DEFAMER: So the nominees that emerged yesterday weren't official yet?
JOHN: What happened is we have press members on our mailing list, and this guy Larry Carroll from MTV's Movie Blog apparently misunderstood and thought that was a final list. And it kind of went viral for us.

So what was it, if not a list of nominees?
When we send out our nominating ballots, we also send out a list of suggested nominees—only because if you don't steer it somehow, you just get no consensus with as many people as we have voting. Those are likely nominees when the final ballots are tabulated and the actual nominations are announced on the 21st, but those are not the official nominees.

Are there any dark horses that could still emerge?
I'm assuming you're talking about The Spirit, which is getting a lot of write-in votes. One of the things that's happened ever since the Oscars jumped their show a month ahead is that we have to get our material out the week of Christmas, and anything that comes out on Christmas or later is not likely to make it out onto our ballot. [...] With Tom Cruise (in the Christmas-released Valkyrie), someone asked, "Well, how can Tom Cruise be on there if The Spirit wasn't?" And with Tom Cruise, the advance buzz was really awful. Although apparently the movie isn't that bad, so it'll be interesting to see if he does or does not get a nomination.

Well, one big star vehicle that seems to have supplanted Valkyrie as far as public ire is Seven Pounds, which a poll of critics recently voted the year's worst.
You know, I've seen that. It's weird, and it's an odd concept for a movie, but it's not quite to the standards of what we would consider for a Razzie. At least until the jellyfish part, which definitely belongs on the "nuke the fridge" list. Up to that point, it's a reasonably reputable movie, though I should admit that it also is getting write-in votes for screenplay. I don't think Will Smith is getting many votes for that, he's getting them for Hancock.

So what criteria do you consider for Worst Picture?
We look at box office—and big box office doesn't protect you from being Razzie-nominated—we look at the Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes, we pay attention to what's being said on the forum of our website. We look at the track record of the people involved. Like Uwe Boll—the guy over at Rope of Silicon was saying "duh." Well yeah, "duh"—it's the same thing as Meryl Streep getting an Oscar nomination! Uwe Boll is just as shitty a director as Meryl Streep is a terrific actress. They're kind of mirrors of one another, and nobody attacks the Academy for nominating Meryl Streep. Uwe's Boll's Postal...if you've seen it, you have my sympathies. I actually have, and it's right up there with Freddy Got Fingered as just an inexcusable, tasteless, unfunny, "why did anyone give this person money" movie. And Freddy Got Fingered is the only Worst Picture winner that I've actually hated.

Has there ever been any overlap with Oscar bait? One of our editors suggested Revolutionary Road this year...
Three times, I believe, the exact same thing has been nominated for a Razzie and an Oscar. And in all three cases, it didn't win either. The best known one is probably Amy Irving as Barbra Streisand's wife in Yentl, who was nominated as both Best and Worst Supporting Actress. I'm trying to remember if the song from Con Air, "How Do I Live," that also may have been nominated for both.

Well there are so many terrible Oscar-nominated songs! That's probably the category that deserves the most overlap.
We actually had a Worst Song category for years, and we had a lot of fun with it. Generally speaking, though, if a song gets a Razzie nomination it's probably one that won't get played a lot on the radio. Although I guess "I Want Your Sex" from Beverly Hills Cop II did win a Razzie!

So what do you think are the top frontrunners this year?
I don't think I agree with our members or the public about The Love Guru. I thought that it was stupid, but I didn't find it offensive. Still, it looks like it has the inside track to get nominated all over the place. I know that when this list went viral yesterday, a lot of the public was disturbed that we had bothered to nominate Rambo. Personally, I think Rambo was a violent, pointless, ill-conceived, badly-written, horribly-acted, badly-edited piece of crap.

Tell us how you really feel!
Eddie Murphy has the highest-profile box office bomb of the year in Meet Dave. I will be curious to see how many nominations—not if it will get nominated, but how many—it will get. He swept three characters at last year's awards, so I'm sure he'll end up with some. The one I'm hoping gets a lot of nominations is Postal. The real enigma about Uwe Boll is not why he exists but why he continues to make movies! Who needs the tax loss so bad that they can spend $50 or $60 million on these movies? I can't wrap my head around it.

