The Golden Raspberry Awards: 2017

The Golden Raspberries started off as an informal joke.  Something for a publicist and his friends to do after the Oscars had ended.  Over time, it has become and enduring and irreverent tradition.  In theory, The Razzies poke fun at the worst movies of the year.  But like any awards ceremony, the Razzies frequently make the wrong call.  We’re going back and looking at the history of the Golden Raspberry Awards one year at a time.

This is actually the third time the Barry L. Bumstead Award has been presented, but this is the first time I have bothered covering it.  The category started two years ago and was awarded to a French soccer movie called United Passions.  At the time, the award was described as honoring “a critical and financial failure that would’ve been nominated if it had received an eligible release.”  Okay, so the Bumstead seemed like a way for the Razzies to extend their reach beyond movies released in the US.  Last year, the award went to the direct-to-video thriller, Misconduct, which cost $11 million dollars to make and featured Al Pacino and Anthony Hopkins in supporting roles.  I get it.  I’m not especially interested, but I understand what the award is all about.

Um, or I did anyway.  Not only did CHiPs get a theatrical release in the US, but it stayed in theaters for nine weeks.  That’s not an insubstantial run these days.  I’m not suggesting that the buddy comedy based on an ancient TV show isn’t a deserving Razzie nominee, but it certainly qualified for nominations.  If the Razzies, wanted to poke the Dax Shepard-Michael Peña vehicle, they could have worked it into a number of categories.  Shepard also wrote and directed the thing.  Typically the Razzies love piling on an actor-turned auteur.  But this time, it feels like they were so excited about nominating the similarly themed Baywatch movie that they forgot all about CHiPs and decided to correct their omission by shoe-horning it into a special category it doesn’t belong in.

For what it’s worth, they seem to have amended the description of the Bumstead.  The part about being unable to be nominated in other categories has been dropped.  Instead, the award is given to a movie that cost a lot to make and lost a lot.  Okay, so now the purpose of the award is to shame movies that performed poorly at the box office in relation to their budget?  Fine.  At a cost of $25 million dollars, CHiPs‘ gross of $18.6 million dollars qualifies it as one of the biggest flops of the year.  Notice I said “one of”.  It’s not the biggest box office bomb of 2017.

Darren Aronofsky’s divisive thriller, mother!, earned under $18 million dollars with a cost of $30 mill.  It was nominated in other categories, so maybe that disqualified it here?  Who can say?  The firefighter drama, Only the Brave, starring Josh Brolin grossed less than CHiPs on a budget of nearly $40 million dollars.  Gore Verbinski’s sci-fi thriller, A Cure for Wellness, grossed a puny $8 million dollars and cost $40 million to make.  I know math is hard, but that seems like a much bigger flop than CHiPs.  Or consider George Clooney’s dark comedy Suburbicon which cost $25 million to make but only earned a paltry $5.7 million dollars making it the lowest-grossing movie of Matt Damon’s career.

If you’re not going to give the Bumstead award to a movie that couldn’t be nominated in other categories (per the original definition) or the biggest flop of the year (per the tweaked wording), what’s the point?

Razzie Redeemer Award
Winner: Hollywood – A safe Hollywood-Haven where talent is protected, nourished and allowed to flourish with proper compensation

Clearly the intention is to honor the #MeToo movement which has been reshaping Hollywood since the long-overdue fall of Harvey Weinstein.  While I appreciate the sentiment, I’m not sure if the Razzies is the best place for it.  Has Hollywood redeemed itself for decades of abuse because a few powerful men got taken to task for their misdeeds?  Clearly the answer to that question is “no”.  While I am all for honoring the men and women who were brave enough to speak truth to power, I am inclined to think that it would have been better to stick to this category’s original purpose: honoring past Razzie targets who had a good year.  I can’t think of any good comeback stories from 2017, so maybe this would have been a good year to give the Redeemer Award a break.

This one also rings a little false to me given that the Golden Raspberries have a long history of treating actresses pretty harshly.  I know it’s all supposed to be in fun, but sometimes the Razzies come across as mean-spirited.  Especially when it comes to the female categories.