Reviewing The Golden Raspberry Awards 2020

Interesting that I chose this to be my first proper blog post, but this was the main reason why I released this blog at the time that I did. Of course, with the delays and cancellations of events that occurred throughout March, it left me more time to perfect some of the sections.

So I guess film award season has come to a close now. Obviously there were the Golden Globes, and then the BAFTAs. Oh, and then the Academy Awards/Oscars/We're Still Relevant For Christ's Sake, who for some reason are still trying to make themselves out to be the ultimate awards ceremony...for some reason. As usual, I didn't really get caught up the the hype for any of the award shows...

...Except for this one. I actually kept full track on it whilst nominations were being announced.

One of the many logos for the Razzie Awards.

The Golden Raspberry Awards, better known as the Razzies, skips out on celebrating the best movies and instead chooses to mock the worst movies. I frigging LOVE this award show. I always like to guess which films will get nominated and then afterwards which films will win. They're normally announced on the night before the Oscars, but since that moved to earlier this year, this'll probably be the last awards show to wrap out film award season. Unless another awards show also occurs afterwards.

For the first time, due to it being their 40th anniversary, the Razzies were meant to be televised for all to watch, but ultimately the coronavirus outbreak meant that it was just uploaded as a video on the 16th March. In all fairness, I would have be unable to watch it myself whilst it was airing due to only having Freeview and not anything like Sky or Virgin. Oh well, I guess you win some and you lose some.

My Overall Opinion Of The Event

For starters, I would like to say that I was content with the list of nominations this year. I feel that last year had a bit of a weaker lineup, as some of the "actors" who got nominated were political figures in documentaries who most likely got nominated for their controversial statuses. This meant that Fahrenheit 11/9 ended up snagging some nominations for "actors" despite actually getting some good critical press (though keep in mind that many other people may not agree, as director Michael Moore is indeed a controversial figure himself). This time however, the people nominated were indeed "acting" in the films. Well, maybe "acting" is a bit of a strong word considering the quality of said acting, but you get what I mean.

I would like to say that a lot of my predictions about the nominations were correct. Plenty of nominations for Cats obviously, but they also had The Haunting Of Sharon Tate, The Fanatic, Rambo: Last Blood and A Madea Family Funeral up there (they really hate the Madea franchise). To be more specific about Cats, I predicted almost every single nomination that would get, including Worst Picture and Worst Director. Same with the actor categories, though I didn't expect Judi Dench to be one of the nominees that time (though that was probably because of the CGI job they did on her - they said she looked more like the Cowardly Lion).

I will say though, there was one thing that annoyed me. For some reason in the Worst Supporting Actor category, Tyler Perry was nominated twice for two different characters in the same film. They never do this whenever an actor gets nominated for two different films - they classify it under the same nomination. Why couldn't they have done the same here? Then it would have meant that they could have nominated Jason Derulo for his miscasting as the Rum Tum Tugger in Cats and just his general arrogance towards the movie industry as a whole. I mean, he gets all pissy about people not liking the film and assumes that only other filmmakers have the right to comment, despite the fact that he's a singer by trade rather than an actor. On the bright side though, he did get nominated for worst screen combo with his "neutered CGI bulge".

Anyway, onto the actual "winners" of the categories!

Worst Picture - Cats.

It's certainly a "must-see" alright. I mean, how else are you supposed to find out how bad it is?

Of course this film was going to win this category. The whole thing was slammed when only the few few trailers came out, was considered to be a complete trainwreck when it actually came out and was one of the worst box office bombs of 2019. And it's not hard to see why - the CGI is appalling, the story makes no sense and makes bizarre changes to the musical that it was based on and the majority of the characters are completely miscast. When you're not laughing at the abysmal quality, you're getting pissed off about how one of the most beloved musicals of the eighties turned into...whatever this was.

I know that some people would have preferred The Haunting Of Sharon Tate to win because they said that Cats was at least enjoyable at times whilst Haunting was "exploitative". But here's the thing. If you win Worst Picture, you'll probably be remembered for a long time, for better AND for worst (mostly worst though). And we'd rather remember something that was spectacularly bad and chuckle-worthy than something that was just, well, bad. So whilst we'll be talking and laughing about Cats and its spectacular failure for years to come, Haunting will just be warming shelves in the nearby discount DVD store.

Worst Director - Tom Hooper for Cats.

This was Tom Hooper at the 2010 Toronto Film Festival after releasing critical darling The King's Speech. How times have changed.

Universal Studios may be at some fault for rushing Cats for a Christmas release, but the CGI's idea was Hooper's. Even when people complained about it, he still insisted that the idea of humans as weird cat/human hybrids was a good idea. Not only that, but he made some weird cinematic and storytelling choices for the film.

Hooper had his first breakthrough hit The King's Speech in 2010, which scored many award nominations and wins, and then moved on to the polarising yet still successful Les Misérables in 2012 and then afterwards another award nomination favourite The Danish Girl in 2015, which did receive one Oscar. Hopefully he can salvage his directing career at this point and gain back the prestige he once had, but we can't be too optimistic here.

