NEW YORK. On the eve of the Oscars it’s time for the Razzie, the annual awards for the worst Hollywood productions.
Blonde ‘won’ the statuette for Worst Picture, while Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker who made Elvis Presley’s fortune and ruin, was ‘awarded’ for Worst Supporting Actor but also for Worst Combination “latex face and ridiculous accent”.
Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis tomorrow is in the running for eight Oscars including the one for best makeup and best hairstyling which sees the Italian Aldo Signoretti in the running with Mark Coulier and Jason Baird. Blonde can also aspire to an Oscar with Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe, but the Razzie jury didn’t really like that film: “Misogynous, salacious and a liar”reads the motivation of the ‘award’ which accuses Andrew Dominik’s work, inspired by the novel by Joyce Carol Oates, of “shamelessly exploiting the memory of the late Marilyn Monroe”.
The ironic “golden raspberries”, parody of the night of the OscarsRazzie Awards, even the worst has its moment of glory
The Razzie statuettes (Golden Raspberry Awards) are shaped like a raspberry: ‘blowing a raspberry’ in English means blowing a raspberry. The awards, founded over 40 years ago by two UCLA graduates, John Wilson and Mo Murphy, are awarded by a jury of 1,200 members (whoever takes the time to pay the annual $40), are meant to be a parody of the Academy Awards, but sometimes satire can turn into an own goal. It happened last year, when the Razzies gave the ‘award’ to Bruce Willis and immediately after they had to revoked when it was discovered that the Die Hard actor suffered from a severe form of aphasia.
An encore was made this year, when a 12-year-old girl popped up among the nominees for worst actress, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, protagonist of the horror film Firestarter: “We have ended up in the blender of the cyberworld”, the organizers admitted that, after having removed the little girl from the five and established that no minor from now on can be a candidate, they entered into the race and they “won by a landslide”.
On a more positive note, Colin Farrell of Island Spirits won a Razzie for “the best redemption” attributed to the former Razzie contestant who “gave his wings back and re-emerged from the hell of awards”: specifically, from the performance as Alexander the Great which in 2004 had earned the Irish the nomination for worst actor to have entered the five of the best actor at the Oscars 2023. Farrell beat rivals like Mark Wahlberg for Father Stu and Val Kilmer for the Netflix documentary Val.