The only three people to have won an Oscar and a Razzie on the same weekend
There probably couldn’t be two awards ceremonies further apart than The Academy Awards and the Golden Raspberry Awards, more commonly known as the Razzies. The Oscars represent the absolute height of cinema acclaim, inviting intense speculation as to the nominees and even more passionate debate about the validity of the winners. Regardless of the audience’s personal choices, the winner of an Academy Award, whether it be for acting or filmmaking, will likely cherish that golden statue for the rest of their careers.
The Razzies, on the other hand, represent the complete opposite. Self-identifying as the “counterbalance to the Oscars”, this awards ceremony takes place on the same weekend as the Academy Awards and has been honouring the worst bits of cinema since 1981, encouraging “well-known filmmakers and top-notch performers to own their bad”.
What initially started off as a parody has since grown to become a legitimate albeit tongue-in-cheek annual ceremony that has actually seen some ‘winners’ attend in person to collect their awards.
Paul Verhoeven made history by accepting the ‘Worst Director’ award, and Halle Berry proved she was able to make fun of herself by collecting her ‘Worst Actress’ award for her performance in 2005’s Catwoman. There are three people, however, who worked on projects so diverse and downright polarising that they won both Oscars and Razzies — on the same weekend.
In 1993, prolific Hollywood composer Alan Menken worked on two features that were doing the rounds at the awards ceremonies, although not necessarily for the same reasons. His song ‘A Whole New World’, co-written with Tim Rice for Aladdin, won them both the Oscar for ‘Best Original Song’.
Full of hope and adventure, the song is sung by Aladdin and Princess Jasmine as they soar over Agrabah upon their magic carpet. Menken’s other entry, however, wasn’t received so well. ‘High Times, Hard Times’, written for Newsies, was regarded so poorly that it received the ‘Worst Original Song’ that same weekend at the Razzies.
After another five years, a new champion emerged to take both the best and worst titles. Screenwriter Brian Helgeland had applied his wordsmithing to two projects in 1997; the post-apocalyptic The Postman and Curt Hanson’s neo-noir caper L.A. Confidential, for which Helgeland shared a writing credit with Hanson. Whilst the latter received critical acclaim, winning praise and a ‘Best Screenplay’ award at the Oscars for Helgeland’s adaptation of the James Ellroy novel, The Postman acquired far from favourable reviews. Ultimately, it turned out that a postman delivering letters to survivors of armageddon didn’t make for particularly compelling viewing, and Helgeland’s writing earned him ‘Worst Screenplay’.
It took over a decade before Menken and Helgeland found a worthy addition, but eventually, in 2010, Sandra Bullock won not one but two Razzies for her performance in All About Steve, which told the bizarre tale of a woman who chases a man all over the world in a desperate attempt to make him fall in love with her. Bullock’s role as Mary earned her ‘Worst Actress’, but her chemistry with Bradley Cooper, who played Mary’s crush, Steve, was deemed so terrible that they both earned the title of ‘Worst Screen Couple’.
Luckily for Bullock, before the weekend was over, the balance had been restored with a ‘Best Actress’ win at the Academy Awards for her lead role in the sports drama The Blind Side.
