There are plenty of awards that honor the best of the prior year’s films, from the Golden Globe Awards and the Screen Actors Guild Awards to the prestigious Academy Awards, but it’s the Golden Raspberry Awards that call out the worst projects to come out of Hollywood each year. The 38th Razzie Awards nominations were announced this week, and the list of films to receive the dubious honor is led by Michael Bay’s latest spin on the robots in disguise, Transformers: The Last Knight.
Bay’s widely panned fifth installment of the live-action Transformers franchise led the pack with nine Razzie Award nominations, earning nods in every category except “Worst Actress” — due to the film not having a lead actress — and even earned two nominations in the “Worst Supporting Actor” category (for Josh Duhamel and Anthony Hopkins). In the awards’ typical, heckle-friendly tradition, the nomination for The Last Knight in the “Worst Screen Combo” category was assigned to “Any Combination of Two Humans, Two Robots, or Two Explosions.”
Following in a close second place among the nominees was erotic drama Fifty Shades Darker, the sequel to 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey (which also received six nominations and won four categories at the 36th Razzie Awards). Fifty Shades Darker received eight nominations in various categories, including a nomination for “Any Combination of Two Characters, Two Sex Toys or Two Sexual Positions” in the screen combo category. Tom Cruise’s underwhelming horror movie The Mummy came in third with seven nominations.
In other highlights (or lowlights, in this case), The Emoji Movie made Razzie Award history by becoming the first feature-length animated movie to be nominated in the “Worst Picture,” “Worst Director,” and “Worst Screenplay” categories, and the first animated feature to be nominated in the “Worst Screenplay” category since 1996’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The nominations and winners of the Golden Raspberry Awards have traditionally been announced the day before the corresponding announcements are made for the Academy Awards, and this year is no different, with the full list of winners scheduled to be announced March 3.
The full list of Golden Raspberry Award nominees and more information about the Golden Raspberry Foundation that chooses the winners is available at the Razzies website.