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Authors: Jim Dawson
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honor,—
H AMLET : Then came each actor on his ass,—
But thanks to the rise of the razz in the twentieth century, the buzz is no longer the bane of every bad actor, but rather what everyone in Hollywood today is desperately seeking.
All of which brings us back to the Razzie Awards ® , handed out each year twenty-four hours before the Oscar ® broadcast by the Hollywood-based Golden Raspberry Foundation. According to John Wilson, the Razzies ® reward the film industry’s worst achievements, offer discerning cinephiles an antidote to the fawning and self-congratulatory Academy Awards ® ceremonies, and illustrate just how silly and pretentious that goddamn ® is. (The symbol for “registered trademark,” it looks like it belongs on the haunch of a Texas steer, not attached to the name of a golden trophy celebrating the Hollywood art of kissing its own ass.) So what better way to scorn Tinseltown movies and the people who make them than by figuratively saying—to quote John Cleese’s famous line from the 1975 film
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
—I fart in your general direction!
“When I registered the term with the Library of Congress in 1980,” says Wilson, “they asked me, ‘Why
raspberry
? What’s the significance of that?’ ”
Razz
was then not as commonly used as
Bronx cheer
—coined many years ago at New York’s Yankee Stadium, where baseball fans were prone to making fart noises at the umpires. “But since then,
razz
has pretty much permeated the culture,” Wilson boasts, then adds magnanimously, “We couldn’t have done it without Hollywood’s help.”
Incidentally, one film experience that would have rated a loud raspberry if the Razzies had been around twenty years earlier was the aforementioned
Scent of Mystery
. The movie itself was probably not lousy enough to garner an award, but Smell-O-Vision—a system whereby garlic, pipe smoke, and other scents were pumped into the air from tiny plastic tubes hidden under the theater seats—turned out to be one of Hollywood’s biggest stink bombs. The machine made an audible hissing sound, and not everyone in the audience got the scents at the same time or at the same intensity. One critic suggested that the only future for Smell-O-Vision lay in dosing the audience with laughing gas. Proving that some things are best left to the imagination, Smell-O-Vision evaporated quickly and was never used again.
To keep the Razzies fresh as they head into the second twenty-five years, Wilson hopes he can come up with new ways to tell the film industry to pull his finger. “Right now I’m thinking about adding the sounds of people farting movie themes on our website” ( www.razzies.com ), he says.
At last year’s Razzie Awards, held on February 26, 2005, at a former burlesque joint called the Ivar Theater, Halle Berry was fingered as Worst Actress for her role in Warner Bros.’s
Catwoman
, which also got razzed for the Worst Film, Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay of 2004. President George W. Bush got the Worst Actor Razzie for his performance in Michael Moore’s
Fahrenheit
9/11, with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld garnering Worst Supporting Actor honors. The only winner with enough aplomb to show up and graciously accept her award was former Oscar winner Halle Berry. You might say that Berry got her Razzie and the Razzie folks got their Berry.
Wilson says there are currently seven hundred voters from around the world, including industry insiders, film critics, and just plain movie fans who like to make rude noises in theaters. The Razzies are often described as “tongue-in-cheek,” but in fact one must first remove the tongue from the cheek in order to give a raspberry. In fact, the Razzie has gained enough stature that it’s become a kind of media standard for Hollywood awfulness. For example, to underscore the overall ineptitude of actress-screenwriter Jenny McCarthy’s
Dirty Love
(2005), critic Richard Roeper said, “They’ll need
H AMLET : Then came each actor on his ass,—
But thanks to the rise of the razz in the twentieth century, the buzz is no longer the bane of every bad actor, but rather what everyone in Hollywood today is desperately seeking.
All of which brings us back to the Razzie Awards ® , handed out each year twenty-four hours before the Oscar ® broadcast by the Hollywood-based Golden Raspberry Foundation. According to John Wilson, the Razzies ® reward the film industry’s worst achievements, offer discerning cinephiles an antidote to the fawning and self-congratulatory Academy Awards ® ceremonies, and illustrate just how silly and pretentious that goddamn ® is. (The symbol for “registered trademark,” it looks like it belongs on the haunch of a Texas steer, not attached to the name of a golden trophy celebrating the Hollywood art of kissing its own ass.) So what better way to scorn Tinseltown movies and the people who make them than by figuratively saying—to quote John Cleese’s famous line from the 1975 film
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
—I fart in your general direction!
“When I registered the term with the Library of Congress in 1980,” says Wilson, “they asked me, ‘Why
raspberry
? What’s the significance of that?’ ”
Razz
was then not as commonly used as
Bronx cheer
—coined many years ago at New York’s Yankee Stadium, where baseball fans were prone to making fart noises at the umpires. “But since then,
razz
has pretty much permeated the culture,” Wilson boasts, then adds magnanimously, “We couldn’t have done it without Hollywood’s help.”
Incidentally, one film experience that would have rated a loud raspberry if the Razzies had been around twenty years earlier was the aforementioned
Scent of Mystery
. The movie itself was probably not lousy enough to garner an award, but Smell-O-Vision—a system whereby garlic, pipe smoke, and other scents were pumped into the air from tiny plastic tubes hidden under the theater seats—turned out to be one of Hollywood’s biggest stink bombs. The machine made an audible hissing sound, and not everyone in the audience got the scents at the same time or at the same intensity. One critic suggested that the only future for Smell-O-Vision lay in dosing the audience with laughing gas. Proving that some things are best left to the imagination, Smell-O-Vision evaporated quickly and was never used again.
To keep the Razzies fresh as they head into the second twenty-five years, Wilson hopes he can come up with new ways to tell the film industry to pull his finger. “Right now I’m thinking about adding the sounds of people farting movie themes on our website” ( www.razzies.com ), he says.
At last year’s Razzie Awards, held on February 26, 2005, at a former burlesque joint called the Ivar Theater, Halle Berry was fingered as Worst Actress for her role in Warner Bros.’s
Catwoman
, which also got razzed for the Worst Film, Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay of 2004. President George W. Bush got the Worst Actor Razzie for his performance in Michael Moore’s
Fahrenheit
9/11, with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld garnering Worst Supporting Actor honors. The only winner with enough aplomb to show up and graciously accept her award was former Oscar winner Halle Berry. You might say that Berry got her Razzie and the Razzie folks got their Berry.
Wilson says there are currently seven hundred voters from around the world, including industry insiders, film critics, and just plain movie fans who like to make rude noises in theaters. The Razzies are often described as “tongue-in-cheek,” but in fact one must first remove the tongue from the cheek in order to give a raspberry. In fact, the Razzie has gained enough stature that it’s become a kind of media standard for Hollywood awfulness. For example, to underscore the overall ineptitude of actress-screenwriter Jenny McCarthy’s
Dirty Love
(2005), critic Richard Roeper said, “They’ll need
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