Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult Engaged! No, Wait A Minute…

Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult are engaged!

Oh, wait a minute. Okay, that’s right, they’re not.

That’s kind of how fans of 23-year-old Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence felt this morning when, after going to bed with the news of their idol’s engagement to handsome British actor Hoult, whom she’s been dating for the past several months. Then, fans woke up this morning to be told by the internet that the fairy tale dream was only that, a dream.

Here’s what happened. The new issue of the tabloid celebrity magazine OK! hit the checkout counter of your local Rite-Aid yesterday and splashed all over the cover a big, typically attractive photo of America’s Latest Sweetheart with a giant, all-caps headline, “ENGAGED!”

Naturally, the internet went into throes of ecstasy. Sites such as Hollywood Life eagerly quoted an OK! Magazine “source,” revealing, “Jennifer is walking on air. She’s madly in love with Nicholas and is the happiest she’s ever been.”

According to what now turns out to be the totally made-up story, the 24-year-old Nicholas Hoult accompanied J-Law home for the holidays to Lexington, Kentucky. “Jennifer is extremely close to her family, ” the OK! source confided. “When she isn’t filming or promoting her movies, she spends a lot of time at her parents’ house.”

All right, great. So that means it was the perfect time for Hoult get down on one knee and pop the ol’ question, right? Well, that’s what OK!‘s source said, explaining that Lawrence didn’t make the engagement public because, “Jen likes to live a relatively modest private life. She knows news of the engagement will make that harder if not impossible. And she is obsessed with her privacy.”

Sure. What multimillionaire, Oscar-winning worldwide celebrity who stars in two or three major Hollywood productions per year and makes a point of being seen on the red carpet at every awards show on TV isn’t “obsessed with her privacy?”

Except in this case, it turns out that Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult kept their engagement private because there was no engagement to make public.

The Gossip Cop web site tried to follow up on the story only to be laughed off by a Jennifer Lawrence spokesperson, who told that site, “This is completely untrue.”

This is not the first time that OK! has “broken” an “exclusive” story about a Jennifer Lawrence-Nicholas Hoult engagement. Last November, the magazine not only reported that the barely post-adolescent Hollywood power couple were engaged, but that they were planning a wedding in the Czech Republic capital Prague, of all places, and that Jennifer Lawrence was already pregnant with their first child. Needless to say, that one turned out to be a phony story as well.