Every year the Golden Raspberry Awards (the Razzies) nominations are announced, and every year people get annoyed about it.
This year, fans were incredulous that Ben Affleck got a nod for his strong performance in Ridley Scott’s historical epic The Last Duel; Amy Adams got not not one but two nominations (The Woman in the Window and Dear Evan Hansen) which feels almost sacrilegious.
The thing is, the Razzies have had some pretty ridiculous shouts since the beginning. In hindsight, one of the nominations for Best Actress in 1981 is shocking and the founders of the Razzies seem to agree.
John J.B. Wilson and Mo Murphy discussed in a new interview with Vulture the nomination they get asked about the most. “For me, it’s Shelley Duvall in The Shining,” Murphy revealed. “Knowing the backstory and the way that Stanley Kubrick kind of pulverised her, I would take that back.”
Duvall’s wide-eyed performance perfectly suits the creeping horror of the film but Kubrick’s filmmaking methods on-set are infamous. One particular scene was filmed a ridiculous 148 times, becoming a Guinness World Record.
“To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realise that you had to cry all day because it was scheduled — I would just start crying,” Duvall told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021. “I’d be like, ‘Oh no, I can’t, I can’t.’ And yet I did it. I don’t know how I did it. Jack said that to me, too. He said, ‘I don’t know how you do it.'”
Kubrick also got a nomination at the very first Razzies, for Best Director for The Shining, but that’s not one Wilson regrets. “A group of us who had read Stephen King’s novel went to see The Shining the night it opened at the Chinese, and we didn’t care for what Kubrick had done with the novel,” he explained.
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“The novel was far more visually astounding, far more terrifying, far more compelling, and we couldn’t understand why you would buy a novel that had all of that visual opportunity in it and then not do the topiary thing, not do the snakes in the carpet, not do the kids’ visions.
If you’re going to say it’s The Shining, you have to have certain key things in there that were not. And as I understand it, Kubrick was the one who decided what they cut out from the novel. So I don’t feel that badly about Stanley Kubrick.”
What do you think the worst-ever Razzies nominations are? Creating the new category Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 movie last year was pretty funny at least.
For more on this topic, follow the Film & TV Observer.
Check out the trailer for The Shining:
