It's a bad time to be in the worst-of business.
Last month, as Hollywood was rolling out its Oscar nominations and celebrating the year's best films, across town another entity, the Razzies, was lauding the year's worst films. And those nominations were met with a collective groan.
A few days after the Razzie nominations were announced, organizers rescinded the nomination for 12-year-old Ryan Kiera Armstrong, up for worst actress for her role in the little-seen remake of "Firestarter," after backlash alleging the voting body was being too cruel to the child performer. An apology was issued, and a new rule was instituted going forward that the Razzies wouldn't nominate anyone under 18.
There doesn't seem to be much of a going forward for the Razzies. Their work is now done online in real time, and a single meme is worth a thousand Golden Raspberry statues.
They're now a relic of a bygone era where time moved slower, humor was a little cheekier and there was a Hollywood machine worth razzing.
Growing up, I loved year-end lists. I would devour them. People magazine, Rolling Stone, Time and especially Entertainment Weekly: it was like Christmas when they came out, all the more because it was actually Christmas when they came out.
In addition to best-of lists, they published worst-of lists, and those were just as much fun as their counterparts. Sometimes your faves would end up on the worst-of list, or a critic would savage one of the year's sacred cows by listing it among the worst films of the year.
It was an insight into the critic's mindset, an eye-opening exercise in tastes and taste-making. It wasn't mean-spirited: critics love movies, that's why they get into the field in the first place. But sometimes movies are bad, and writing about bad movies can be just as enlightening as writing about the good ones. In a world of stuffy prestige flicks, a romp with a bad movie is just the cleanse moviegoers need.
Over the years, publications have systematically eliminated worst-of lists. A generational shift in readership and the general attitude toward perceived meanness, fostered by the internet, has deemed these lists problematic, and the intention of them more difficult to discern. Worst-of lists are seen as picking on — or worse, bullying — bad films and the people who made them, and those are issues no one wants to deal with anymore.
Which brings us to the Razzies. The Golden Raspberry Awards were instituted in 1981 as a way to "celebrate" the year's worst films. Over the years, they attained a certain level of prominence, and even semi-respectability: when Halle Berry won worst actress for 2004's "Catwoman," she showed up to accept her trophy, and Sandra Bullock did the same for her role in "All About Steve" in 2010. She famously went on to collect an Oscar for best actress for "The Blind Side" at the Oscars the next night.
But over the last decade and some change, a timeline that dovetails with the rise of social media, the Razzies — which are determined by an open-sourced body of film fans who pay $40 a year for membership privileges — have been derided as lowbrow at best, cruel at worst. The kerfuffle over this year's "Firestarter" nomination didn't help matters, nor did last year's incident where a category dedicated to "Worst Performance by Bruce Willis" was eliminated after it was revealed the "Die Hard" star suffers from aphasia.
The changing landscape of Hollywood has also affected the Razzies. This year's nominees for worst picture are the Marvel punching bag "Morbius" and four titles released on streamers: the Netflix Marilyn Monroe biopic "Blonde," the Disney+ remake of "Pinnochio" and two films you've probably never heard of, the Kaya Scodelario-starring "The King's Daughter" and "Good Mourning," a stoner comedy starring Colson "Machine Gun Kelly" Baker.
There's a good chance "Good Mourning" is one of the year's worst films, but how many people have seen it or even care enough about it to get miffed about it? If the Razzies aren't ruffling a few feathers, there's no point to them. They've become passe as film culture has splintered into a thousand tiny pieces, and calling out streaming titles just isn't the same as thumbing your nose at big screen stinkers such as "Showgirls" or "Wild Wild West," the worst picture winners of 1995 and 1999.
"Showgirls" has of course been reclaimed as glorious pop camp, as has the delightful "Spice World," a worst picture nominee in 1998. "Spice World" was up for nine Razzies that year — as a collective, the Spice Girls won the award for worst actress — but at the time those nominations seemed as tongue-in-cheek as the movie itself.
That's just not the case anymore. Times and attitudes change, and the Razzies are a VHS tape in a streaming world. Even worse, they're late to the party: every joke there is to make about "Morbius," the most wide-reaching title of the year's worst picture slate, has already been made online, those jokes minted into memes, those memes now close to a year old and covered in digital dust. At this point, "Morbius" slander is just kicking a dead horse.
There was a whiff of desperation in the statement from Razzies co-founder John B. Wilson following the "Firestarter" flap. "We have never intended to bury anyone's career," said the former film publicist. "We all make mistakes, very much us included. Since our motto is 'Own Your Bad,' we realize that we ourselves must also live up to it."
The mea culpa illustrated just how out of step the Razzies have become, and if they'd really own their own bad, they'd quietly step away. It was once an honor just to be nominated, but that time has passed.
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