Are we going to see any love for M. Night Shyamalan this year?
It looks like it has the possibility, but if there's anything he's learned from the multiple Razzies that Lady in the Water won years ago, it's that casting yourself as a Jesus-like character in your own movie doesn't go over well. At least he isn't in The Happening. That was one that was a lot of fun to see with people when it first opened, because the audience doesn't know you're going to find out that it's bush—but not the President!—that's responsible for Armageddon. That twist he does in all his movies was particularly dunderheaded in this one. And I'm normally an admirer of Betty Buckley, but of all the elements in this movie that I hope get nominated, Betty Buckley as a crazy old lady who crashes her head through a window and screams at Mark Wahlberg is high on my list. That definitely deserves some attention from us!

PREVIOUSLY: Razzie Nominations Serve A Shocking Snub To 'The Spirit'

We'd had high expectations that no film could surpass The Spirit's unimpeachable Razzie campaign, which featured a 15% fresh Tomatometer rating, a viral "For Your Consideration" ad, and Samuel L. Jackson in a series of fur coats and Nazi costumes. And yet! MTV writer Larry Carroll got his hands on the official Razzie ballot, and The Spirit warranted nary a nom (even in the sure-lock "Most Excessive Use of Chiaroscuro" category, somehow, The Hottie and the Nottie squeaked by).

Here's a sampling of the contenders:

Worst Picture:
Speed Racer, Disaster Movie and Meet the Spartans, The Day the Earth Stood Still, High School Musical 3, The Hottie & The Nottie, Dungeon Siege, The Love Guru, Postal, Rambo, The Happening, Meet Dave, Witless Protection

Worst Actor:
Zac Efron, Dane Cook, Larry the Cable Guy, Eddie Murphy, Al Pacino, Keanu Reeves, Sylvester Stallone, Tom Cruise (Valkyrie), Will Ferrell, Ashton Kutcher, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Mark Wahlberg

Worst Actress:
Paris Hilton, Jessica Alba, The cast of The Women, Camilla Belle, Cameron Diaz, Kate Hudson, Diane Keaton, Jennifer Connelly, Zooey Deschanel, Vanessa Hudgens, Eva Longoria-Parker, Reese Witherspoon

Worst Director:
Uwe Boll, Scott Derrickson, Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer, Tom Putnam, Marco Schnabel, Sylvester Stallone, Jon Avnet, Diane English, Roland Emmerich, Brian Robbins, Kenny Ortega, M. Night Shyamalan

Fingers crossed, Manoj!

• 2008 ‘Razzies’ Nominees Include Indy 4, Paris Hilton And Tom Cruise - How Would You Vote? [MTV]

· Not enough tragic celebrity-offspring-death news for one day? The coroner's findings say Dr. Dre's son died of a heroin and morphine overdose.
· Resolution encouragement: Ricky Gervais thinks people who get gastric bypasses and lap band surgery (hey—that's us!) are "lazy fucking fat pigs" who should "stop eating, get off your arse and go for a run."
· This year-in-review quiz from today's LAT was extremely entertaining.
· The latest fake-memoir to pull the wool over Oprah's eyes has inspired this slideshow of famous literary hoaxes. We always had our suspicions about Misha, but our desire to believe there might have really existed a Holocaust-surviving weregirl trumped all rational thought.

WHAT'S NEW: High stakes are hardly unusual for a holiday frame, but their sheer volume in 2008 is slightly disturbing: Last week's new-movie nomads shall be consumed wholly by a pack of heavyweight predators in wide release. Their top grosser should be Disney's Bedtime Stories, a sizable stride in the slow Eddie Murphyfication of Adam Sandler, playing a novice storytelling uncle who is shocked when his tales come to life. Hijinks ensue while conjuring the most explicit double entendres he can imagine, thus leaving both the kiddies and himself fulfilled when the gumball rain outside yields a ball-gum flood requiring Keri Russell's careful attention. Expect Stories to win the long weekend with $39.9 million.

