popularity. Winfrey, of course, comes in at number one, both in terms of pay and power. Madonna's earnings placed her at number nine on the list, while Lopez came in at number fifty-one.

Forbes estimates Winfrey's earnings at $260 million last year, and her net worth in the area of $1.5 billion, making her the nation's wealthiest African American. She'll be adding two new reality shows to her media empire, which already includes a blockbuster daytime talk show, satellite radio show, magazine, and Broadway musical, as well as stakes in hit shows by Dr. Phil McGraw and Rachael Ray. The school for girls she founded in South Africa has drawn much media attention this year, and she's recently endorsed Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Winfrey has been called the world's most powerful woman, the most influential woman in the world, one of the most influential persons of the 20th century, the world's first black woman billionaire, and the greatest pop culture icon of all time. Can any mortal person live up to all that hype?

This post is part of our Money Face-Offs feature. Let us know who you think comes out ahead in this head-to-head match-up, and check out our other Money Face-Off posts.

As executive producers and hostesses of America's Next Top Model and Project Runway, respectively, Tyra Banks and Heidi Klum have proven that they are much more than just the pretty faces that catapulted them both to fame and fortune on the runway and in the pages of fashion magazines. On the former show, contestants long to hear their mentor, "Miss Tyra," tell them they are "still in the running to become America's Next Top Model." Runway contestants are informed that "You're either in ... or you're out" and cringe if they hear German-born Heidi eulogize: "I'm sorry, you're out ... auf wiedersehen."

The 33-year-old Banks -- featured on Time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people in 2006 and 2007 -- certainly keeps busy, hosting her own syndicated daytime eponymous talk show in addition to her efforts on Model, an addictive primetime competitive reality show that airs on The CW network -- a collaboration between CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS) and Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) Warner Brothers Entertainment Unit.

This post is part of our Money Face-Offs feature. Let us know who you think comes out ahead in this head-to-head match-up, and check out our other Money Face-Off posts.

Celebrities -- they're more than superior human beings, they're money-making machines. If these celebrities were stocks, which would be the shrewd buy?

One sure sign of celebrity is first-name recognition, and today's contestants have certainly reached that pinnacle. Oprah and Martha are brands known worldwide, Oprah for compassion and wisdom, Martha for style and elegance.

Martha Stewart's brand is still tainted by her 2004 insider trading conviction and her stretch in Camp Cupcake. Before then, her growth from model and stockbroker to America's favorite lifestyle celebrity was impressive. After authoring the bestselling book Entertaining in 1979, she transitioned to television with her hit show Martha Stewart Living, for which she gathered several Emmys. In 1987, she inked a lucrative deal with déclassé retailer Kmart as a lifestyle consultant, to help it break into higher price-point retailing. In 1990, with Time Warner (NYSE:TWX) she launched Martha Stewart Living Magazine. The zenith of her career came in 1997 when she took herself public. The IPO for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (NYSE: MSO) made her a billionaire.

Since relocating to New York about a year ago, one of the more surprising realities I can't get over is the sheer ubiquity of celebrities -- they're simply everywhere! Walk through any subway train -- from an Inwood-bound A train to a Z train headed for JFK -- and you'll find those stars and starlets shining down on you. Lindsay! Britney! Paris! Lindsay! Brangelina! TomKat! Lindsay! All gloss and glory, beaming at you from the pages of the ever-present In Touch Weekly.

Power lunchers, design majors, single moms, goth queens -- even your own friends and families -- they're all reading these magazines. And don't think it's just women -- fellas are just more sly about it, brandishing blurbs about A-Rod's latest effort while sneaking peeks at Page Six.

Hey, I'm not making this up -- the Audit Bureau of Circulations confirms this celebrity fetish. Figures released yesterday show the gossip glossies are flying off the checkout stands.

OK! Weekly, put out by Britain's private Northern & Shell -- which also publishes some of London's sauciest fishwraps -- saw circulation bound 54% higher during the first half of the year, selling 809,000 copies per issue. Also reporting jumps in circulation were US Weekly (did you know it was founded by The New York Times (NYSE: NYT)? Thanks, Wikipedia!), In Touch Weekly and Life&Style, the latter two both owned by Germany's Bauer Publishing, Europe's largest private publisher. Alas, BloggingStocks' distant Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) relative, People, slipped 2%, though it remains proudly at the top of the heap, with more than 3.7 million copies of each issue sold.

Time, another corporate cousin, saw its genre-leading circulation drop by 700,000 -- apparently owing to its excision of promotional tie-ins that weren't pulling their weight and a redirection away from waiting room subscriptions. Circulation for newsweekly challengers and financial magazines stood pat, with the curious exception of the enigmatic London weekly, The Economist, which posted a 15.5% jump!

So what's on the uptick? Stoic, faceless financial analysis and paparazzi pap! Wrap your head around that.

Magazine sales in general held steady year over year, which is more than the Audit Bureau can say for the newspaper industry, unfortunately. Predictably, among the few major papers to post higher sales in the most recent newspapers report were the tabloid New York Daily News and its rival, The New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (NYSE: NWS), the new guardian of The Wall Street Journal.

Perhaps fearing Jessica Simpson pinups in Rupert's new plaything (Item!), fans of the Journal's gravitas are flocking to The Economist's stuffy pastures.

Tuesday night two of America's biggest stars -- Napoleon -- a.k.a. Blackstone Group LP's (NYSE: BX) CEO Steve Schwarzman and Paris Hilton collided. The reason? The Wall Street Journal reports that Blackstone won a $20 billion bid to acquire Hilton Hotels Corp. (NYSE: HLT).

How much of this $20 billion will go to Paris? Nobody knows. However, the Conrad N. Hilton Fund, controls about 5.3% of Hilton's shares outstanding. If the Blackstone deal goes through, that stake will be worth about $990 million. Conrad has 8 children, including Paris's dad. Assuming that all the kids get an equal share, Paris's dad would get about $125 million -- if that figure was eventually split between Paris, and her sister, Nicky, Paris would receive over $60 million.

This spring a group of students in one of my classes delivered a presentation on the hotel industry. One of the students in that group predicted that Marriott International, Inc. (NYSE: MAR) and Hilton could get taken over by private equity. Another student commented, with apologies to Paris Hilton, "That's Hot!"

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned in this post.

It was a banner Valentine's Day on the airwaves this morning; Sirius Satellite Radio (NASDAQ:SIRI) personality and self-described "King of All Media," Howard Stern -- not to be confused with Anna Nicole Smith's former companion of the similar name -- announced his engagement to long-time girlfriend, model/actress/animal-rights spokesperson Beth Ostrosky. Howard proposed Tuesday night with a 5.2-carat diamond ring in tow.

I will confess -- I'm a huge fan of Howard A. Stern -- and I have been for more than 10 years. The controversial "shock jock," and all of his sidekicks, are funny, insightful, and generally pretty sharp, not to mention tireless. I listened when he was married to Alison, I listened when he was going through a divorce in 2000, and I was listening several years ago when he swore that, though he deeply loved his girlfriend, marriage-number-two would never be in the cards. I've laughed along with his staff in recent weeks as Howard vigorously protested a bit too much when grilled on the issue. It is good to hear him settled and happy once again.

The couple, who had reportedly been talking about taking their commitment to a new level for months, plans to have a long engagement. The forthcoming drama involved with planning the wedding will surely make for good fodder on his radio show, and some pleased SIRI subscribers.

Beth Gaston Moon is an analyst at Schaeffer's Investment Research.