The Whitfield Awards 2014
Here are the categories and winners for this year’s awards. The losers have been notified by e-mail.
Worst Musical – Walking on Sunshine.
Did anyone really want or need a ‘80s jukebox musical staring Katy Brand and one of the Arterton sisters? Pissed groups of girls about to fly off to the Greek islands will love it – it’ll be a primer for all the embarrassment and relationship breaking chaos to come, but everyone else will only wheel this one out when they want to be single and have tried every other means to no avail.
Worst Twist – Colin Firth, Before I Go to Sleep
Sadly, most of the audience had gone to sleep by the time Firth, playing a concerned husband nursing his amnesiac spouse for two thirds of the running time, turned out to be a first order bastard, who kidnapped the woman he was living with, having bludgeoned the memory out of her years earlier. Why didn’t the family make a bigger effort to find her and why would Firth risk everything by taking his victim to the hotel where he attacked her? The writers forgot to tell us.
Worst Prequel – Annabelle
Did you enjoy The Conjuring? Good, then why not leave it there?
Worst Wife – Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl
We’ve all endured relationship trouble but spare a thought for Ben Affleck – no c’mon, try. His spouse framed him for her murder, killed a man, then had the audacity to come home and demand he resume his husbandly duties. I’d have had two words for her and they wouldn’t have been gone girl.
Worst Feminism – The Homesman
Hilary Swank’s story of frontier adversity and the rough end of 19th century patriarchy turned out to be Tommy Lee Jones’ tale instead. Director Tommy Lee Jones was unavailable for comment.
Best Joke – The Green Inferno
There wasn’t much to write home about in Eli Roth’s cannibal horror but a group of man eaters getting the munchies from a victim dosed up on weed was one of the highlights, particularly as it spelt doom for one of the more irritating characters. Did it matter that one suspected Roth had built the whole movie around that gag? No.
Best Submariner – Jude Law, Black Sea
If you needed someone to retrieve Nazi Gold, Jude was your man this year. He rallied together a rag tag group of aged sailors, got them into an antique boat and went hunting, having to cope with ocean ridges, mad Russians and intense flooding in the process. At the end there was even time for a smoke. Textbook. Well, apart from all the deaths.
Best Use of Tools – Denzel Washington, The Equalizer
Luckily, when faced with a troupe of killer mercenaries, ex-government killer Washington worked in a giant convenience store that could be fully and brutally weaponised. You’ve been to B&Q many times but you’ve never had this much fun, trust me. Thank God he didn’t work in a soft toy warehouse.
Best Cop Out – Ridley Scott, Exodus: Gods and Kings
Is God a righteous redeemer who punishes the guilty, albiet only having floating by and done nothing for four centuries, or a malevolent, genocidial madman who can’t quite reconcile his own wrath with his own private feeling that thou should not kill? Those looking to Ridley Scott for answers came away with a headache, and not just because the flight from Eqypt was rendered in Dolby Atmos. Don’t worry though, Christian Bale’s Moses was on hand to embody your confusion and distance himself from everything that went on, so that’s alright isn’t it?
Best Aaron Paul – Need for Speed
Amongst a pretty thankless selection, Pinkman’s appearance in an inoffensive game-to-movie conversion was the least worst thing he did on the big screen in 2014. The former Breaking Bad star certainly deserves better, so cross everything in the 12 months to come. Another year in the movie wilderness and we may lose him to Meth.
And that, my friends, was 2014. I hope it was worth it. Until next year…
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