Cult MTL Academy Rewards

 
The people have spoken! Cult MTL readers have determined the results of our Academy Rewards challenge, laying down essential opinions on the cinematic issues that the real Oscars lack the cojones to tackle. Meanwhile, the sharpest-minded Oscar predictors among our readership won themselves a modest haul of cinematic prizes, while one unlucky guesser will be walking home with a grab-bag of bad movies, and a little consolation prize.
 
Most outrageous Oscar omission
The Master 37%
Moonrise Kingdom 34%
Rust and Bone 11%
Skyfall 10%
Holy Motors 8%

Our readers were pretty much on board with the critical consensus on this one, with the two Andersons (P.T. and Wes) considered the most glaring in their absence from the annual honours. We can neither confirm nor deny that Skyfall and Holy Motors made the list due to Cult MTL staff preference, but surely the acclaimed Rust and Bone could have got in the Foreign Language Film category at least.

 

Most outrageous Oscar inclusion
Les Misérables 39%
Silver Linings Playbook 31%
Beasts of the Southern Wild 15%
Django Unchained 8%
Life of Pi 7%

Yeah, what was up with musical clusterfuck Les Miz being on the list? We actually kind of liked Silver Linings Playbook, but it’s definitely an anomaly in Oscar territory. Beasts had enough haters to contend, but our readers generally agreed with the critical praise of Django and Pi.

 

Best comedy
21 Jump Street 33%
This Is 40 25%
Goon 22%
Wanderlust 13%
The Dictator 7%

A remake of an ’80s series with Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill sounded pretty brutal to a lot of critical ears, but audiences (and Cult MTL readers) felt otherwise. Canadian hockey comedy Goon came pretty close to matching the all-powerful Apatow, while another Paul Rudd vehicle, Wanderlust, brought up the rear (his monologue to the mirror was brilliant, admit it), with Sacha Baron-Cohen left in the wake (oh, how fickle are the fates to the Borat creator).

Worst movie
Piranha 3DD 35%
Resident Evil: Retribution 22%
Alex Cross 22%
Cloud Atlas 14%
The Paperboy 7%

The relative critical praise of the first Piranha remake, compared to that of its sequel, just shows how razor-thin is the line between enjoyably trashy and just plain terrible. Mila Jovovich has basically overdrawn her likeability capital on the Resident Evil franchise, while Alex Cross combined Tyler Perry and generic thriller to the detriment of both. The widely panned Cloud Atlas fared relatively well with our readers, while The Paperboy barely figured — didn’t you guys read our review?

Worst performance
Adam Sandler, That’s My Boy 38%
Rihanna, Battleship 33%
Tyler Perry, Alex Cross 15%
Gerard Butler, Playing for Keeps 14%
John Cusack, The Paperboy 0%

Somebody out there enjoys Adam Sandler movies enough that they keep raking in cash, but it’s clearly not our discriminating readers. Rihanna, meanwhile, proves she should stick to her day job (if that). Tyler Perry’s foray into thriller territory was ill-advised, and in Gerard Butler’s case, it seems that it was audiences who were misguided to think he could do anything except yell with his shirt off. Looks like there are still enough Say Anything fans to keep Cusack off this list despite his participation in The Paperboy.

Most pointless remake
Total Recall 43%
Red Dawn 20%
Les Misérables 17%
Frankenweenie 10%
House at the End of the Street 10%

We’d have to agree about the Total Recall remake; the original, while hardly anyone’s idea of a masterpiece, was good campy fun, whereas the remake was none of the above. Jingoistic actioner Red Dawn should have stayed in the ’80s, Les Misérables we’ve covered above, Tim Burton we’ll get to below, and the less said about House at the End of the Street, the better.

Actor in greatest need of a career intervention
Johnny Depp, Dark Shadows 34%
Colin Farrell, Total Recall 34%
Mark Wahlberg, Contraband, Ted  16 %
Samuel L. Jackson, The Avengers, Django Unchained, Meeting Evil, The
Samaritan 10%
Bill Murray, High Park on Hudson 6%

Johnny Depp can’t stop acting in mediocre Tim Burton films. They’ve developed a co-dependent relationship that needs to stop for the good of both them, not to mention ours. But Farrell’s participation in the rotten Total Recall remake was enough to catapult him up the ranks to a tie in this ignominious category. Fewer actors out there appear in a more equal ratio of pretty damn good stuff and total crap like Marky Mark… perhaps, as Michael Caine said, it’s just that bad movies pay the same as good ones. Sam Jackson, we love you, but two words: quality control. And as for Bill Murray, he clearly still has his legions of admirers, though his turn as FDR was pretty crap by most accounts, including our own.

