Mission: Hollywood - slumming is the new cool.

Inevitably, there comes a time in every celebrity’s life when the trappings of extraordinary wealth and ridiculously foolish amounts of material things are just not enough to create happiness. Feeling curious, lazy or bored, the celebrity turns to projects or assignments that may seem somehow beneath their inestimable talents in an effort to recapture their artistic or spiritual fire.

These efforts usually have one of two results: the pathetic one in which the celebrity ends up in something referred to as “direct to video” or the ironic one in which the celebrity makes even more extraordinary wealth, leading to the purchasing of even more ridiculously foolish amounts of material things, thus beginning the cycle all over again.

So in today’s Mission: Hollywood, let’s see if you can separate the crafty from the lazy as we look at some celebrity slumming:

Let’s face it: if you’re lending your Precious Celebrity Vocal Talents to an animated feature not being made by Pixar, you’re totally slumming. Now that Eva Longoria’s celebrity status has been elevated to Planetary Emissary, she can feel comfortable appearing in Low-Rent-Toy-Story-in-a-Supermarket Foodfight! where, she explains, the unseen world of the supermarket is divided (fourth item down) along strict societal lines: “…they have a big community and all the aisles are different parts of the town…the cereal aisle is like Times Square…the discount aisle is like the ghetto; you don’t want to go over there.”

You’re a big movie star. You’ve won an Oscar. You defined the legacy of a long-running TV show. You’re handsome, witty, a celebrated playboy and man-about-town. Naturally, your logical next move is to hawk some fancy shmancy foamy coffee - but only if it’s “classy”.

In the late 70’s when the serial-murderer-stalks-randy-teens genre was but a squealing, machete-wielding infant, making a horror movie was definitely thought of as being beneath mainstream Hollywood. But now we’re living in a post-Scream world where deconstructing this cinematic staple is as common as a flopping remake of a TV show. So we shouldn’t be surprised that Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon - kind of a “When Jason Met Spinal Tap…” mash-up - is getting strong reviews from the slasher-faithful geek community (of which Burbanked, we would note, is an enthusiastic supporter).

“Doing research for a role” is one of the most common excuses for celebrity slumming because it can be used to justify virtually any manner of “we’re just like regular folks” activities. Case in point: Courtney Cox Arquette, researching a new role as editor-in-chief of a major gossip mag, recently angered a number of her former Friends co-stars by first interviewing and then fabricating stories about them! Admittedly, we don’t have any psychological training, but doesn’t replicating the behavior of something that relentlessly plagues you, a powerful and excruciating cockroach of existence for you and your friends…isn’t this more or less completely self-despising?

Could there be a better blunt tool to dissect the low-end activities of Hollywood than the achieving-legendary-status A.V. Club’s “Commentary Tracks of the Damned”’s “Commentary Tracks of the Damned”? Admittedly, they’re poking more fun at the pretensions of the director of Oscar nominee (Oscar! Nominee!) Sylvester Stallone’s direct-to-DVD opus, but really no item on Celebrity Slumming would be complete without featuring a stern-faced, droopy-eyed Stallone pointing a gun at us.

We as film fans actually take great delight in seeing our pop culture icons debasing their careers - and when six dozen of them do it all at the same time within the context of a cheesy disaster movie, it’s like our dark hearts of envy have thrown a party and everyone’s invited. So when we see that the 1974 cornball classic Earthquake has made someone’s - anyone’s - Top 10 list, it’s a good day indeed.

Bonus Earthquake linkery! Here’s a site that has more comprehensive information about this zany, wonderful movie than any sane person would be expected to compile - including an exclusive look at the never-realized sequel!