The Golden Choc-Tops: 2009's most under-appreciated actor ... and wankiest director

Today we present the first two gongs in Crikey's inaugural Golden Choc-Top awards: The Most Under-Appreciated Performance of 2009 and The Mutton Dressed As Lamb Award For Pseudo Intellectual Cinematic Wankerism.

As the anticipation hots up around next week’s Oscars, today we present the first two gongs in Crikey‘s inaugural Golden Choc-Top awards. If you haven’t yet cast your vote in the Golden Choc-Tops Readers’ Choice segment, head here to have your say.

Most Under-Appreciated Performance of 2009

Early February the academy announced its 2010 nominations, officially extinguishing portly star Kevin James’ hopes of taking home a golden statuette for his sizeable (ho ho) work in Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

Their list includes a bunch of worthy choices (such as Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart, Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds and Gabourey Sidibe and Mo’Nique for Precious), some strange choices (Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon for Invictus) and some truly inexplicable choices (Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side, Penélope Cruz for Nine).

Like almost every awards-distributing film body on the planet, with the honourable exception of Massachusetts’ made-up sounding Chlotrudis Awards (which nobody has heard of anyhow), the Oscars ignored one of 2009’s most head-turning performances: the tour de force one man powerhouse of acting oomph from star Sam Rockwell in Duncan Jones’s sensational psychological SCI-FI, Moon.

Rockwell is frame-chewing outstanding as an astronaut afflicted by a severe case of space cabin fever, accompanied in his ship only by the HAL-inspired, Kevin Spacey-voiced computer GERTY. With no supporting cast, it was up to Rockwell to make the film work — and he does so with dazzling aplomb, a performance marked by paranoia, confusion, exasperation and reality-upheaving internal conflicts.

The Mutton Dressed As Lamb Award For Pseudo Intellectual Cinematic Wankerism

Just as garden variety film reviewers like to use words such as “auteur”, “mise en scene”, “visceral” and “aesthetics” to flex their supposed cinematic know-how, sub-standard filmmakers similarly use a range of techniques to lend superficial films the illusion of depth. The Mutton Dressed As Lamb Award For Pseudo Intellectual Cinematic W-nkerism seeks to acknowledge the year’s most striking cases.

Director John Lee Hancock badly misfired when he attempted to infuse his wobbly story of yoof-come-good, The Blind Side, with bona fides by incorporating references to a literary work — but children’s picture book Ferdinand the Bull proved a somewhat ineffectual choice. Ol’ Ferdinand snubbed the film’s world premiere, reportedly livid about Sandra Bullock’s Best Actress nomination.

But last year, one film made by a Masters Grad from the school of How To Piss Off Christian Lobbying Groups While Appeasing Film Festival W-nkers Who Have Nothing Better To Do Other Than Convince Themselves That The Darkly Shot “Artistic” Drama They Are Currently Watching Is Not Slow And Boring But In Fact Rivetingly Psychological (HTPOCLGWAFFWWHNBTDOTCTTDSADTACWINSABBIFRP for short) took pseudo intellectual cinema to spectacular new levels of shameless pomposity. The culprit was serial decorum-destroying Dutch director Lars von Trier (who reportedly added the “von” during his stay at a Danish film school — apropos, of course, of nothing) and is the depressingly shot, allegedly psychological drama Antichrist.

The film follows a creepy couple who retreat to a cabin in the woods after the tragic death of their young son. Their boy “falls” out a window during the film’s opening scene, presumably in an attempt to extricate himself from the narrative mess that follows. The director proceeds to employ every arty farty play in the book: scenes shot in black and white, European opera soundtrack selections, obscure motifs, references to Freud, random pointless shots of animals, resolutely un-s-xy presentation of human body parts, nameless protagonists (they are known only as “He” and “She”) long energy-draining conversations about grief and remorse, etc, etc.

Remember that old episode of The Simpsons, when a film festival comes to Springfield and Barney Gumble makes a short about his life as the town alcoholic? Antichrist is that film inflated to feature length format. Von Trier, unfortunately, is not taking the p-ss.