Awarded for Worst in film First awarded 1978 | Country United States Last awarded 2006 | |
Presented by Hastings Bad Cinema Society | ||
The Stinkers Bad Movie Awards (formerly known as the Hastings Bad Cinema Society) was a Los Angeles-based group of film buffs and movie critics devoted to honoring the worst films of the year.
Contents
- Founding
- The Stinkers first ballots
- Nominating Paris Hilton
- Closure
- Motion picture
- Special awards
- References
The society was founded by Mike Lancaster and Ray Wright, two former ushers who met in the late 1970s at what is now the Pacific Hastings Theater in Pasadena, California (from which the society originally got its name).
The Stinkers Bad Movie Awards have been featured in Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, and on the BBC, CNN, as well as in several newspapers and magazines.
Founding
Lancaster and Wright offered the annual Stinkers Bad Movie Awards, which was a parody of the Academy Awards. The Stinkers were similar to the Golden Raspberry Award (the "Razzies"), which debuted four years after the Stinkers. Aside from the usual categories one might expect in an Oscar parody (Worst Picture, Worst Actor, etc.), the Stinkers offered other clever categories such as Worst Fake Accent, Most Painfully Unfunny Comedy, Least 'Special' Special Effects and Worst On-Screen Hairstyle. Unlike the Razzies, the Stinkers did not have an awards ceremony.
The Stinkers' first ballots
The Stinkers' first ballots were handed out to the public in 1997. In the years that followed, the Razzies and Stinkers rarely agreed on a list of nominees or winners. The Stinkers initially opened their balloting to the general moviegoing public but soon discovered that most people surveyed hadn't seen many of the films on the ballot and often just voted for the person they hated the most, usually someone like Mariah Carey, the Spice Girls or anyone connected with the film Gigli.
In 2001 the Stinkers created 100 Years, 100 Stinkers: The Worst Films of the 20th Century, a list that parodied AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list. The next year the Stinkers made a special trophy of a miniature flushing toilet for comedian actor Tom Green. Green's Freddy Got Fingered was nominated for seven awards and won Worst Film, Worst Sense of Direction, Worst Actor and Most Painfully Unfunny Comedy. That same year the Stinkers gave a special award to David Manning, the controversial Sony Pictures fictitious movie critic. The Stinkers included in 2003 another special category for Worst Performance by a Child, dedicated to child actor Spencer Breslin.
In 2004, the Stinkers went to a more selective way of obtaining votes. They dismantled their membership and offered ballots by invitation only to a small, select group of film geeks and critics, who had seen a majority of the films during the year.
Nominating Paris Hilton
In 2006, the Stinkers refused to nominate hotel heiress Paris Hilton for her supporting role in the horror film House of Wax. Said Lancaster, "To get on the Stinkers ballot you are judged on your performance, not your tabloid persona. Anyone that would put Paris Hilton on a list of the five worst supporting actresses in 2005 didn't see a lot of movies in 2005. I could list twelve actresses who gave worse supporting performances than Paris Hilton."
The next year, the Stinkers did nominate Hilton for Worst Actress for her performance in the barely released National Lampoon's Pledge This!. Society co-founder Lancaster had this to say about Hilton's nomination, "It was like Paris was baiting us, I'm not sure why she needs us to confirm to her that she's a bad actress appearing in a bad movie, but if she has the nerve to play her movie in a theater five minutes from my house, I will take notice. I still have my ticket stub if any one doubts this film played in a theater. It was like a gift from the bad movie gods."
Closure
In late January 2007, it was announced on the website that following the announcement of the year's winners, the Stinkers website would be officially closed down after ten years on the internet. On July 1, 2007, four months after the announcement of the worst of 2006 winners, the site was taken down. Its final headline was a review quote from Chicago Sun-Times critic Richard Roeper calling the film Evan Almighty "a paper-thin alleged comedy with a laugh drought of biblical proportions."
A book about the Stinkers Awards and their history was also promised on the website, just before the site closed down. It was to be released "before the end of the decade." This never came to pass.