Welcome to the first annual Hooksexup Red-Band Awards, honoring all that was sexy in film this year. From A Single Man to Up in the Air, from those actors who achieved sex-symbol status to those who saw it slip away, from the hottest thing on screen to the least erotic: we've consulted our experts, and the winners have finally been chosen. Join us for the exciting results.

SEXIEST PICTURE
A Single Man

It’s not just that Colin Firth swims around naked in a pool and skinny dips with pouty pretty boy (and Sexiest Performance nominee) Nicholas Hoult. And it’s not just Julianne Moore’s eyeliner and lip gloss. It’s not even that virtually every second of the film is suffused with longing glances, suppressed passion, and desperate yearning. While all that clearly helped, A Single Man was voted Hooksexup’s Sexiest Picture of 2009 simply because it was the one movie we literally wanted to have sex with, thanks to fashion designer-cum-film director Tom Ford’s sumptuous eye for visuals and Mad Men-on-Ecstasy early ‘60s fashion porn. Plus: great acting and especially great writing (by Ford and David Scearce, adapting a novel by Christopher Isherwood) are always totally hot. — Andrew Osborne

Runners-Up: Duplicity, An Education, Up in the Air

 

BEST SEX SCENE
Lluís Homar, Broken Embraces

 

Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces opens in the apartment of a famous former movie director who has gone blind, and who, when we meet him, has persuaded a beautiful, statuesque blonde to help guide him across the street and upstairs to his home. Once settled in, he effortlessly convinces her to help him make sure that he's still in full working order below the eyes. When these spirited preliminaries are over, the woman leaves, never to be seen again, and the movie can begin to explain, in flashback, how the director went about losing his career, his eyesight, and his one true love (Penelope Cruz, demonstrating once again that those who've never seen her in a Spanish-speaking role have no idea what they're missing). No doubt all of this was very sad for him, but it wouldn't do for a good-looking guy in an Almodóvar movie to just sit around crying about it. — Phil Nugent

Runners-Up: Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, Adventureland; Jason Statham and Amy Smart, Crank: High Voltage, George Clooney and Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air

 

WORST SEX SCENE
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, Antichrist

Perhaps it’s a bit of a stretch to call what happens between Gainsbourg and Dafoe late in Lars von Trier’s 2009 outrage Antichrist a “sex scene” – at least, that’s not the way we remember it from health class – but there’s no question it was the worst thing to happen to genitals on a movie screen last year. Gainsbourg, whose sanity is slipping away following the death of her toddler son, has finally had enough of psychiatrist husband Dafoe’s patronizing attempts to cure her, so she does what any of us would do under the circumstances: she smashes his testicles with a large block of wood, then jerks him off until he ejaculates blood. We’re pretty sure this isn’t in the Kama Sutra, but if you make it this far into Antichrist, you might as well stick around for Gainsbourg’s encore, in which she snips off her own clitoris with a rusty pair of scissors. That’s why we love Lars von Trier: there’s a little something for everyone. — Scott Von Doviak

Runners-Up: Matt Czuchry and Yvette Yates, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell; Katherine Heigl and vibrating underwear, The Ugly Truth; Patrick Wilson and Malin Ackerman, Watchmen

 

SEXIEST PERFORMANCE IN A MOTION PICTURE, FEMALE
Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air

To watch Vera Farmiga make suave, cocky lady-killer George Clooney weak in the knees in Up in the Air is to wonder where she’s been all our lives. True, she did turn our heads as the sexy shrink who scored both Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed, but aside from that blip on the radar, her filmography has been a perilous terrain riddled with pitfalls. (Running Scared, anyone?) That should change thanks to her Oscar-nominated turn as a corporate frequent flyer who aptly describes herself to Clooney’s similarly well-traveled hatchet man as “you with a vagina.” It can’t be easy to cast the woman who makes The Cloon realize he’s met his match, but Farmiga pulls it off with ease, humor, and piercing ice-blue eyes. — Scott Von Doviak

Runners-Up: Penelope Cruz, Broken Embraces; Melanie Laurent, Inglourious Basterds; Amanda Seyfried, Jennifer’s Body

 

SEXIEST PERFORMANCE IN A MOTION PICTURE, MALE
George Clooney, Up in the Air

There is a moment in Up in the Air when Anna Kendrick's twenty-something, recently hired career-girl says of George Clooney's Ryan Bingham, "No, I don't even think of him that way, he's old." And in this moment you might wonder, "Wait, is her character blind and deaf? How did I miss that?" Because even in this role — as a man hired out to lay off other companies' employees — Clooney's charm is irrepressible. In fact, it's a requirement: without those soulful eyes and warm, gravelly voice, his character might never gain our sympathy. But Clooney can sell anything, whether it's an inspirational talk about leaving all emotional bonds in the dust or a heart-to-heart about how the most important moments of our lives are the ones we share with others. Hell, by the end of the movie, we'd even be happy to have the man fire us. — James Brady Ryan

Runners-Up: Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker; Taylor Lautner, New Moon; Nicholas Hoult, A Single Man