As the anticipation hots up around next week’s Oscars, today we present two more 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.

The George Clooney Award for Silky Smooth Screen Charisma

And the winner is… George Clooney. And the runner-up is… George Clooney. While it could be construed as poor form to award the person from whom this award takes its name – not once, but twice, for first and second place – the Golden Choc-Tops would have it no other way. The simple fact is that no other actor oozed as much silky smooth liquid cool in 2009 as our boy George.

In his Oscar-nominated Choc-Tops runner-up role in Up in the Air, Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a mealy-mouthed “termination facilitator” who jets from city to city firing hard-luck employees. In Clooney’s hands, with those suave looks, that soft voice, that velvety demeanour, that — OK, I’ll stop — even a remorseless corporate tw-t is turned into an irresistibly charming creation.

But it was a vulpine corduroy-clad George Clooney that truly bedazzled ’09 audiences with a mixture of quiet dignity, well-phrased verbosity and fabulously foxy garb. This year’s George Clooney Award for Silky Smooth Screen Charisma goes to Fantastic Mr. Fox, the eponymous Clooney-voiced star of director Wes Anderson’s retro-looking stop motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book.

The chook-pilfering Mr. Fox has a makeshift plan for every unexpected event; a speech for every dinner party. His pleasant mannerisms are interspersed with rare moments of slashing wit: after the death of his nemesis, Rat, Fox says of the late rodent’s last-breath turn of conscience: “Redemption? Sure. But in the end, he’s just another dead rat in a garbage pail behind a Chinese restaurant.” Style. All style.

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The Best Page-to-Screen Cock-Up

Another year at the cinema, another array of terrible book adaptations. Some went admirably well (exhibit A, B and C: Fantastic Mr. Fox, Balibo, Precious) but most were howlers. New cinema instalments from three of the biggest book franchises on the planet emerged in 2009 (Angels and Demons, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and The Twilight Series: A New Moon). Predictably, all raked in waterfalls of dosh at the box office and all made boringly unimaginative plain-tofu blockbusters.

But the award for Best Page-to-Screen Cock-Up goes to a gushingly sentimental Hallmark romantic drama from director Robert Schwentke, who took a very good book and turned it into the dietary equivalent of a block of cheese the size of a car battery.

Audrey Niffenegger’s best selling page-turner The Time Traveller’s Wife was a punchy, cleverly structured and unconventionally told novel about a man with a “Chrono-Displacement” disorder that forces him to spontaneously vanish and re-emerge, naked, in a different time (as you do). Eric Bana plays him as a irritating aw-shucks douche, all puppy dog looks and “why me?” dialogue. The film’s emotional resonance is mushy, grotesque and faux charming, like snot and boogers on a fancily embroidered hanky.

Coming up tomorrow: Most Intense Crap In Your Pants Scene and Best Performance From an Inanimate Object