The Razzie-winning performance Madonna said she was “sabotaged” into giving: “We all make bad movies”
Is it even possible to be sabotaged into giving a performance so bad that it’s deemed worthy of a Razzie? Madonna claimed that it was, but all you have to do is look at the facts, and some cracks begin to appear.
For one thing, it’s the actor who gives the performance, and whether they’re good or bad rests entirely on their shoulders. Good actors can give bad performances, just like bad actors can give good performances, but someone’s work being solid on set before being ruined in post-production seems questionable.
The elephant in the room is, of course, Madonna herself. You could maybe see her point if the rest of her filmography was packed with professional, accomplished turns that made her Razzie win an anomaly, but it wasn’t her first, and it sure as shit wasn’t her last, seeing as she’s won nine of them in total.
Since this is also the person who was decreed by science itself to be the single worst actor in the history of the moving image, too, the bounds of credulity begin folding in on themselves when the ‘Queen of Pop’ suggested that her ‘Worst Actress’ win for Body of Evidence wasn’t really her fault.
“In the ’40s, the bad girl has to die,” she told Time. “What I loved about the role was that she didn’t die. And in the end, they killed me. So I felt that I was sabotaged to a certain extent. For some reason, when that movie came out, I was held responsible for it entirely. It was my fault. Which was absurd.”
To be fair, there are a lot of terrible things about Body of Evidence, and Madonna is only one of them. She wasn’t held entirely responsible, though, at least not by the Razzies, who also shortlisted the movie for ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Director’, ‘Worst Actor’, ‘Worst Supporting Actress’, and ‘Worst Screenplay’, sharing the load among virtually all of the key players.
“We all make bad movies,” she declared, accurately. “I mean, Diabolique came out, and Sharon Stone was not held responsible for the fact that it was a crap movie, you know what I mean?” She kind of was, since her perceived attempt at reinventing herself saw the new version of the Basic Instinct focal point nominated for ‘Worst New Star’ at the Razzies for her performance in the 1996 remake.
The plot, dialogue, and every single member of the cast were found sorely lacking in Body of Evidence, and while it’s true that Madonna took the brunt of the ire, that came with the territory when she was the biggest name involved in the production by a quite considerable distance, never mind the pre-release accusations that it was a vanity project which existed solely to give her a Basic Instinct of her own.
Was she sabotaged into a Razzie-winning performance? In a word, no, because a shite performance is a shite performance, no matter what happens between the final day of shooting and the moment the film is locked, loaded, and ready to hit the big screen, but she’s entitled to disagree.
