Conventional wisdom would suggest that they ought to know the difference between shit and sugar, but, judging from the once bankable names who are now in career life-support, that's hardly the case. John Travolta, for instance, is notorious for being his own worst enemy, someone whose inimitable gifts as an entertainer are invariably undermined by his own undiscriminating palate. After nostalgia fiend Quentin Tarantino singlehandedly returned him to superstar status with "Pulp Fiction," Travolta uncharacteristically sidestepped the minefields of his past by starring in a string of back-to-back hits. Whether out of complacency, idiocy or just plain greed, he eventually went back to his old ways and began delivering performances undeserving of his bloated, perk-heavy contracts. Coming full circle, Travolta reached his second occupational nadir this summer with the embarrassing flop "Battlefield Earth" -– an ill-advised vanity project so atrocious it makes you long for "Perfect" and "Two of a Kind."

Then there's Robin Williams, a brilliant performer who fell to the fated Oscar curse. Since snagging the best supporting actor trophy for "Good Will Hunting," Williams has senselessly jettisoned comedy for schmaltzy clunkers like "Jakob the Liar." Seemingly disgruntled by the lukewarm response to his last few flicks, Williams has gone into a self-imposed exile from the movie biz and was last seen misspending his superlative improv skills on "Whose Line Is It Anyway?"

9) The fame game
How is a star born? In many respects, the process by which one achieves stardom is about as abstruse and defective as the process by which our presidential candidates are chosen -– oftentimes we have no clue who these people are, what exactly they did, why we should pay any attention to them and how they even got there in the first place. Hollywood is the land of illusion, after all, and there is no greater illusion than convincing members of the public that they actually have a say in who makes it. In reality, those decisions are made by a clandestine ad hoc committee of publicists, agents, editors, producers and other sundry big shots long before we ever get a chance to exercise our will.

If anyone doubts our impotency to influence the course of popular culture, I encourage them to recall the media hype surrounding Matthew McConaughey's "overnight" explosion onto the scene back in 1996. Months before McConaughey's first major release ("A Time to Kill") even hit theaters, his shit-eating mug was plastered across every magazine from Vanity Fair to Newsweek –- all of which egregiously touted him as the Second Coming of Paul Newman. Taking their cue from the omnipotent wizards behind the curtain (Joel Schumacher, Bob Daly, et al.), the press slavishly hopped aboard the McConaughey bandwagon and executed a P.R. blitz tantamount to brainwashing. By the time we found out whether or not he could deliver, our collective minds had already been made up, conditioned by a subliminal advertising campaign that essentially told us that McConaughey was a new golden boy. The scary thing is that it worked: "A Time To Kill" was the tenth-highest-grossing movie of that year.

Catering to a marketplace increasingly geared toward the fickle tastes and attention spans of the MTV set, the studios have begun to churn out flavors-of-the-month with the regularity of Baskin-Robbins. Every time we turn around these days, there's a new hottie shoved down our throats (is there any magazine cover Sarah Michelle Gellar hasn't appeared on yet?). It's gotten to a point where all these cosmetically impeccable teen queens have become indistinguishable from each other -– blended together into one giant mass of silicone and collagen. For every Kate Hudson (the nepotistically aided offspring of Goldie Hawn) who manages to defy the beauty stigma and rise above the muck of mediocrity, there are a hundred expendable Tara Reid and Shannon Elizabeth clones ready to be blackballed come the first sign of mammary droopage.

10) The bubblegum pop resurgence
Thanks to their hackneyed lyrics, ungainly choreography, ludicrously hep stage outfits and grating personalities, boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync have become such glaring and overused targets of ridicule I'm almost tempted to hold my tongue ... almost. The TV industry is already addicted to this kiddie crack, banking big with awards shows and concert specials. Can the big screen producers be far behind? Not since the rule of the Osmonds and the Bay City Rollers in the '70s has there been such an infestation of milquetoast teenybopper groups onto the Billboard charts. The latest strain of this musical epidemic can be traced back to shrewd Svengali Lou Pearlman -– a corpulent, repugnant-looking character with the skeevy manner of a prowling pederast. Say what you will about Pearlman's questionable business practices ('N Sync sued him over his creative accounting), but give the man his props for building a multimillion-dollar cottage industry out of the assembly-line packaging of pretty, fresh-faced goy boys who individually possess utterly marginal singing, dancing and songwriting abilities. To rock-starved purists who yearn for the day when musicianship once again becomes in vogue, Pearlman's Frankensteinian monsters are the epitome of what's wrong with the record biz -– soulless, synthetic pop acts designed strictly to prey on the pocketbooks and hormonal longings of pubescent girls.

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