Nominations, snubs for Razzies
THE nominees for the 38th annual Golden Raspberry Awards were announced on Monday, and the list of shame included multiple nods for Transformers: The Last Knight, The Emoji Movie and The Mummy. No big surprises there – the Razzies “celebrate” Hollywood’s most dismal output, so it’s appropriate that the contenders are a bunch of critically derided box office underperformers. But there were also some eyebrowraising selections. Let’s take a look at the surprises, snubs and other noteworthy choices among the nominees.
Surprise: All the actresses who did decent work in bad movies.
Jennifer Lawrence, Dakota Johnson, Sofia Boutella and Susan Sarandon were all in (arguably) terrible movies this year, but that doesn’t mean their performances were worth singling out for ridicule. Dakota Johnson, for example, is by far the best thing about the Fifty Shades movies. She’s the only one that seems in on the joke of the movie’s cheesiness. And it’s not Sofia Boutella’s fault The Mummy was awful. She did just fine in the (admittedly one-note) role of a seductive zombie princess.
And then, of course, there’s Jennifer Lawrence. The Razzies don’t usually go after self-serious arthouse films, so it was a bit of a surprise to see so much attention paid to Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, the divisive drama about a famous poet and the woman he sucks dry. The movie was bizarre and disturbing, but Lawrence turned in the kind of work the Oscar winner always does. She was wholly committed.
That may be the biggest flaw in the Razzie system. The decision makers seem to zero in on a handful of movies they deem “bad” then fill every category with nominees from those films, leaving out some epically terrible performances in the process. Snub: Tulip Fever.
It’s pretty conspicuous that one of the most high-profile flops of the year didn’t get a nomination – especially since it was a Weinstein Company production. Footage from the movie was first screened during the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, which seemed to indicate that a premiere was imminent. It wasn’t, and that’s never a good sign. The release was pushed back no less than five Transformers:TheLastKnight times, finally arriving in September, after which it made back a fraction of its budget and earned a 9 percent fresh rating from critics. Ouch.
Interestingly timed selection: Mark Wahlberg in Transformers and Daddy’s Home 2.
How funny that so soon after the big payday imbroglio surrounding Wahlberg’s salary for All the Money in the World, the actor gets Razzie noms for his performances in two movies, Daddy’s Home 2 and Transformers. True, the Razzies acting nominations don’t always line up with acting ability (see above), but in this case, they nailed it. Wahlberg – not to mention his co-star, the also nominated Anthony Hopkins – phoned it in on Transformers, racing through the horribly written dialogue as if talking faster might distract the au-
dience from how idiotic the script was. It didn’t work.
Snub: The Snowman.
Even Tomas Alfredson, the director of The Snowman, knew his movie was ghastly. That’s why, upon its release, he immediately went on the record explaining what had happened. The Swedish director told Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation that he didn’t have enough time to shoot the Michael Fassbender-starring thriller. When you don’t have enough footage, it’s pretty hard to make a coherent film, which is a little factoid he learned during the editing process.
“We discovered that a lot was missing,” he admitted, adding that about 10 to 15 percent of the screenplay was just never shot. “It’s like when you’re making a big jigsaw puzzle and a few pieces are missing so you don’t see the whole picture.”
Hey, it happens. But when it does, the people in charge of choosing the year’s worst films should take notice, right?
Questionable categorisation: Tyler Perry in the best actress category – again.
The Razzies have a history of nominating Tyler Perry when he plays his character Madea and putting him in the worst actress category. They did it in 2012 with Madea’s Witness Protection and 2013 with A Madea Christmas, not to mention last year for Boo! A Madea Halloween. Message received, Razzies: You’re not into Madea. But can we all agree that Tyler Perry is, in fact, a man and that putting him in with the actresses is a tired play for juvenile laughs? It’s not like it’s the first time the awards show has done it.
Snub: The Book of Henry. Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World follow-up was such a wildly problematic genre bender that it inspired some of the most imaginative critical writing of 2017. I’ll just let Washington Post critic Michael O’Sullivan explain: “After a foray into more straightforward stuff, with 2015’s Jurassic World, the cinematic mad scientist has returned to the laboratory with The Book of Henry, a movie so mystifyingly misbegotten that it makes Frankenstein – the monster, not the movie – seem unremarkable. It’s the filmmaking equivalent of a monkey with the head of a goat, the tail of a fish, wings and teeny-tiny rat claws.”
The winners, such as they are, will be announced March 3.