Walls and Ceilings - Old paint and paper pulled off, down to wood

After doing some repair work on my ceiling, I have two places where the paint pulled off. One was from old water damage (near ceiling), and the other is down low on an exterior wall.

I am guessing that this was original paper (really old house) that was painted over. There is no way that I am going to strip all this paper off down to the wood and plaster right now (under time constraint), but if I just paint over these spots (from 2" sq to 1' sq), the indentation will be obvious.

Can I just level out these spots with paste, sand to smooth, and then paint the wall?

Thanks,

-john

After some research I found that what has been exposed is actually the brown paper backing of the original wall paper.

Can I use a screen, or some paste and just fill this in, and then sand and repaint?

Thanks,

-john