All seems well in Tinseltown again.

Tom and Katie have become proud parents. Brad and Angelina will be soon.

Dodger Stadium looks better than ever, and Jack Nicholson looks as though he’s had a bit of a makeover, too.

The beautiful people are still beautiful. The Clippers are no longer pitiful.

And the Lakers are back in the NBA playoffs.

Yes, those Lakers. You might remember them from a few years back when Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal were buddies, courtside seats cost $2,000 a game, and the biggest problem owner Jerry Buss had was figuring out how many diamonds to put on the championship rings.

Not everything has changed.

Sitting near Nicholson will still set you back a mortgage payment or two. The Laker Girls still look Hollywood perfect, and Bryant still shoots every time he touches the ball within 25 feet of the basket.

But even in Tinseltown not everything goes according to script. The dynasty was unraveled quickly when Kobe and Shaq started feuding, Kobe and Phil stopped talking, and Kobe had to go to Colorado to do a lot of explaining.

Things got so bad that B-list celebrities were allowed to sit at courtside.

Gone are the old Lakers who used to swagger into the playoffs knowing they could beat anyone.

In their place is a team just happy to still be playing this coming weekend.

“It doesn’t really seem like we’re overly jumping for joy, but it is a great accomplishment for us,” Bryant said after the Lakers beat Phoenix to clinch a playoff spot Sunday. “We came from last season when we didn’t make it. This season nobody expected us to make it and here we are.”

Credit Bryant for most of that. He’s the dominant player in the game and will end the season as the first player since Michael Jordan in 1987-88 to average 35 points or more.

Give a big assist to Jackson, too, who called Bryant uncoachable in his book yet somehow found a way to coach him when the Lakers offered him $10 million a year to come back.

Not that Jackson has spent much time coaching Bryant. The Zen philosopher now seems to have a new philosophy – let Bryant do what he wants and hope Lamar Odom and a generic collection of understudies pick up enough of the slack for the Lakers to pull out a win.

Jackson barely batted an eye when Bryant scored 81 in January to lead the Lakers to a victory over Toronto.

“It’s not exactly the way you want to have a team win a game, but when you have to win a game, it’s great to have that weapon to be able to do that,” Jackson said.