The official website of the Golden Raspberries Awards, better known as the Razzies, looks like it was designed by a twelve-year-old circa 1998. This is, frankly, appropriate, since the Razzies have long had the sense of humour and cultural awareness of a twelve-year-old, and of late, they’ve had about the sensitivity of a twelve-year-old from fifteen years ago. I’m pretty sure even most modern twelve-year-olds know that “trannie” is not an inherently funny term nor one that should be used if you aren’t actually trying to be offensive. Though I do note that someone seems to have pointed that latter out to them, as it’s almost expunged from the nominees list after having been ubiquitous on the shortlist.
The Razzies were created in 1980 in response to the glitz of the Oscars, not to mention as a counterpoint to their ostensible celebration of the best in film. (Any film buff can recite to you chapter and verse about where the Oscars have gotten it wrong, and few will actually cite How Green Was My Valley if they really know about film history.) If nothing else, they serve to crystalize a moment in time; Can’t Stop the Music and Xanadu were both big contendors that year. If you want to know what the big laughingstock movies of any given year were, you can do no better than to check the list of Razzie nominees.
But perhaps that’s the real problem. The nominees lists are also full of singers, athletes, and other non-acting celebrities who try to act. (This year, Shaquille O’Neal is up for Blended.) And, yes, many of those performances are indeed terrible, and we all knew it. But did we expect anything else? Atlas Shrugged 3 only puts in one appeance on the list this year, for Worst Remake, Rip-Off or Sequel; surely whoever plays the lead in that must be an inherently worse actress than Charlize Theron, even at her worst, but does anyone even remember her name? She isn’t a convenient scapegoat, because no one knows her name. Or whoever got stuck actually playing John Galt. But Adam Sandler for the umpteenth time? Sure, why not?
I am not one of the people who delightedly watches bad movies. I do not cherish them. However, I know people who do, and with few exceptions, the movies on the Razzies list are not the kind of movies they actually watch. Usually, these are big-budget bad movies (for obvious reasons, I doubt this is true of Atlas Shrugged 3), which are a different kind of bad. Honestly, big-budget bad movies are usually bad in a dreary sort of way. They’re boring. And while I’m pretty sure a couple of this year’s lower budget Razzie nominees are boring, they’re boring the way your Born-Again uncle at Thanksgiving or that college roommate who just discovered Ayn Rand are boring. Being lectured at is always boring, though being lectured to isn’t necessarily.
A lot of movies get made every year. IMDb has 9376 movies under “movies made in 2014,” and I’m pretty sure that doesn’t include TV—though it might include made-for-TV. Are there movies on that list worse than Transformers 4, Expendables 3, or even Saving Christmas? Almost certainly. Oh, I haven’t seen them. But then, in most cases, no one has seen them, since they slip in and out of a few local theatres somewhere without making a cultural sensation. It’s a heck of a lot easier to pick the best performances of a year, because good performances make themselves known in a way that, even in this age of social media, bad ones frequently do not.
It’s also worth noting that pretty much all a man has to do in order to get a Razzie nomination is dress in drag. Dustin Hoffman seems to have ducked for his Tootsie performance, possibly because even the Razzies didn’t feel they could dodge the critical acclaim on that one, but a few minutes of poking around the nominees list last week turned up drag performances by three different actors, all nominated in the appropriate (lead or supporting) actress category. Indeed, I am now greatly surprised to discover that Eddie Murphy only has one nomination in a female category, since there’s the Nutty Professor movies to look at as well.
Similarly, Gods help you if there is some obvious way to insult the name of your movie. Looking up the Tootsie information helped me find an entry for Conan the Bavarian. There’s this year’s “trannies” debacle. And so forth. Are these puns clever? Okay, there’s the argument that puns are never clever, but I don’t believe that to be true, myself. Just that they seldom are, and the puns of the Razzies are not going to be on anyone’s demonstration that it’s possible.
And finally, let’s get to that website, shall we? Because wow. Okay, so at least nothing is flashing, and no tinkly synthesized music plays when the website loads. But it’s a bad colour scheme which seems to ignore issues of readability. There is a homepage. There is a forum. There does not appear to be much else. Well, except several encouragements for you to buy a membership, which will make you eligible to vote. (Which honestly makes the Golden Globes look reputable.) The page is so busy that it’s hard to know where to look first. The history they encourage you to look up? That’s in their forum; there is no comprehensive list of past nominees or winners, just a series of forum posts which go in chronological order by when the last post was added, not by anything to do with the years in which things were nominated. And for the love of Gods, who doesn’t know about spellcheck these days?
