Tomorrow night, Sundance will host the official Closing Night Awards Ceremony -- but if utterly subjective hardware-distribution is what you seek, your wait is over! The First Annual Movieline Sundancies Awards are about to get underway, its twenty gleaming trophies -- each painstakingly hand-cast in the shape of a pair of golden Ugg boots -- lined up and ready to be presented to this year's list of illustrious winners. Click on for the results!
Best Use of Locations (above-ground division): Lovers of Hate
Bryan Poyser's terrific microbudget love-triangle thriller sets up an entire cat-and-mouse chase inside a sprawling mountain manse. The best part: It's located in Park City! Ingenious and meta! -stv
Best Use of Locations (below-ground division): Buried
Somehow, director Rodrigo Cortes and star Ryan Reynolds manage to maintain 90 lively minutes inside a coffin hidden somewhere in the Iraq desert. As technical achievements go, it's nothing short of astonishing. -stv
Worst Use of Close-Up: Enter the Void
Gaspar Noe's sprawling psychedelic head-trip is a technical masterpiece, with each scene literally traveling to the next by floating over Tokyo rooftops or swooping through lightbulbs, sink drains and bodily cavities. Fine -- but the slow, spiraling descent into a kidney-shaped tray holding a freshly aborted fetus proved to be a little....how do you say?...much. -sa
Best Use of Close-Up: Hesher
Young Devin Brochu's face frequently filled the entire screen, and never conveyed anything but 100% honesty. Kid's going places. -sa
Best Monologue: Rich Tillman, The Tillman Story
After rote eulogizing by military figures and celebrities at Pat Tillman's funeral, the dead soldier's younger brother Rich takes the podium with a beer in hand and unleashes a barnburner: "I didn't write shit because I'm not a writer. I'm not just going to sit here and break down on you. But thanks for coming. Pat's a fucking champion and always will be. Just make no mistake, he'd want me to say this: He's not with God. He's fucking dead. He's not religious. So, thanks for your thoughts, but he's fucking dead." -kb
Most Counterintuitive Character Name: Smurf, Animal Kingdom
The cutthroat matriarch of the film's disintegrating Australian crime family is neither blue nor three apples high nor sequestered in a mushroom. That said, her ruthlessness could easily give Gargamel a run for his money. -stv
Most Unappetizing Meal: Winter's Bone
Determined to drive some self-sufficiency into her younger siblings, Jennifer Lawrence's Ree teaches them how to gut a squishy dead squirrel for food. Delish! -kb
Most Grating Voice-Over: Kieran O'Brien, The Shock Doctrine
The Shock Doctrine, the lesser controversial of Michael Winterbottom's two Sundance offerings this year, used the narration skills of actor Kieran O'Brien, whose loud, nasal, WWII-BBC-newsreel-announcer delivery was the equivalent of a jackhammer on a* hungover skull. (*Translation: "my.") -sa
Biggest Comeback: Malin Akerman, happythankyoumoreplease
After being miscast in Watchmen and wasted in Couples Retreat, Akerman actually shines in happythankyoumoreplease as an alopecia-afflicted party girl. Who knew? -kb
Most Pervasive Narrator: Kiefer Sutherland, Twelve
Very little of interest happens in Joel Schumacher's Sundance bomb, but rest assured, Kiefer will narrate every single thing as though he were recording a special headphones track for the blind. -kb
The Golden Balls Courage-in-Filmmaking Award: Sebastian Junger & Tim Hetherington
These co-directors spent close to an entire year's deployment with a platoon stationed at the most dangerous outpost in Afghanistan, and managed to hold on to their cameras and wits even while under heavy fire. Enjoy your balls, boys -- you've earned them. -sa
Tensest Q&A: The Killer Inside Me and Catfish (tie)
Whether it was the woman asking why Sundance would program a graphic film like Killer -- then storming out of the theater -- or the man who told Catfish's filmmakers that he didn't buy their story, this year's Q&As were a contentious bunch. -kb
Most Chilling Transformation of a Formerly Unthreatening Apatowian: Jonah Hill, Cyrus
Spending one of many unsettling nights sleeping over at his new girlfriend's house, John C. Reilly runs into his jealous potential son-in-law, played by Hill, standing in a kitchen in nothing but his underwear and a T-shirt, with a butcher's knife in his hand. AAAAH!!!! -sa
Best Sex Scene: Splice
Just trust me. The more left unsaid about it, the better. -stv
Worst Sex Scene: Blue Valentine
The abortive coitus shared by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams's shattered married couple is supposed to be uncomfortable, sure. But when you just wind up feeling sorry for the exploited Williams, something went wrong somewhere. -stv
Best Incorporation of Vintage, Hardcore Gay Porn: The Kids Are All Right
You'd think the most graphic depictions of two sweaty, nude men engaging in stridently anti-Mormon activities at Sundance might have appeared in something like Enter the Void, but you'd be wrong. The lesbian couple at the center of this feel-good family comedy actually get off to the stuff, and watching Julianne Moore trying to explain to her son just why that is makes for some hilarious awkwardness. -sa
Most Egregious Vanity Project: Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. the New York Knicks
Just in case it wasn't clear that the Indiana Pacers superstar owned the rival Knicks in the early '90s, he went and co-produced a documentary about his life and triumphs to affirm it for posterity. Tacky, tacky, tacky. -stv
The "Hey -- What the Forgettable Guy From The Hangover Doing in Hasidic Garb Making Out with a Black Cocktail Waitress?" Award: Holy Rollers
Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Bartha were a treat as Holy Rollers' bickering pair of Hasidic ecstasy runners -- particularly Bartha, who finally makes a lasting impression as the bad seed who draws Eisenberg into the dangerous racket in the first place. -sa
Best Make-up: Hesher
It's not especially sophisticated, but the huge middle finger and stick-figure suicide tattoos worn by Joseph Gordon-Levitt's anarchist freak never fail to elicit a laugh. -stv
Agent of the Year Award: Alia Shawkat's Representation
As the bassist of The Runaways, Shawkat has exactly zero lines -- and yet she somehow scored third-billing. Now that's a negotiation! -sa