Highway to the denim danger zone.Photo: Splashnews

Roughly a year ago, Katie morphed from Tom Cruise's sweetly bland child bride — tagging gamely along with Posh, hiding behind a curtain of hair — to a chicly coiffed and poised fashion plate who was as groomed for the grocery store as she was for the red carpet. It was one of the best style makeovers since Fergie stopped wetting her high-waisted shorts. But now, Katie shuffles to All My Sons rehearsals and her Eli Stone shoot wearing raggedy, baggy jeans either rolled up to the ankle or, worse, pegged there like she's a refugee from one of Tom's eighties flicks.

Sure, the outfit looks good from this angle.Photo: Getty Images

Then Maggie Gyllenhaal threw a wrench in our theory. Surely, promoting The Dark Knight was the perfect way for this indie princess to present her quirky personal style as a charming antidote to Hollywood’s cookie-cutter starlets. Instead, she gave us a fashion roller-coaster, sporting a schizophrenic range of looks that made us wonder if she threw them into her bags at random, possibly while blindfolded.

As if sensing our fatigue with its omnipresent marquee show, MTV has released a fresh, tear-stained trailer for The Hills designed to convince everyone that its premiere next month heralds a whole new thorny web of intrigue. And we're trying to feel excited, but we've been burned before: Last season devolved into boring retread conversations and anticlimactic three-word confrontations. So pardon our cynicism, but we're fairly sure this teaser — with its taupe love interests, melodramatic one-liners, and ruined mascara — is less a jumping-off point for awesomeness than a souped-up Cliffs Notes reel full of false hope. But to be sure, we ran the trailer through our internal Hills montage-defragging machine to try to interpret the actual path of these "plot twists" — watch for yourselves and see if you agree with our analysis.

Kelli's winning design, Daniel's plastic-cup cocktail dress, and Blayne's onesie from hell.Photos courtesy of Bravo

Fortunately, at first blush things are promising. Reprising old favorites like the grocery-store challenge, with corn-husk sorcerer Austin Scarlett judging it, reminded us why we fell in love with the show in the first place. Throw in Tim Gunn lecturing the designers for lacking originality, a character contestant (Stella) whose makeup reminds us of Cher, and the season's theme apparently shaping up to being Heidi Klum's Upper Thighs — did her legs develop a fabric allergy? — we can only conclude that the tingly sensation in our extremities must be…optimism. Here's our take on this season's crop of competitors, and who, in the words of our favorite life coach, just might make it work.

Poor Anne Hathaway. As if it weren't tough enough to promote Get Smart in the wake of dumping her skeevy jailed boyfriend, she had to grapple with last weekend's spate of splashy tabloid headlines about her love life: "The Princess and the Con-Man" on People's cover, and the touchingly subtle "BURNED BY A LOSER" from Us Weekly. If we'd had a month — or even a week — like that, we'd be on day eight of watching Ocean's Eleven while eating only ice cream and not brushing our hair. Instead, Anne has risen from the ashes looking like the proverbial $21 million bucks her ex needs to post bail. Take a look at her fashion from the past few weeks; we think you'll agree that Ms. Hathaway is the perfect poster child for how looking hot really is the best revenge.