What is the only movie to feature an Oscar-winning and Razzie-winning performance?
The Golden Raspberry Awards are a ceremony that almost commands as much attention as its lofty Hollywood progenitor.
Around the time of the annual Academy Award nominations announcements early in the year, The Golden Raspberry team, or Razzies as they’re better known, reel off their parody alternative to the lauded Oscar gongs with a counter collection of that year’s most dismal contributions to cinema, be it ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Actor’, and so forth.
Typically taking place the night before the Oscars, the press is much easier as Hollywood’s extra-packed press descends to the events as a cynical hors d’oeuvres for the main event.
It’s become something of an institution in itself. First held in 1981 by UCLA graduate and industry marketer John JB Wilson in his own living room, the Razzie Awards soon grew to a much-loved yearly celebration, eventually swelling to a room of hundreds and even compelling lucky winners to personally accept the illustrious Razzie—a golden raspberry atop a Super 8mm film reel stacked on a larger 35mm film core—Halle Berry, Sandra Bullock, and Paul Verhoeven, all inviting the ignominious trophy in good humour.
On occasion, a fortunate few can pick up both a Razzie and an Oscar on the same weekend. Such an honour was bestowed on Bullock, who won ‘Worst Actress’ for 2009’s All About Steve before picking up an Oscar for The Blind Side.
Awarded the respective gongs for equal parts celebrated and awful, composer Alan Menken joined the double club in 1993 for his original songs to Aladdin and Newsies in 1993, and four years later, screenwriter Brian Helgeland followed suit for his work on the glittering highs of LA Confidential to the turkey ebbs of The Postman.
However, in the Razzies’ entire history, only one film out of 77 nominations has ever actually won both a Golden Raspberry and an Academy Award in one fell swoop.
So what film’s won the honour of an Oscar and a Razzie?
At the peak of his filmmaking career, writer and director Oliver Stone looked to the greed that had been evoked during the Reaganomics era toward the end of the 1980s’ neoliberal lurch.
Depicting the white collar financial crime that Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox is embroiled in at the hands of Michael Douglas’ bigwig corporate raider Gordon Gekko, 1987’s Wall Street would prove an effective excoriation of unfettered capitalism, if its thematic attack fell on the stockbroker yuppies who valorised Gekko as their ideal role model.
Douglas would walk away with the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ the following year, yet Daryl Hannah’s turn as the materialist partner to Fox, Darien Taylor, would pick up the Golden Raspberry Award for ‘Worst Supporting Actress’, which was little surprise to the production team, or even the director himself. “Daryl Hannah was not happy doing the role and I should have let her go,” he confessed in his 1996 biography. “All my crew wanted to get rid of her after one day of shooting. My pride was such that I kept saying I was going to make it work”.
