Razzies put bite on Twilight as worst picture
Academy Awards spoof hands out prizes for Hollywood's lousiest movies
The Twilight team finally has earned some love — or loathing — from Team Razzies.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2 was picked as last year's worst picture Saturday by the Razzies, an Academy Awards spoof that hands out prizes for Hollywood's lousiest movies on the eve of the Oscars.
The finale to the blockbuster supernatural romance dominated the Razzies with seven awards, including worst actress for Kristen Stewart, supporting actor for Taylor Lautner, director for Bill Condon and worst screen couple for Lautner and child co-star Mackenzie Foy.
Adam Sandler was named worst actor for the raunchy comedy That's My Boy, his second-straight win after 2011's Jack and Jill, which swept all 10 Razzie categories a year ago. Pop singer Rihanna won worst supporting actress for the action dud Battleship.
Twilight movies had been well represented in Razzie nominations over the years but had not won any key awards there. Razzie voters joke that as with The Lord of the Rings finale winning best picture at the Academy Awards, they were waiting for the last Twilight flick on which to heap their scorn.
"I have a pet theory, which is that the box office on Twilight films is very impressive, but my theory is that instead of 40 million individual girls going to see it, it's 8 million girls going to see it five times each. People who love those movies just adore them," said Razzies founder John Wilson.
"I believe the attitude of people who really love Twilight movies toward this subject is very similar to the pomposity with which the Academy Awards addresses the whole rest of the world. Our whole existence is all about making fun of pompous, so Twilight really is right up our alley."
The Twilight finale also won for worst screen ensemble and worst remake, rip-off or sequel. For worst picture, it beat out Battleship, That's My Boy, the family flick The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure and Eddie Murphy's comedy flop A Thousand Words.
Stewart's worst-actress prize came for both Twilight and her fairy-tale update Snow White and the Huntsman.
In the five Twilight movies, Stewart stars as sullen teen Bella Swan, who falls for ageless vampire hunk Edward Cullen (worst-actor nominee Robert Pattinson) and finds herself at the centre of a love triangle with him and her childhood pal, werewolf stud Jacob Black (Lautner).
Stewart set a consistent standard of emotional stoniness throughout the Twilight movies, Wilson said.
"Acting should involve having an expression on your face, and she is blank, other than the morose kind of half-Goth thing her character does," Wilson said. "I didn't realize Snow White and Bella were soul sisters, because of the very limited range of what she can do. I think it was Dorothy Parker who said about Katharine Hepburn that she runs the 'gamut of emotions from A to B.' Kristen Stewart is so expressionless she might as well be a brick wall."
Sandler's That's My Boy, which also won the worst-screenplay Razzie, flopped at the box office and continues a gradual decline in receipts for the comic actor's movies.
"He's an enormous star who is on what I call the 'down-alator' of his career," Wilson said. "He's about to step off the same cliff Eddie Murphy stepped off about 10 years ago. Eddie Murphy has never come back, and Murphy is more talented."