33rd Razzie Awards Noms Announced

Taking their usual place of (dis)honor the day before the Academy Awards nomination announcement, the snarkmeisters behind the Golden Raspberry Awards announced the 2012 candidates this morning. Most of 'em are the usual suspects-- but I have to admit this year's five ignominious Worst Picture Noms movies are unusually novel.

Those Worst Movie nominees (and bear in mind, I have seen none of these films):

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2 - Alright, it made over $800 million dollars in total BO, but I'll agree that's no reason not to believe it's terrible. It also nailed ten other nominations. There is a reason the Razzie people go after a film like this, one that is crafted for the low expectations of a YA-oriented audience: it has to do with the fanboy nature of the Razzie nominating body. As I have noted before, these are the same folks that thought that The Last Airbender was a worse cinematic affront than Sex in the City 2.

Battleship - Well-deserved. It's one thing to take a line of toys and fashion a franchise of brick-stupid movies out of them. It's quite another thing for an injection-molded plastic board game to be the inspiration for an insanely overproduced effects epic. Okay, they're not different at all, really. Still: why?

Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure - This prefabricated Teletubbies rip-off went down as one of the biggest bombs of 2012: made for $20 million, it took $445,000 opening weekend. It sounds absolutely ghastly, and it garnered some of the funniest reviews I've read in a while.

That's My Boy! - I've mentioned elsewhere that Adam Sandler is getting a bit too old and sour to do his mugging act in his movies anymore. I was proven right and wrong in 2012: he played Jack and Jill in Jack and Jill, so he could both shamelessly mug and be his own dour straight man. In That's My Boy! Sandler plays the estranged, degenerate jailbird dad of Andy Samberg. Adam trots out his gross-out Party Boy persona for this character-- but the problem here is the puckish charm that made this persona at least palatable in past movies is all but gone now. In cases like this, you're supposed to compensate for having a charmless protag with superb, witty writing (i.e. Bad Santa). Nope.

A Thousand Words - This long, long, long-delayed Eddie Murphy film garnered an amazing rating of ZERO percent on Rotten Tomatoes. It was the effective and anticlimactic end of the High-Concent Redemption Comedy sub-genre (Liar Liar, Groundhog Day, Click, etc.).

Back to the Razzie Awards Press release: I read the 2012 noms on the LATimes website, then tried to follow the link to their website. Razzies.com is a terrible, terrible place: crowded, ugly layout, counter-intuitive navigation, infested with ads and pop-ups. I would almost believe it was created to be awful on purpose.

Regardless of the remarkable fecklessness of their web presence, the Razzies serve an absolutely vital function: they're one of the few checks on unbridled ego and hype-induced delusion left in the motion picture industry. The AMPAS, the AFI and MPAA should underwrite the damn thing.

The Razzie Award ceremony is apparently a fun, low-budget affair-- one where actual, A-list nominees sometimes appear. Sandra Bullock showed up for the 2009 awards, accepting her Golden Raspberry for All About Steve. The hilarious part: apparently Sandra walked out toting the original Golden Raspberry Award prototype. The Razzie officials eventually had to ask for it back, in exchange for the standard $1.98 gold spray-painted plastic award.