Scandal rocks the snark community as the Razzies face allegations of vote tampering
Over the last few years, the Razzies have found themselves struggling to find some kind relevance in a world where social media has enabled everyone to say something snotty about a dumb movie whenever they want, leading to situations where the nominees are either weird vendettas (like choosing Mother! over The Snowman) or easy, obvious targets (like every time a Fifty Shades movie was chosen). This year, though, the nominees seemed fairly agreeable… almost suspiciously agreeable, if some new allegations are anything to believe.
The Hollywood Reporter says that an anonymous tipster who is a member of the Razzie voting community shared a leaked PDF of the final voting tallies, and some of the totals supposedly don’t line up with the top nominees in each category. For example, the PDF says that Fifty Shades Freed received the most votes in the Worst Remake, Rip-Off, Or Sequel category, but it was not included in the final five nominees announced earlier this month. Jamie Dornan and Kevin Spacey also supposedly got enough votes to be included in Worst Actor, but neither of them are on the final ballot.
The leaker says that Razzie co-founder John Wilson “just picks whatever he wants,” with someone on the Razzie forum going further and saying that “the nominations are fixed by a biased creep with a biter political agenda.” (The political agenda thing almost certainly comes from the fact that Donald Trump is nominated.) This is apparent breach of trust is especially upsetting for the Razzie voters because—as the anonymous tipster points out—they “are paying members who expect some sort of integrity in the voting process.” That’s probably one of the bigger revelations here, since it’s not really common knowledge that the over 1,000 Razzie voters pay for the opportunity to vote on whether or not Fifty Shades Of Whatever was worse than Transformers: Something Of The Something every year.
That alone seems like enough to throw the whole process into question. What happened to dunking on bad movies for the art? Whether the integrity has been shattered or not, the Razzies will be handed out on February 23.