Or, rather, will it be a supporting vampire, or a supporting werewolf? With its plentiful stock of wolfcake and bloodsuckers, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 is a bonanza for a category that’s often among the Razzies’ most predictable. Due to a fluke of scheduling, though, the name-brand Supporting Actors the Razzies typically love — Burt Reynolds, Marlon Wayans, Verne Troyer, Jon Voight, and (of course) Rob Schneider — have zero movies due to be released in 2011. That means some fresh Razzie meat come January 23!
Will Jackson Rathbone follow up his shocking Razzie win last year with another nomination? Might Taylor Lautner have better luck in Supporting Actor than he did in Worst Actor last year, when he lost to Ashton Kutcher? What about Kellan Lutz as vampire Emmett, the most bloodless of the bunch? Or Michael Sheen as Aro, who seems prepared to devour the scenery like so many shrieking coeds? Or Jamie Campbell Bower, who … uh … we can’t remember who “Caius” is. At any rate, they’re all front-runners, so let’s put them there.
Once upon a time, it was easy for a working actress to pad her résumé with a Razzie for Worst Supporting Actress. Just pick a terrible script, play your wafer-thin girlfriend/wife/mom/coworker role as woodenly as possible, and then walk away with the gold(-painted raspberry). Hell, Faye Dunaway won a Razzie in 1993 for The Temp, and Estelle Getty in 1992 for Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.
Then came Madonna and the reign of the superhotties. The Worst Supporting Actress Razzie stopped rewarding bad performances in terrible movies and started rewarding the latest flash-in-the-pan babe who looks good on a press release. So awards started going to, yes, Madonna, Estella Warren, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Carmen Electra — nonactors all, for whom a Razzie is worth little more than a shrug. They don’t understand, or care, that a Golden Raspberry is a feather in an actor’s cap.
Let’s give the Razzies back to the real actresses! The awards the past two years for Sienna Miller and Jessica Alba give us hope. We’ll see if this coming January 23 the Razzies continue the trend.
The writers responsible for The Smurfs — David Stem, David Weiss, Jay Scherick, and David Ronn — will be back for Smurfs 2. In fact, because the live-action/CGI combo thing takes so long to produce, they’ve already turned in a draft of the screenplay for the 2013 sequel. People hoping for topical political humor are probably out of luck. Grade: C [HR]
Sarah Silverman’s working on a new show — about a woman re-entering single life after a decade long committed relationship — and ABC, NBC, and FOX all want it. Also, it’s being produced by Ron Howard’s Imagine TV, and Howard is apparently so into the concept that he’s tagging along to pitch meetings. Can they just make a show about Ron Howard and Sarah Silverman in pitch meetings? Grade: B+ [Deadline]
What do Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, Sylvester Stallone, and Prince have in common? They’ve all been nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Director! The Razzies have always prided themselves on nominating a mix of directors for the industry’s biggest prize. Sure, actors (Kevin Costner, Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy) who step behind the camera are always favorites. But the Razzies voters seem to enjoy taking auteurs and top-notch pros down a peg, as well; by RazzieWatch’s count, 14 directors have been nominated for the Oscar for Best Director and the Razzie for Worst Director.
Bruce Willis is negotiating to star in the increasingly weird-seeming G.I. Joe 2: Retaliation as Joe Colton, the original Joe. He'd join Dwayne Johnson, Adrianne Palicki, and RZA, and be inexplicably directed by Jon M. Chu, the guy who made the Step Up movies and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never. Grade: B [HR]
Oren Moverman (The Messenger) is writing and possibly directing The Terrorist Search Engine, a movie based on Wesley Yang's recent New York magazine profile of Evan Kohlmann, a young, Internet-savvy, counter-terrorism expert who earned the nickname "the Doogie Howser of Terrorism" for his testimony leading to the conviction of nearly 24 jihadists. Scott Rudin will produce and Jesse Eisenberg may star ("That's thousand. Twenty-four thousand jihadists"). Grade: A [Deadline]
We’re skipping the usual predictions this week because this week's releases have us too excited. It’s Christmas in July for RazzieWatch, as Hollywood trots out two turkeys with serious Razzie heat on the same day. It could well be … the Crapture! (Of course we haven't seen either of these movies, so it’s possible that one or both of them might be great! But having seen thetrailers, I think it’s fair to say there’s a good chance both will stink on toast.)
In predicting who might be nominated for Worst Actor, first you have to ask: What does the Golden Raspberry look for in its leading men? It’s a question that drives Razzie gurus crazy. Sometimes the winners of the Worst Actor award are megastars like Eddie Murphy, John Travolta, and Adam Sandler. Sometimes the winners barely qualify as actors at all: the Jonas Brothers, George W. Bush, Roberto Benigni.
Occasionally, an actor will dominate an era, as Kevin Costner did the 1990s, a decade in which he was nominated six times (and won three Razzies). But sometimes an actor will leap from obscurity with a performance for the ages, as Tom Green did when he won the Razzie for Freddy Got Fingered in 2001. (He’s still the only Worst Actor winner to accept his award in person at the ceremony.)