Most played-out directorial schtick
Tim Burton, Frankenweenie, Dark Shadows 41%
Judd Apatow, This Is 40 26%
Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained 17%
Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom 13%
Guy Maddin, Keyhole 3%

Burton, it’s time for a reboot — not of another series, classic children’s book or one of your own damn films, but of your career and artistic vision in general. Real talk. Apatow’s mix of bourgeois angst and toilet talk is potentially also in need of some rejigging. Tarantino and Anderson have a few of their critics (including our own in the case of Django), but Maddin is clearly still beloved (in fact, he was only included on this list because of a grouchy Cult MTL employee who shall remain anonymous).

Hottest actor
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Looper 39%
Channing Tatum, Magic Mike 25%
Mathias Schoenaerts, Rust and Bone 20%
Ezra Miller, The Perks of Being a Wallflower 9%
Garrett Hedlund, On the Road    7%

There’s a certain relief in knowing that good old-fashioned handsome charm (Levitt) beats out big muscles (Tatum, Schoenarts), pretty-boy features (Miller) and, uh, old-fashioned handsome charm (Hedlund) — but maybe the latter’s poor showing had to do with the fact that practically no one saw On the Road.

Hottest actress
Marion Cotillard, Rust and Bone 40%
Jessica Chastain, Lawless 19%
Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook 15%
Emily Blunt, Looper 14%
Anne Hathaway, The Dark Knight Rises 12%

Cotillard easily dominated the competition in this category, proving her desirability even with both legs digitally removed. Chastain may have attracted actual Academy attention for Zero Dark Thirty, but gained points here by dropping her laundry in the relatively obscure gangster period piece Lawless. Lawrence’s catsuited dancing and jogging in Silver Linings, Blunt’s drool-worthy almost-masturbation scene in Looper and Hathaway’s leotard-clad super-antics were left to divide the spoils.

Best sex scene
Michelle Williams and Luke Kirby’s lengthy montage of just about every
kind of sex imaginable, Take This Waltz 31%
Stuffed teddy bear Ted has grocery store sex with Jessica Barth atop
fresh produce, Ted 21%
Kristen Stewart simultaneously jerks off Garrett Hedlund and Sam
Riley, On the Road 18%
Belgian beefcake Mathias Schoenaerts initiates Marion Cotillard to the
joys of post-amputation sex, Rust and Bone 17%
Juliette Binoche gets banged by R-Patz in a limo, Cosmopolis 13%

Cult MTL readers proved there’s nothing like sheer quantity to satisfy their lustful urges in rewarding Sarah Polley’s dramatic display of sexual variety. We kind of included that Ted scene as a joke, but hey, whatever floats your boat, guys. Kristen Stewart’s relatively strong showing demonstrates that a double handjob can overcome both Twilight prejudice and a movie that barely anyone saw. Rust and Bone’s unusual pairing was close behind, while speaking of Twilight, its other alumnus and a veteran French beauty brought up the rear, pun very much intended.

Best grossout
A piranha hiding inside a lady devours a dude’s junk during sex,
Piranha 3DD 33%
Two slaves have a hand-to-hand fight to the death in a salon as their
white overlords sip cocktails, Django Unchained 25%
Noomi Rapace self-aborts an alien fetus, Prometheus 20%
Matthew McConaughey forces Gina Gershon to perform fellatio on a piece
of fried chicken, Killer Joe 20%
Eric Bana cauterizes his amputated finger on a snowmobile engine,
Deadfall 2%

The numbers don’t lie — we can only take away from this that our readers consider Gina Gershon fellating fried chicken to be of equal grossness to an alien fetus self-abortion. Oh, and that either is only 5% grosser than slaves fighting. What can we say? We’re not here to judge. But yeah, that Piranha scene was hella gross.

 

Best villain
Javier Bardem, Skyfall 57%
Every monster in the history of the universe, The Cabin in the Woods 21%
Tom Hardy, The Dark Knight Rises 19%
Jean-Claude Van Damme, The Expendables 2 5%
Jeff Daniels, Looper 0%

Bardem’s campy performance in the latest Bond installment was the easiest victory by far in this year’s poll. The Cabin’s cavalcade of monsters barely beat out Hardy’s musclebound and mumble-mouthed performance, leaving Van Damme in the dust and Daniels without a vote to his name (come on, he was awesome).

We congratulate the lucky (or savvy) folks who correctly guessed all the top categories in the actual Oscars. We’ll be contacting them shortly to award these prizes:
1st prize: 1 RVCQ festival pass, 2 tickets to Chaos & Order at the SAT
2nd prize: 2 Cinéma du Parc tickets, 2 tickets to Chaos & Order at the SAT
3rd prize: Holy Motors DVD, 2 tickets to Chaos & Order at the SAT

And to the supremely unlucky person who got all the answers wrong, your luck just got even worse: you’ll be getting a sackful of the year’s worst DVDs.

Thanks to everyone who participated! ■