THE LEAST funny event of the year took place last Sunday. Inserting a tongue the size of Texas into their gaping cheek, the organisers of the Golden Raspberries Awards handed out gongs for the worst films and performances of the last 12 months.
This year, the Razzies broke with tradition by raking rigorously through the year’s releases and uncovering some overlooked atrocities. Obscure indie navel-gazers; pompous literary adaptations; foreign- language goat-herder movies – the sniggering jury acknowledged all cinematic life.
I’m joking, of course. The good people at the berry-related jamboree awarded an unprecedented 10 prizes to the Adam Sandler vehicle Jack and Jill. Really. That’s the best they could come up with?
The Razzies have always seen themselves as an irreverent alternative to The Oscars. Whereas that mainstream event cuddles up to celebrity as it buttresses the cinematic establishment, the supposed bad boys lower the tone by ironically celebrating all that is wretched in film.
Except it’s not that way at all. You will search hard to find an organisation more at home with celebrity worship than the Razzies. Every time a pop star makes a film, the anti-Academy acknowledges the deluded warbler. Indeed, 10 years ago, Madonna was named worst actress of the century at the jamboree.
They never miss an opportunity to state the bleeding obvious. Sylvester Stallone invariably makes the shortlist. Jar-Jar Binks was mentioned for his turn in The Phantom Menace. Mr Sandler is the Razzies’ unofficial patron saint.
Don’t get me wrong. Of course, Jack and Jill is awful. Al Pacino has some fun playing himself, but every other aspect of the film is ham-fisted, chuckle-brained and creatively vacant. The plant-people of Zongo-Zongoville make more subtle entertainments.
It is, however, no less terrible than a dozen 2012 films made by well-regarded members of the cinematic establishment. At least Jack and Jill doesn’t have any ideas above its station. It set out to be plain moronic good fun and, well, it is plain and moronic.
The films that deserve the most severe opprobrium are those that, despite their abysmal dialogue, clunky acting and lame direction, sally forth convinced of their own importance. Any film by arch-indie nuisance Miranda July deserves acknowledgment: that director’s The Future actually caused milk to curdle. And no Adam Sandler film has been as intellectually half-baked as (oh, the poor wee men with their existential crises) David Fincher’s cretinous Fight Club.
The Golden Raspberries were not always so dull. Back in 1980, the event’s inaugural year, the jury nominated Stanley Kubrick as worst director for The Shining. Posterity has revealed that selection to be slightly mad. But it showed guts. And it was slightly mad. Isn’t that what we expect from a awards ceremony named for the onomatopoeic representation of farting?
dclarke@irishtimes.com
