Welcome, dearest AE readers, to the first annual (we hope) Golden Spoon Awards, where we celebrate the good in “so bad it’s good!”
If you already know what’s going on and you’re here for the Golden Spoon nomination form, click here. Otherwise, proceed to the FAQ.
Hang on. What are the Golden Spoon Awards?
The Golden Spoon Awards are meaningless fake awards that honor the best in the year’s bad filmmaking. In other words, they’re just like the Oscars!
For real, though, the idea here is to give accolades to the things we loved in the movies we didn’t. As you may know, I cover the Razzies, the premiere award ceremony devoted to shitting all over the most notorious films of every year. If that beat has taught me one thing, it’s that picking on dumb movies for being dumb is…not all that interesting. So I thought it might be fun for us all to fill a little niche that the Razzies have left behind.
Behind every great bad movie (and quite a few non-great bad movies) is someone taking the whole ridiculous enterprise very seriously and making the experience – if not the actual movie – one to cherish. The one good (or at least, committed) actor in a cast of idiots. The director who did her darnedest to bring life and spark to a passionless project. The screenwriter who gave us the best unintentional comedy of the year. The composer who thought he was working on a very different project.
It’s easy to be great when everyone around you is also great. It’s much harder when everyone around you is a talentless hack, and it takes a true artist to elevate a bad film to something wonderful. We honor those artists here.
Why are they called the Golden Spoon Awards?
They are named after the not-actually-mysterious spoon stock photos in The Room, one of dozens of beautiful little touches that make that particular film transcendent. Tommy Wiseau’s attempt to explain the spoons helps not at all.
What constitutes a “bad movie of 2022”?
A bad movie of 2022 is a movie given its widest release in 2022 that you thought was bad. It’s that simple. If you thought The Menu was bad, you’re wrong, but you can still nominate it for Golden Spoon Awards. If other people agree with you that the movie was bad, it may also get their nominations.
What Golden Spoon categories are available?
In this first, experimental year of the Golden Spoon Awards, we will have seven categories based on the Big Eight Oscars:
- Best Bad Movie – for the year’s most overall enjoyable bad movie experience
- Best Director of a Bad Movie – for the director whose choices led to the most interesting, if perhaps inexplicable, bad movie experience of the year.
- Best Actor/Actress in a Bad Movie – for the actor or actress in a leading role who gave this movie way more than it deserved in performance quality, commitment to the bit, or both.
- Best Supporting Actor/Actress in a Bad Movie – for the actor or actress in a supporting role who gave this movie way more than it deserved in performance quality, commitment to the bit, or both.
- Best Bad Screenplay (Original or Adapted) – for the screenplay that gave us the most meme-able lines of the year, which we’ll remember long after we’ve forgotten everything said in Empire of Light.
Live-action and animated films, plus all hybrids in the betweenspace, are eligible for nomination.
What will the winners receive?
They will receive very fine write-ups on this here movie website. If I get really bored or have work I really don’t want to do, I might paint some plastic spoons gold and write their names on those too.
How will the nominations work?
This is where you come in!
You – yes, you – can nominate films for the Golden Spoon Awards via this form. Nominations will be open until January 31, after which I will compile the official slates of nominees and Phase II: Voting will open. The winners will be announced during the week prior to that other meaningless awards ceremony.
This of course means that we will need nominees. The Golden Spoon Awards depend on your contributions for success, so please please please nominate and have fun! I look forward to announcing our inaugural cohort in a couple of weeks.
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.