The bourgeois-white-assholes-and-their-crazy-fucking-dog tearjerker Marley & Me won't be that far behind at $35.7 million, defying Disney's covert spoiler ops to steer people to their own family offfering. Behind that, look for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to officially launch its Oscar crusade with $22.6 million, hindered by its nearly three-hour length and more-than-expected siphoning off by Valkyrie (which we'll get to in a bit). At the bottom of the scrum you'll find The Spirit, Frank Miller's spectacularly awful adaptation of Will Eisner's comics classic, pocketing $11.9 million for Lionsgate. Also opening in limited release: The Cannes darling, Oscar-probable animated documentary from Israel, Waltz With Bashir.

THE BIG LOSER: There aren't enough pejoratives in the world to pile onto Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes's misbegotten attempt to steal another Oscar while the Academy reaches for its collective Kleenex. Or checks its watch; the reunion of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet is an interminable slog that, with any justice, should see its early, positive numbers reverse dramatically as Los Angeles and New York audiences flee theaters in search of refunds. What more can we say? Oh — lots.

THE UNDERDOG: We probably have no right to place a Tom Cruise film in this spot — especially one so expensively ubiquitous of late. But after all those months of speculation and dread surrounding Bryan Singer's $90 million thriller about the failed plot to kill Hitler, let's be fair: Valkyrie is a solid if weird popcorn thriller. The first act drags, Singer gets a little too cute for anyone's good (may we never again be subjected to his spinny Phonograph-Cam™), and you never do totally sink into Cruise and castmates Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Kenneth Branagh as English-speaking German officers. Still, the assassination conspiracy and its momentary glimmer of success is a captivating fluke of history handled articulately and tastefully — and sure, entertainingly — by Singer and Cruise. Even if you don't contribute to its $18.2 million opening, it's worth a look in the weeks ahead.

FOR SHUT-INS: This week's new DVD releases include the Statham-y holiday favorite Death Race, the underrated Coen Brothers caper Burn After Reading, Anna Faris's Playboy commercial-cum-college comedy The House Bunny, and a couple of the year's most notorious indie flops, The Women and Hamlet 2. Gather the family, and have a great holiday weekend!

So Bad it's Good: The Spirit (Dec. 25). Perhaps it's best to know as little as possible going into this adaptation of Will Eisner's classic 1940s comic series, written and directed by Eisner acolyte Frank Miller in the arresting visual style of his debut (with Robert Rodriguez) Sin City. But the silhouettes, snow and sooty (if green-screened) Central City backdrops are less-convincing a reason to have a look than the gleeful pageantry of Miller's bad taste: The Spirit (Gabriel Macht), essentially a zombie cop turned oversexed masked-vigilante enforcer, introduces himself by way of an epic fight with equally unkillable Central City crime lord The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson). Mud is thrown, balls are crushed, toilets are slammed, and expectations are dashed. "This," you should expect to mutter to yourself and/or your incredulous date, "is fucking terrible."

Well, kind of. Your first impression — that Miller has no idea what he's doing — eventually surrenders to an intrigue with what he'll do next. Will Scarlett Johansson put her beguiling badness to work as Octopus right-hand Silken Floss, or simply stand around like a line-reading cleavage prop? Will Eva Mendes (as jewel thief Sand Saref) test the PG-13 rating with her de rigeur gratuitous nudity? Will doctor Sarah Paulson ever tire of her male-slut superhero crush? Will Jackson's fat, annoying cloned henchmen ever shut up? And is that actually Sam Jackson up there in Nazi regalia, shouting about eggs?

By the time Miller answers most of these questions, you're already barreling toward The Spirit's climax — a convergence of the hero, villain and their intimates for a hyper-violent This is Your Life variant for the soul of Central City. With spectacle to spare and absolutely no interest in Iron Man's optimism, The Incredible Hulk's self-seriousness or The Dark Knight's social criticism, The Spirit instead emerges as the comics genre's semi-lucid inbred cousin. Hating this movie would be like booing at the Special Olympics.

So Bad it's Bad: Seven Pounds (now playing). At some point one might expect an ebb to the extraordinary critical tsunami that helped devastate Will Smith's morality play. Or at least a backlash of some kind, anything pledging some redeemability to the story of a purported IRS agent making a set of mysterious rounds to help an ensemble of sick, blind and otherwise downtrodden strangers.

