The Award for Worst Nomination Goes to...
Yesterday, the winners of the Razzies were announced, with George W. Bush winning Worst Actor and Worst Couple (with EITHER Condoleezza Rice OR the book My Pet Goat) for Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which also won Worst Supporting Actor (Donald Rumsfeld) and Worst Supporting Actor (Britney Spears, beating fellow nominee Condoleezza Rice). It should be noted that Fahrenheit 9/11 is unseen by this author.
Is it really fair for George W. Bush, et al, to have been nominated for the worst acting award? Maybe I could understand if the film were about Ronald Reagan, whom one could argue, as Edmund Morris partially does in his biography Dutch, was trying to play the role of president rather than actually be president. Is archival footage of Reagan a performance? I could possibly entertain this argument and that he could be elligible for playing himself, either for good or for bad, in a documentary.
It is somewhat of an historical anomoly that Michael Moore was not nominated for worst director. We have now seen 25 Razzies given out for Worst Actor, and winning the Worst Actor is pretty strongly correlated with a nominations for Worst Director, Worst Screenplay, and Worst Picture (or Worst Remake or Sequel) for the same film. Indeed, this is the first year since 1996 that a Worst Actor winner--Pauly Shore in Bio-Dome--came from a film that not also nominated for all three of these other awards; however that year Shore tied for the award with Tom Arnold in Big Bully and The Stupids, which did receive nominations in all three categories. In the previous year Shore did not share the award for Jury Duty, which was not nominated for any of the others.
The other times this happened were in 1993 (Burt Reynolds, Cop and a Half), 1983 (Christopher Atkins, A Night in Heaven) and 1981 (Klinton Spillsbury, The Legend of the Lone Ranger). In 1992, Razzie favorite Sylvester Stallone won his fourth Worst Actor Award for the dreadfull buddy cop film Stop! or Mom Will Shoot, which was nominated for Worst Sceenplay, but not Director or Picture.
But Fahrenheit 9/11 clearly does something qualitatively different than these other films. In a standard film, the director will ask for another take if an actor gives a poor performance. If we took the cutting room scraps, it might be possible to piece together a horrible performance by Jamie Foxx--who knows? perhaps one even worthy of a Razzie--but no, Taylor Hackford knew that Foxx's best perfomances should make it into the film. How is it fair to compare Bush's "performance" to that of fellow nominee Collin Farrell in Alexander, which presumably is in the opinion of Oliver Stone the best Farrell had to offer? Although Stone was nominated for Worst Director....
Even if you take the position that Bush was acting and that he was not saying what he knew to be true or something like that, it was partly Moore's point to show the worst possible takes, to expose where Bush was giving his least effective perfomances. Fahrenheit 9/11 should not have been elligible for any acting Razzie.
Of course I do have a remedy in this--pay $25 to get membership in the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation, which will give me a vote at the nomination stage.
Other nominees for Worst Nonimations include any posthumous Grammy nomination.
Is it really fair for George W. Bush, et al, to have been nominated for the worst acting award? Maybe I could understand if the film were about Ronald Reagan, whom one could argue, as Edmund Morris partially does in his biography Dutch, was trying to play the role of president rather than actually be president. Is archival footage of Reagan a performance? I could possibly entertain this argument and that he could be elligible for playing himself, either for good or for bad, in a documentary.
It is somewhat of an historical anomoly that Michael Moore was not nominated for worst director. We have now seen 25 Razzies given out for Worst Actor, and winning the Worst Actor is pretty strongly correlated with a nominations for Worst Director, Worst Screenplay, and Worst Picture (or Worst Remake or Sequel) for the same film. Indeed, this is the first year since 1996 that a Worst Actor winner--Pauly Shore in Bio-Dome--came from a film that not also nominated for all three of these other awards; however that year Shore tied for the award with Tom Arnold in Big Bully and The Stupids, which did receive nominations in all three categories. In the previous year Shore did not share the award for Jury Duty, which was not nominated for any of the others.
The other times this happened were in 1993 (Burt Reynolds, Cop and a Half), 1983 (Christopher Atkins, A Night in Heaven) and 1981 (Klinton Spillsbury, The Legend of the Lone Ranger). In 1992, Razzie favorite Sylvester Stallone won his fourth Worst Actor Award for the dreadfull buddy cop film Stop! or Mom Will Shoot, which was nominated for Worst Sceenplay, but not Director or Picture.
But Fahrenheit 9/11 clearly does something qualitatively different than these other films. In a standard film, the director will ask for another take if an actor gives a poor performance. If we took the cutting room scraps, it might be possible to piece together a horrible performance by Jamie Foxx--who knows? perhaps one even worthy of a Razzie--but no, Taylor Hackford knew that Foxx's best perfomances should make it into the film. How is it fair to compare Bush's "performance" to that of fellow nominee Collin Farrell in Alexander, which presumably is in the opinion of Oliver Stone the best Farrell had to offer? Although Stone was nominated for Worst Director....
Even if you take the position that Bush was acting and that he was not saying what he knew to be true or something like that, it was partly Moore's point to show the worst possible takes, to expose where Bush was giving his least effective perfomances. Fahrenheit 9/11 should not have been elligible for any acting Razzie.
Of course I do have a remedy in this--pay $25 to get membership in the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation, which will give me a vote at the nomination stage.
Other nominees for Worst Nonimations include any posthumous Grammy nomination.
1 Comments:
Though, I do believe that W is a terrible actor, I was also really disappointed with this nomination. Clearly the Razzie committee was letting their hatred of current government get in the way of properly rewarding terrible acting.
For what it's worth, I am always sad that there is such a strong correlation between "actor" nominees and "picture" nominees. There are often terrible performances in wonderful movies, and wonderful performances in terrible movies. In fact, this is probably more common.
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