Worst Lead Actor - John Travolta as Moose and Sam Munroe in The Fanatic and Trading Paint respectively.

With a performance like that, you'd next be expecting him to yell "WHERE'S RACHEL?!" (Note: Screenshot taken from The Fanatic.)

Travolta was just one of the two Razzie veterans to be nominated in this category, the other one being Sylvester Stallone for Rambo: Last Blood. Ultimately, the double insult of being nominated for two films rather than just one must have "helped" him win this award. The Fanatic was particularly disastrous, only being released in a few select cinemas (where it made a measly $3,153) before being sent straight to streaming platforms. Maybe they thought that they'd have more people watching it online.

Worst Lead Actress - Hilary Duff as Sharon Tate in The Haunting Of Sharon Tate.

Probably one of the least exploitative screenshots taken from the film.

Well if some people were so desperate for Haunting to win a Razzie, it certainly got one, even if it wasn't Worst Picture. Seriously, a former teen Disney idol as Roman Polanski's murdered wife? She may have the appearance but Duff certainly didn't have the acting skills needed. In a category that brought us Francesca Yates (as the white cat Victoria, who tends to spend a lot of time with her mouth gaping slightly open) and Tyler Perry (yet again nominated for his Madea role), Duff's performance was certainly a turd.

Fun fact about how I found out about Haunting: One of my university friends was super excited for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and I decided to look up some more about to check whether it was worth her time (Answer: Yes, it certainly was). And then I discovered that it wasn't the first film about the Manson murders released in 2019. It was this film. Which bombed. Guess which film people actually liked in the end, and no, your first guess does not count.

Worst Supporting Actor - James Corden as Bustopher Jones in Cats.

There were some cats eating out of rubbish bins during his segment too, but you don't need to learn about that. Ew.

Yes, even in a film that brought us Jason Derulo as a character who was supposed to based on Mick Jagger rather than any R&B star, Corden ultimately took the "award" for this category. In due fairness, this was one of the few segments of the film that people did not enjoy - they made the mistake of trying to place Corden's film personality onto the character and it didn't work out.

The saddest thing about this is that Corden is actually a pretty good actor when he's not trying to put on that particular personality. He's been in many successful British comedy shows, he's doing very well with his talk show and most importantly in my opinion, he starred in The Wrong Mans, a brilliant parody of crime thrillers that my family loves. And yet most people remember him for the obnoxious characters he plays on the big screen. I think he should just stick to television in the future.

Worst Supporting Actress - Rebel Wilson as Jennyanydots in Cats.

And this is before she starts stripping off her fur and eating the human-faced cockroaches.

The Bustopher Jones segment actually comes off as relatively tame when compared to the Jennyanydots segment. Like with Corden, the same mistake was made of trying to incorporate Wilson's stage personality onto a character who was actually the complete opposite of that in the original musical. Except this one is actually worse. Some people may have enjoyed Cats and found it to be underrated, but even they didn't enjoy Wilson's scene.

Worst Screen Combo - Any two half-human, hair-feline hairballs in Cats.

Just a select few of the Cats cast grouped up for the same shot.

The Razzies always have fun with this category. Obviously you'll sometimes get the "normal" combos such as Jaden and Will Smith (albeit on Planet Nepotism according to the Razzies) in After Earth or Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan in Fifty Shades of Grey. And then you get the really silly ones such as Kirk Cameron and his ego in Saving Christmas or any actor paired up with a stupid outfit. Consequently, this has to be my favourite category of them all.

The cast of Cats ended up winning the award this time. Whether they mean the cast interacting with each other, the combination of the humans with the CGI or both, I'm not entirely sure, but seems good enough to me. Jason Derulo clearly counts in this field, though "neutered bulge" aside, some people seem to agree that he had one of the better CGI jobs in that film.

Worst Screenplay - Cats (screenplay by Lee Hall and Tom Hooper, based on the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, which was based on T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book Of Practical Cats).

I mean, how do you actually get a picture of the screenplay? You might as well just watch it in general to learn more about it. But then again, maybe not.

Can I just point out that a musical like Cats doesn't actually work in feature-length film format? Hall and Hooper still went ahead with the attempt anyway, and what we get is a plotline even more confusing than the vague one that we had onstage. They also took the most sexually-confident character Bombalurina (who was one of the heroes in the original show) and turned her into a catty (no pun intended) henchwoman to Macavity, which, to me at least, is essentially a form of slut-shaming. If you ask me, the 1998 DVD version was perfectly fine - we could have just stuck with that if we wanted to see it on a screen.

Hopefully, this doesn't cause a second death in movie musicals like what happened in the late 20th century before Moulin Rouge! and Chicago brought them back into vogue in the early 21st century (though people who weren't into them in the first place will probably think otherwise), but the West Side Story remake comes out this year, so I think we'll see how that one goes before we properly decide.

Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-Off Or Sequel - Rambo: Last Blood.

Now is he getting all dirty on that poster, or is that just down to Stallone's age?

Cats may have been a terrible remake of a famous stage show, but when placed into a category that featured sequels as well, it was ultimately let off. I remember seeing the poster for Rambo: Last Blood and already having a lack of faith in it. X-Men: Dark Phoenix sort of gets off the hook since a lot of the back publicity was due to it being the final X-Men film by 20th Century Fox, even if it did turn out to be awful anyway. I don't exactly know what saving grace this film could possibly have.

The problem with the Rambo franchise is that the original film First Blood was meant to be a criticism of the Vietnam War and a sophisticated character study of Rambo himself, who was simply a war veteran who wanted to get back home. The sequels on the other hand try to portray him as a straight-up action hero and focus more on the fight scenes and explosions. Overall, the first film sticks out like a sore thumb when compared to them - and is the only decent one of the bunch.

Razzie Redeemer Award - Eddie Murphy as Rudy Ray Moore in Dolomite Is My Name.

Eddie Murphy looking extremely dapper in his latest film.

Probably the only award that anyone wants to win, this goes out to anyone who has been nominated for or won Razzies in the past, but has recently done something that was actually good. This time it went out to Eddie Murphy, in what was probably the only category this time that most people didn't correctly predict. I was expecting Jennifer Lopez for Hustlers; everyone else expected Adam Sandler for Uncut Gems (though my mum did joke that maybe the Razzies just hate Sandler that much). Regardless, Murphy does a very good job in this film as Rudy Ray Moore, stand-up comic and blaxploitation actor, in a role that requires him to be funny as always but not to obnoxious extremes like in Norbit and The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps. Overall, he ends up being the only true winner of any category, being the best rather than the worst.

Worst Reckless Disregard For Human Life And Public Property - Rambo: Last Blood.

JUST LOOK AT ALL THE FLAMES ON THAT POSTER THERE! And that's just one of the instances of property damage.

Now this is a new category that the Razzies introduced, similar to previous categories in the past such as "Worst Excuse For A Movie: All Concept, No Content" and "Most Eye-Gouging Use Of 3D" that didn't stay long but were still entertaining to find out the results for. Two films with a fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes actually made it into this category, the first being Joker and the second being Dragged Across Concrete. Keep in mind that this is the only category that they both got nominated for.

Ultimately, that win went to Rambo: Last Blood, so Joker will not gain the honour of winning both an Oscar and a Razzie. Well, at least that film can argue that the violence in it was meant to "prove a point" about how society treats outsiders and why people become psychopaths in the first place. Rambo: Last Blood is just mindless all the way through.


So overall, most people's predictions were correct (with the Razzie Redeemer Award being the only exception), and the awards were well-deserved by their "winners". Certainly an improvement over last year with the "actor" nominations for political documentaries, even if the Razzies weren't able to have a normal ceremony this year.

So Why Do I Care?

Now you may be wandering: why are you getting so obsessed with all of this? Obviously there are other people out there who also get entertainment out of the Razzies, but placing bets on who win get nominated and who will win, as well as nitpicking every single aspect I liked and disliked?

Well, there are two reasons why. The first is essentially what the TV Tropes website defines as "bile fascination", or just taking an interest in the shitty. I know that these films are horrible (though some may disagree) and that I shouldn't be wasting my time watching them, but something makes me want to learn more about them. To find out if they are really as bad as people say they are. And if they're not that bad, well, I won't be unhappy with the results. In contrast, if people say that something is supposed to be really good and I find out that it isn't...well, I'm gonna be very disappointed indeed.

And now for the second and most important reason in my personal opinion. With a lot of major film awards such as the Oscars, the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs, there appears to be a select idea of what is a good film and what isn't. Which is fine if you're into serious historical dramas and biopics, but not so fine if you prefer stuff like the Deadpool films and the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy (which are all amazing, but not films that the Oscars go for). People have different tastes when it comes to films that they like, and only one taste gets catered to at these film awards.

With the Razzies however? It doesn't matter. If it's shit, it'll get nominated. Mindless blockbusters, failed Oscar-bait, you name it. Whilst some people may think that some of these films are actually good (I mean, why do you think Adam Sandler still had a career?), it's easier to agree on a bad film than a good film.

And I mean, come on! The people at the Razzies clearly have a fun time with what they do. They've dressed up in crazy outfits, they've done parody musical numbers - they always seem like they've having such a good time with what they do, unlike the Oscars who seem to try and stay "relevant" as much as possible.


Anyway, that's it for my review of the Razzies this year. Hopefully they'll be able to televise the awards next year to make up for the coronavirus this year, but for now, we can all point and laugh at the unlucky nominees from this year (as well as debate over whether Cats is an enjoyable trainwreck or just a trainwreck). And who knows? I'll probably do a review again then. I certainly had fun doing this one.