Alas, we won't be the ones inaugurating that movement. Seven Pounds is everything its detractors say, with baffling plot contrivances and dramatic ineptitude compounded by the cardinal sin of utter boredom. As Smith's mission crystallizes and his motivations surface — in a twist so random it really does defy spoiling here — the likelihood of any emotional payoff diminishes behind the vast horizon of its star's ego. We imagine Seven Pounds' final 40 minutes may someday acquire some esteem in the Cult-Classic Canon for its adroit interweaving of printing-press repair, bone-marrow transplants, bad sex and killer jellyfish. But for want of anything worthwhile preceding them, it begs the question: If Will Smith falls in the forest and the audience walked out around the one-hour mark, does he make a sound?

So Bad it's Ugly: Revolutionary Road (Dec. 25) . While novelist John Cheever traced the glide path of America's fall from post-WWII euphoria to disillusioned ennui, his contemporary Richard Yates was the black box that captured every primal, panicked cry in the seconds before the crash. Nearly 50 years on, Sam Mendes likely fancies himself to share a little of each man's qualities, with his decade's worth of moodily revisionist entries surveying suburbia (American Beauty), crime and the Depression (Road to Perdition), the first Iraq War (Jarhead) and now Revolutionary Road, Yates's debut novel about an idealistic young couple's suffocation in the Connecticut suburbs.

But Mendes crafted not so much an adaptation here as he did a stunt. It was one thing to reunite wife Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, tricking the Titanic generation into a bit of po-mo awards-season whiplash; it was another entirely to impose his semi-literate condescension on Frank and April Wheeler, Yates's doomed ad man and his housewife, whose shared yearning for a life beyond the social constraints of their titular street capsizes in devastating slow-motion. Their unraveling was a symbolic end to the optimism of Eisenhower's '50s, no less nightmarish for its yowling, virtually unprecedented depiction of complacency's costs. It created a stir that never altogether faded, influencing American Beauty itself and prompting no fewer than a dozen failed screen attempts before Mendes and Scott Rudin coaxed around $40 million of DreamWorks' money to smear their quasi-pedigreed patina over the Wheeler family's implosion.

It would have been bad enough with screenwriter Justin Haythe digesting Yates's piercing dialogue into compact, Oscar-clip-compatible bursts. It would have been bad enough with DiCaprio and Winslet, each miscast, delivering those bursts in furrow-browed, you-shout-now-I-shout order. It would have been bad enough with Michael Shannon dropping by as the neighbors' candid loony son, the Connecticut equivalent of Southern dramas' "magical Negro" whose cruelly omniscient nuggets coincide conveniently with key junctures of the Wheelers' dissolution.

But Revolutionary Road's real failure transcends tone-deafness. Here, Mendes actively perverts his source's vanguard qualities — grossly commodifying the Wheelers, fetishizing their anguish, and in fact reveling in the excruciating emotional turmoil that tormented Yates until his death in 1992. We knew Mendes was a bit of a serial masturbator, but a necrophiliac? Moreover, a cold-blooded cultural murderer? Quick — someone save Kate.

God, we hope not. While we're sure Ken Tucker will be chiming in any minute now with his Iron Man vs. Spirit early Oscar-race handicapping, we have no doubt that Lionsgate will keep this one fairly straightforward — perhaps an ironic marketing surge positioning Scareltt Johansson "for your consideration" as Sexiest Nurse, or maybe Gabriel Macht as Most Overmatched Leading Man. In any case, we salute a studio with the balls to move a release up a month while the rest of the world makes excuses for its delays. We've already suggested Disney should be so bold. Pussies.

• Christmas gets Frank Miller's 'Spirit' [Variety]

While the pictures do evoke a sort of kinky, Halloween-meets-Abu Ghraib appeal if you stare at them long enough, the expressionless starlet's turn as garden-variety fetish model leaves us wanting more — and not "more" as in "We can't wait to see this," but rather, "Why isn't the mannequin in this mug shot turning us on?" Claiming copyright infringement, reps for Lionsgate instantly issued a cease-and-desist notice to yank the photos, to which the editors at Hollywood Newsroom replied: "They're newsworthy.... Fuck off." See? Now that's sexy.

• Leaked pic of sexy nurse Scarlett Johansson [Hollywood Newsroom]