The entrants on the top 10 this year are a sex-crazed golfer, a shock jock, a television therapist, Simon F*cking Cowell, a flamboyant singer that has never written a song, and Tyler Perry, a man who built his fortune pretending to be a fat black lady.

I can’t offer any more insight into the state of the entertainment industry and the country at large than this list does without commentary, so let’s just get through this thing and pretend it’s populated with a bunch of NPR personalities and theater actors to assuage our guilt.

10. Tiger Woods – $75 million

It must be nice to be so blessed with endorsements that you can spend the past two years not winning any golf tournaments, banging every hostess that Orland-area Outback Steakhouses can throw at you, and still find yourself with enough money that you’re one of the 10 highest-paid entertainers in the country. To be fair, Tiger Woods is far and away the most entertaining person on this list. He’s like 46,000 James Pattersons.

Also, he has Ambien sex, which I think is pretty neat.

9. Howard Stern – $76 million

The nice thing about being Howard Stern is that his standards of professionalism operate inversely to everyone else’s. If he wants to stick twin Asian midgets on a sybian for the world to see, he’ll enjoy a small ratings bump. If Dr. Phil does it life as we know it would cease to exist. Stern is tied up with Sirius/XM for a long time, so unless Son of the Beach becomes really, really popular in syndication soon, he’s going to be holding steady at $70 million bucks or so. Nothing to sneeze at.

8. Leonardo DiCaprio – $77 million

DiCaprio had a banner year last year thanks to his biggest non-Titanic films ever, Shutter Island and Inception. I had no idea that many people saw Shutter Island. Remarkably, he didn’t score a single producing credit in 2010, so all that money appears to have come from salary and endorsements, though it’s hard to imagine he didn’t get some participation in Inception.

He also is probably scoring some pretty sweet Growing Pains royalties from his role as Luke, the scrappy orphan. That’s probably the bulk of this sum.

Tyler Perry (shudder) will be answering to John C. McGinley in the latest adaptation of James Patterson’s Alex Cross in I, Alex Cross. McGinley’s character is described as “ambitious” and “vigorous.” “Vigorous,” eh? It’s not stipulated in the article, but one can safely assume that this character hates Zach Braff as well. (Variety)

And Gangster Squad’s Josh Brolin will be married to a hot redhead in Mireille Enos (The Killing). Mireille has garnered a bit of heat, having also signed on for World War Z recently. More than a wife in Gangster Squad, she will also work with Brolin in assembling his police squad as she fears for his life. Yay, terrified wife!

In the film, directed by Rob Cohen (Stealth), Perry plays detective Cross, who disrupts a murderer’s plans. So the psycho killer, played by Matthew Fox (“Lost”), decides to send the detective a tersely-worded letter — actually, he kills the poor guy’s wife. Now Cross has to bring him to justice once more, with the help of his partner Tommy Kane (Ed Burns).

Summit CEO Rob Friedman managed to get the rights partly because he oversaw the last set of Alex Cross movies at Paramount, which starred Morgan Freeman and not a guy who dressed up like a fat woman dressing up like Snooki. (Deadline)

“Fox plays Michael Sullivan, who kills both for money and thrills. He’s known as the Butcher of Sligo and shows why after Cross thwarts one of his killing attempts. Sullivan makes his retribution personal, by killing the  detective’s wife in gruesome fashion. Then it becomes a mano a mano battle between them.”

Yikes! Cross, by the way, is being played by Tyler Perry, who up to this point is best known for wearing a dress and claiming to not be afraid of no po-po. Even if this movie is terrible, it will probably still be sort of interesting. (via Deadline)