The Razzies: Mean-Spirited Mischief Makers or A Necessary Counterweight To The Stuffy, Self-Serious Oscars?

A career publicist, John J. B. Wilson has always been proactive about his own narrative-building. He’s repeatedly laid out the origin story for the Golden Raspberry Awards in countless interviews and, most authoritatively, 2005’s The Official Razzie Movie Guide: following a 99-cent double feature of disco kitsch artifacts Can’t Stop the Music and Xanadu in 1980, he entertained the natural and inevitable thought that these films were so sublimely awful, they deserved an award for it. When his regular Oscar telecast viewing party rolled around, after the ceremony wrapped up, he distributed ballots to his assembled pals and invited them to bestow special citations upon the year’s worst of the worst. The night’s charm came from its casual cheapness, with Wilson clad in a chintzy dimestore tux as emcee, all prizes presented from behind a cardboard lectern, and a broomstick topped with a foam ball for a mic. To this day, the un-coveted statuette is slapped together from faux-wood-finish paper glued around a jar lid spray-painted gold.

What began as a night of good-natured ramshackle revelry between friends in on the joke has expanded into an institution all its own, now in its 44th year of celebrating badness. This year, the ignominious tradition’s growth received the ultimate legitimization in the form of a series (“And The Razzie Goes To…”) on boutique streaming platform The Criterion Channel, their business model premised on a high-bar imprimatur of quality. The collection showcases wrongfully maligned strokes of cockeyed genius, such films maudit as gaudy satire Showgirls and absurdist comedy Freddy Got Fingered, alongside true dreck like Tom Cruise vehicle Cocktail or Pam Anderson sleazefest Barb Wire, noteworthy for what the Library of Congress would call “cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance.” The screening slate invites viewers to consider the subjectivities of taste, how and why some movies are given thumbs-down, and by which self-appointed arbiters. It’s also a salute to Hollywood’s thumb-biters-in-chief, their efforts a rowdy reminder that loving something means you can make fun of it, too.

As of late, however, not everyone’s laughing along. Criterion’s implicit ratification comes at a time when each awards season brings a fresh round of earnest bile spewed in the general direction of the Razzies, and not even from the artists in the crosshairs of their squirt guns. Critic Matt Zoller Seitz referred to them as “so cowardly” for targeting films already agreed upon as safe objects of ridicule, and a headline in Uproxx last year declared that “The Razzies Suck More Now Than They’ve Ever Sucked Before.” In a 2015 broadside for Indiewire, Sam Adams described the annual festivities as “a tiresome ritual we can’t seem to escape” and concluded that “Even as awards for terrible movies go, the Razzies are really The Worst.” Calls for total and permanent abolition were issued by Cracked in 2017, SlashFilm in 2022, and Collider in 2023.

Plentiful and in many cases fair, their objections fall into two main categories. The first argues against the simple fact of the Razzies’ existence, that singling out films on the basis of badness is cruel and wrong and anti-art. This party line speaks to a rising tide of opposition to negativity as a basic concept; it’s the core principle of the “let people enjoy things” brigade, forever wriggling out of the woodwork to remind the public that completing a feature film requires a lot of hard work from a lot of passionate people, and far more conviction than the slagger-offers of the world could ever muster. Never mind that this line of reasoning is fundamentally false ��� a great many films are made with minimal effort by clock-punchers who do not give a shit — it repudiates the very practice of criticism. A writer can’t assess film honestly without admitting that some of them are not so good, and a dishonest writer’s positivity can’t be trusted. 

Some detractors within this camp narrow their focus to particular examples of the Razzies’ mean-spirited attitude, going after their targeting of thin-skinned child actors or a Bruce Willis deep into mental infirmity. Both ignore the affectionate foundation with which all Razzies are bestowed — the Golden Raspberry was so named because the disses dispensed should be taken no more seriously than the blowing of a thbpppppt! — though the latter raises some interesting questions about how one accounts for the unknowable personal details that go into art. (Does knowing that the star’s brain was deteriorating make his Death Wish remake any less poor? Does pity for a defenseless person preclude them from a Razzie, in the same respect that some feel reprehensible behavior should bar skilled talents from laudatory awards?) At any rate, the Razzies officially apologized in both cases and rescinded the decisions, giving themselves Worst Actress in place of 12-year-old Firestarter lead Ryan Kiera Armstrong.

The other school of thought contends that the Razzies’ cardinal sin lies not in the project itself, but in choosing the wrong nominees. They pick movies that are actually good, but in a challenging or unconventional way; they pick movies that are indeed bad, but so blatantly that there’s no sport in pointing it out; they make selections based on celebrity, in the star-fucky hope that someone of note might show up and add a jolt of wattage to the night’s festivities; their patterns of nominations betray bias along lines of race and sexual orientation; the voting bloc is unqualified, and in many instances, hasn’t even seen all of the titles in contention. Fair as all of these points may be, every single one could also be applied to the Oscars.

“Cheers and jeers impose the same communal dimension on expression, two routes into a single channel of engagement with cinema.”

Movie-lovers have developed a pretty circumspect understanding of the Academy program’s flaws, and yet so many still tune in to Hollywood’s Biggest Night without fail because it’s fun. It’s something to do, something to talk about during an otherwise paltry patch of the movie calendar. There’s no use noting that many of the greatest releases of any given year don’t have the money or profile to compete on this level, and besides, deciding which art is best would be a trivial, stupid, minimizing endeavor anyhow. Rather than an objective gauge of quality to be taken as final word, the picks offer insight into how one specific slice of showbiz prefers to think of itself, its various crafts, and the concept of excellence. Getting mad about their unjustness is a losing game. 

This is the very same spirit with which one should approach semi-professional haterism, as a sort of nega-Oscars that emanates from the same love-of-the-game foundation. The savviest celebrities have recognized this, and chosen to respond by proving that they have a sense of humor about themselves. Tom Green showed up to collect his hefty haul of five Razzies for Freddy Got Fingered, and in lieu of an acceptance speech, he played harmonica until he was forcibly removed from the stage; Halle Berry rolled through to pick up her Catwoman Razzie, with the Oscar she’d won for Monster’s Ball on hand; one day before she won Best Actress for The Blind Side, Sandra Bullock accepted Worst Actress and distributed DVD copies of All About Steve to attendees as part of a counter-razz asking whether they’d really watched it. 

It’s just not a flattering look for someone rich and/or famous to work up genuine wrath for the MAD Magazine rejects giving out Worst Screen Combo to Pooh and Piglet as “Blood-Thirsty Slasher Killers (!)” in Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. (Also nominated: “Ana de Armas and Chris Evans (who flunked screen chemistry)” for Ghosted, and “Any 2 Money-Grubbing Investors Who Spent $400 Million for Remake Rights to The Exorcist” for The Exorcist: Believer.) Cheers and jeers impose the same communal dimension on expression, two routes into a single channel of engagement with cinema. There’s no clearer demonstration that even disdain requires personal investment than throwing a whole award show over it, and for art, any passion of reaction represents victory. Or as Brian Helgeland put it when graciously accepting his Worst Screenplay Razzie for The Postman, “I’m sure it would sound better in Latin, but it is truly better to be ridiculed than ignored. Indifference is the enemy, and with this Razzie, indifference has been defeated.” 

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.