Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. We’ve got eight new trailers for you this week from all-star directors and former child stars; check ‘em all out after the jump.

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1. In her capacity as creative director of Polaroid, Lady Gaga has designed the GL10 Instant Mobile Printer, a device that allows you to print photos from your smartphone via Bluetooth. We assume Polaroid uses the term “designed” loosely. [via NME]

2. Your daily actor/project Mad Lib: Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio are collaborating — as both executive producers and stars — on a cop drama for NBC. The working title is Blue Tilt. [via Deadline]

3. Yesterday, the Internet got all worked up over the news that Real Housewife of DC/White House party crasher Michaele Salahi had been kidnapped. The story of what actually happened is fairly complicated, but in case you have as little time for this item as we do, here’s the punchline: She ran off with Journey guitarist Neal Schon. Really. [via LA Times]

4. Roman Polanski was famously arrested in Zurich at the request of the US Justice Department back in 2009, but he will return to the city September 27 to receive the lifetime achievement award the city’s film festival had hoped to bestow upon him before he was taken into custody. [via Guardian]

5. And, if you thought the Michaele Salahi story was bizarre, here’s an incredible headline for you: “Nicolas Cage awoken by naked man with Fudgesicle.”

Bonus buzz: 19 Dogs with Beards

1. Starting next Monday, Lady Gaga will be streaming her new album, Born This Way, in FarmVille; players will have to complete tasks for access to each of the tracks. Says Gaga: “I want to celebrate and share Born This Way with my little monsters in a special way that’s never been done before. Zynga has created a magical place in FarmVille where my fans can come play and be the first to listen to the album.” [via THR]

2. Fox kicked off the 2011 schedule announcement season by cancelling five of its more forgettable shows and picking up four new ones — including Zooey Deschanel’s The New Girl, “a comedy about a girl who leaves her boyfriend and moves in with a bunch of immature, wacky guys.” [via A.V. Club]

3. Oprah Winfrey is planning not one, but two episodes with James Frey during the final full week of her talk show. The shows will air May 16 and 17. Does anyone else find this totally strange? [via NYP]

4. The Dude’s trademark, zip-front cardigan sweater — one of four created for the costume department of The Big Lebowski, and the only one worn by Jeff Bridges — is going up for auction this weekend in Beverly Hills. [via CinemaBlend]

5. Ethan Hawke has joined Colin Farrell and Bryan Cranston in the cast of the Total Recall remake. Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel are in negotiations for the female leads. [via THR]

Bonus link: Hanksy Strikes Again!

1. The 2011 Golden Globes nominations have been announced, and Black Swan, Glee, The Social Network, and The Kids Are All Right all scored multiple nods, while The King’s Speech leads the pack with seven. View the full list here.

2. Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Carpenter — who play a brother and sister on Showtime’s Dexter, which has always kind of creeped us out — are filing for divorce after nearly two years of marriage. [via EW]

3. George Clinton says that his signature was forged to clear a sample for two tracks by the Black Eyed Peas, and is now seeking millions in damages for copyright infringement. [via Guardian]

4. Ethan Hawke is in talks to star in a new show on FOX. “Described as a high octane procedural, Exit Strategy centers on a team of five experts associated with the CIA who are deployed when a CIA operation goes bad to extract the ones involved before it’s too late. Hawke would play the team leader, the architect of exit strategy who also empathizes with the people they extract and would rather die than let them get hurt. Each episode would tackle a different crisis in a different country.” [via Deadline]

5. After an attempt to make a grand entrance via harness went bad, a bleeding Hugh Jackman was removed from the set of Oprah in Australia earlier today. But he’s OK! He later returned and carried on with his scheduled interview segment. [via THR]

Bonus link: Top 25 Gawker Passwords

Acting and writing are not so different. Both require discipline, facility with language, and the ability to disappear into a world that is not quite reality. And with more credibility than the all-too-frequent actor/musician vanity crossover, the actor-as-author subset has its own self-congratulatory cachet. With a slew of new books by better known screen personalities hitting stores this fall, here’s a tribute to ten thespians who have taken on the literary arena.

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It may not be the Nobel Prize, but the competition for this year’s “Bad Sex in Fiction” award is just as stiff (cringe — pun intended). Philip Roth is on the Literary Review’s shortlist, and he’s in good company — current nominees include Amos Oz, Nick Cave, and John Banville, while past candidates include such literary giants as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, and Tom Wolfe. Now in its 17th year, fiction’s most notorious honor was dreamed up by Auberon Waugh (Evelyn’s son) “with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing, or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels.”

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Back in the days when we still lived in dorms, around the time that college graduation loomed on the horizon and we were cowering in its shadow, two movies got us through the stress: Kicking and Screaming (no, not the one with Will Ferrell) and Reality Bites. No finer films have yet been made that speak to the fear and desperation associated with leaving the confines the liberal arts. As a result of repeat viewings at that time in our lives, we might have inflated attachments to Ethan Hawke and Josh Hamilton.

So we were a little excited by the latest production from Sam Mendes’ Bridge Project, The Winter’s Tale, which features both actors. Truth be told, we expected Hamilton to outshine Hawke. Did he not remain an indie darling while Hawke became a hearthrob, and then, perhaps, a hack (see: his director credit on that Lisa Loeb video; two mediocre novels and a flopped film adaptation)? Does this not imply some vague standard of quality related to performing the Bard on the boards?

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Photo: Joan Marcus

The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov’s final play, begins with the arrival of Liubov to her childhood estate, which is about to be auctioned off to cover her debts. Kopakhin, a millionaire of peasant origins who grew up with Liubov, has a plan to save the estate and the orchard, and Gaiev, Liubov’s brother, has plans of his own. Nonetheless, the auction takes place just as surely as Godot never arrives, leaving Chekhov the opportunity to play with variations on the work’s major theme: abundant affection coupled with an absence of tact.

Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of the play is in production at BAM until March 8, under the direction of Sam Mendes. We expected nothing short of perfection from Stoppard, but, shockingly, he seems oblivious to the importance of “tact” in the play’s construction. (In one important instance, the line “But you have to, you have to express yourself differently” is flatly rendered as “That’s not the same thing.”) Because the major theme of The Cherry Orchard was lost in translation, the actors are not properly conducted toward a full realization of the play, even with a pro like Mendes at the helm. They’re on their own in this cacophonous production. Some manage to strike the right notes anyway; others are painfully sharp.

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Last year Hamlet 2, sold to Focus Features for a cool $10 million making it one of the biggest deals ever to go down at Sundance. The year before Little Miss Sunshine went to Fox Searchlight for the same hefty price. The first film, most of you probably didn’t see, but it was kind of funny — just not $10 million funny. (This was our favorite part.) The latter won two Academy Awards and that year’s Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature. Go figure.

So what films are poised to land this year’s double-digit deal given the current economy? Variety has a few starry-eyed ideas about it here; we provide a cheat sheet for the buzziest flicks after the jump.

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