Best picture, best actor, best screenplay … you can get sleep aids like that anywhere. The real story of cinema 2005 lies in our completely arbitrary, free-associative list of the year's greatest achievements – dubious and otherwise.
Best documentary you probably didn't see
In the Realms of the Unreal
Best summer blockbuster you probably did
Batman Begins
Best actor (relaxed rules)
Gromit, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Best lead performance that will never win an Oscar
Steve Carrell, The 40-Year Old Virgin
Best comeback
Mickey Rourke, Frank Miller's Sin City
Best supporting performance that was actually a lead
Amy Adams, Junebug
Best-received supporting performance that actually stank on ice
William Hurt, A History of Violence
Best starring "performance" by a two-by-four
Bill Murray, Broken Flowers
Most valuable villain
Cillian Murphy (Batman Begins, Red Eye)
Best indie director whose moment has nonetheless passed
Todd Solondz (Palindromes)
Best movie written and directed by a New Yorker contributor
The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach)
Best movie written and directed by a waiter at an Orlando TGI Friday's
Waiting … (Rob McKittrick)
Popcorn flicks that deserved a wider audience
Constantine, George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Serenity
Popcorn flick that deserved a darker projector
Fantastic Four
Best performance by Rachel McAdams
Wedding Crashers
Worst performance by Rachel McAdams
Red Eye
Another performance by Rachel McAdams
The Family Stone
Best beaver
Three-way tie: Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe; Alexis Dziena, Broken Flowers
Best talking beaver
Three-way tie: Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe; Linda Lovelace, Inside Deep Throat
Going places
Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know); Phil Morrison (Junebug); Tim Kirkman (Loggerheads)
Ain't gonna happen
Orlando Bloom (Kingdom of Heaven, Elizabethtown)
Dumbest way to die at the movies
Shot in theater lobby after seeing Get Rich or Die Tryin'; runner-up: starring in Get Rich or Die Tryin'
Weakest argument for intelligent design
March of the Penguins
Best argument for intelligent design
Kate Hudson's torso, The Skeleton Key
Best achievement by a bear
Racking up Timothy Treadwell (Grizzly Man)
Worst achievement by a bear
Racking up Morgan Freeman but not Robert Redford or Jennifer Lopez (An Unfinished Life)
Worst special effects
A Sound of Thunder; runner-up: Rene Russo's face, Two for the Money
Best performance by an actress you'd swear was a minor
Rachel Weisz, The Constant Gardener
Worst performance by an actress you'd swear wasn't
Dakota Fanning, War of the Worlds
Lie of the year
"I saw March of the Penguins, and it honestly didn't move me one bit"; runner-up: "I saw The Chumscrubber"
Most distasteful sight of the year
Foreign object removed from Benjamin Bratt's bloody rectum (Thumbsucker); runner-up: every frame of High Tension
Over so soon?
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (76 minutes); runner-up: Jon Heder's career (Just Like Heaven)
Least convincing retards
Tie: Robin Williams, House of D; Johnny Knoxville, The Ringer
Most convincing retards
Tom 'n' Katie
Most horrific mauling by a lumbering beast
Grizzly Man, again; runner-up: Tom Arnold having sex with Maggie Gyllenhaal, Happy Endings
Best way to get your undeserving feature into the Florida Film Festival
Writing that the FFF is "one of the top 10 festivals in the world" (Chris Gore, My Big Fat Independent Movie); runner-up: being Gregg Hale (Say Yes Quickly)
"Important" movies that sucked out loud
Crash, Heroin Town
"Important" movies that were just OK
Good Night, and Good Luck; Syriana; North Country
"Important" movies that were entertaining if flawed
Munich, The Constant Gardener
"Important" movies that were better than Frank Miller's Sin City
None
Clearest sign that Hollywood is desperate for another Passion of the Christ
Campus Crusade for Christ invited to advance screenings of Elizabethtown and Walk the Line
Worst moment in film 2005
The climax of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, in which Hayden Christensen's Anakin Skywalker finally becomes … Hayden Christensen in a Darth Vader mask. Nooooooooo!
