Partly that's because of economies of scale: we simply can't afford to make the blockbusters that are a mainstay of global film. But it's also because the only possible form of low budget film that Australians will go see - comedy - has been pissed on from a great height by a seemingly endless string of duds. Why bother listing them all: You and Your Stupid Mate is all you need to know.

A decade ot two ago Australian comedy was a viable option for a film-maker, whether you wanted to make Malcolm, Death in Brunswick or The Castle. This year - just like last year, and (Boytown and Kenny aside) the year before that - no Australian feature-length comedy films were made. And so we have the following...

Worst Film Winner: Australia - 70% Nominees Rats & Cats - 20% Meat Pie - 10% Last Year's Winner Boytown

	Voter comments Meat Pie came out?! I must vote for Australia; I'm a bit of a Garnett Mae devotee, but more importantly, I'm - usually - a Baz Luhrmann devotee - that's what makes Australia so much worse. What the fuck was he thinking? - samadriel Baz Luhrmann claims the film still isn't finished. Whether he was referring to his constant editing of already-released movies or the film's running time, I'm not sure. Was there anything not to hate about this film? The publicity blitz; having Nicole Kidman's terrifying face crammed down our throats; the sheer arrogance of naming a movie after an entire country... I already feel like I've watched it twenty times and I haven't even gone to the cinema. - Moribunderast I thought it was about to end, but it went on for another hour. - Emergency Lalla Ward 10

Australia was always going to be a weird film. It was supposed to be a world-class blockbuster but anyone who's paid even the slightest attention to film over the last decade knows that a retro-romance isn't what blockbuster crowds want to see. Will Smith fighting science fiction monsters: now that's how you make your money back. Whatever his talents as a film-maker, Baz Luhrmann certainly has the skills when it comes to getting people to throw their money down a well.

More importantly for these awards, Luhrmann seems to have been committed to the idea of making a film that somehow contained the entirety of Australia, from a cast that dredged up all the great names of Aussie cinema without bothering to call on the ones who could actually act to a script that seemed to veer wildly from sweeping Aussie saga to tender romance with a hefty dose of Stolen Generation Protest Play thrown in.

Into this soup was thrown Bazza's idea of what "Australian comedy" is: the broad, bonza, all-Aussie knockabout kind of comedy that our cinema keeps throwing up time and again, from Les Patterson Saves the World to Welcome to Woop Woop to You and Your Stupid Mate. That is to say, the kind of comedy no-one pays money to go see. It's the kind of insight into our national culture that this clumsy, barely coherent, largely retarded film showed time and time again. If it had been made by a Mongolian whose knowledge of Australia came entirely from old episodes of Paul Cronin's Solo 1, it couldn't have got it more wrong.

Then again, it could have been worse: at least Rebel Wilson was nowhere to be seen.

Rats & Cats was a sign of just how starved local audiences are for film comedy. At any other time, it would never have made it out of the festival circuit. Sure, it's a film... in that it runs as long as a real film, has characters like a real film and tells a story roughly like a real film. But at its heart it's not a real film and it knows it. And it was the only Australian comedy released in 2008.

As for Meat Pie - well, it's been renamed Australian Pie, but that aside it's no closer to a screen near you in 2009 than it was in 2008. This isn't uncommon at all: there's a lot of stages in between coming up with a script and getting your movie into cinemas, and a lot of films never quite get over the finish line. It's probably better this way: Get This turned the idea of this film into something the real thing will never live up to.

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