The Golden Raspberry Awards held their first ceremony on 31 March 1981.
It will surprise no one that I hate this. And it sums up the film critic industry. But what is the point of talking about films you hate? For every bad film that gets reviewed a thousand times, there are hundreds of good low-budget independent films that no one has heard of.
The Golden Raspberry Awards do have one good aspect. They don’t criticize low-budget independent films. But this just highlights the opportunity cost of the whole thing. It defines these largely unseen films out of existence.
But it goes after plenty of films that are later re-evaluated as good. For example, they nominated Ishtar for three awards: film, director, and screenwriter. But it won for director. The idea that Elaine May wrote a bad screenplay is laughable. And we all know why critics hated the film. It committed the greatest sin a film can commit: it was a comedy with a large budget!
Heaven’s Gate got the same treatment. Michael Cimino won the award for worst director. And like with Ishtar, the reviews were more about its budget than the film.
The Golden Raspberry Awards are really just a gossip column in awards format. And I just don’t see the point. The judges seem to do little more than listen to what industry insiders are saying and then vote. They should retire it and use an LLM to give out the awards. It would at least be quantitative.
The awards are a parody of award shows — in theory. It they actually were, I would love them! But they are just the dark side of other award shows. They are conventional wisdom, just negative. But they could still be good, though. They could use their celebrity to highlight low-budget independent films. “Hey! These mainstream films suck! But you could watch this little gem instead!”
But no. I doubt the people involved are even aware that there is anything else.
Golden Raspberry Awards via Wikipedia under Fair Use. Featured Image by karaokefanboy under CC BY-SA 2.0.
