Announcing the Winners of the The 2021 Peely Awards for the Worst in Pop Culture

Thanks to LibraryLass for making this excellent header.

Well, the voting is in, the roosters have come home to… roost, and we’re here to announce the winners of the 2021 Peely Awards for the Worst in Pop Culture. These votes were tallied at Midnight EST, January 3^rd from the nominations made in Round II – our most popular and successful year yet! Thanks so much to everyone who nominated, be they categories or candidates, and to everyone who voted; you helped end the year in style. I’d also like to say thanks to Lovely Bones, whose incredible aid in counting votes (and consistent checking of shared votes between duplicate nominations) was instrumental in this coming out at all.

And what a year it was! You had projects slated for 2020 that were delayed or shelved, only to arrive with less zest than you’d have wanted. You had stuff that just did not read the room when it came to the ongoing pandemic or politics or even basic decency. You had people trying poorly to break into “shared universes” or huge brands – and some of those very successes stumbling in their own ways. You had two video games using a particular ugly narrative trope, one an otherwise acclaimed project and one a symbol of awful “super serious” games writing. You had ossified comic strips proving they can be obscene, just like adaptations that didn’t have to be bad; they just chose to be. You had Yuji Naka, the co-creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, face-planting so bad it forced him out of the gaming mainstream (and given his history, maybe that was a bit of karmic justice).

But there is one work that went below and beyond: Me, You, Madness. An otherwise easy to ignore thriller with no thrills (whose stabs at comedy and romance were even deader on arrival) caught our attention for one single reason: it was truly, abominably bad. Its serial killer fetishization was somehow more warmed-over Dexter than the actual warmed-over Dexter revival. Its atrocious use of popular licensed songs recalls winners and nominees of years past. But having actual Trump money behind it – due to being financed partially by star Louise Linton’s husband and former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin – was the special spice. It felt like a film entirely out of time, something made by people completely ignorant of the changing cultural (and pop cultural) landscape. Which would be only moderately interesting were it not so appalling and so repellent. It did not win this year’s Worst Film award, or any award beyond getting its own category, but no other work of art best represents the dregs of 2021.

But, such as it is. There was a smorgasbord of awfulness, hatefulness, crealty, incompetence, poor execution, and low hanging fruit. In fact, some worthy stuff got lost in the shuffle; did you know that Eric Roberts was in a movie this year titled The Wrong Mr. Right – and it didn’t make the finalists for “Worst Title for an Eric Roberts Movie?” And it’s part of a series by Vivica A. Fox and David “A Talking Cat!?!” DeCoteau?! We need to investigate this further.

…Well, while we’re doing that, here are our winners and runners-up! Check ‘em out!

1. The Jared Leto Should – AND DID! – Win This just for his One Line of Dialogue in The Snyder Cut Award for Worst (Gender non-specific) Actor of 2021 (Wolfman Jew)

• Jared Leto, his one line of dialogue in Justice League: The Snyder Cut (30)
• Gal Gadot, Red Notice (10)
• Eden Perkins, Cowboy Bebop (8)
• Lebron James, Space Jam: A New Legacy (7)
• Bryce Dallas Howard and Seth Gabel, Maquette (3)

2. The Jon Stewart’s Raiding of Mr. Freeze’s Ice Puns Award for Worst Villain (UpVoFoCo MoDo)

• The Flag Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for having incoherent beliefs used to justify a boring, borderline offensive “yeah global poverty and inequality sucks but the superheroes definitely need to focus on smacking down the people trying to change it” storyline (46)
• Rami Malek as guy planning…something?, No Time to Die (16)
• Kang, Loki (7)
• Ray Winstone as whatshisname, Black Widow (7)
• Marco Inaros, The Expanse (4)

3. The Mud, Sex, Gold, and Failed Notes Award for Worst Musical (SadClown)

• Dear Evan Hansen (37)
• Cinderella (20)
• Diana: The Musical (16)
• Annie: Live (4)

4. Work Blockbuster or Franchise Project, Be It Sequel, Prequel, Reboot, or Yadda Yadda (Snob-Ra, Michael Weyer)

• Space Jam: A New Legacy (36)
• Ghostbusters: Afterlife (18)
• Tom & Jerry (16)
• The Matrix Resurrections (10)
• Godzilla vs. Kong (9)

5. Worst Trailer, Poster, Advertising Campaign, Celebrity Endorsement, or Broader Act of Marketing (Tigercat919, Owen1120,  So Bring Us A Figgy Pliny)

• The Cherk poster from Cherry (38)

• The Peloton ad with Chris Noth made as damage control after Mr. Big dies in And Just Like That… after riding one, days before his several sexual assault and misconduct allegations from the past twenty years resurfaced (33)
• Matt Damon crypto ads (29)
• The first trailer for Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, a bizarre bit of footage in which an utterly nondescript dink repeatedly growls that he’s going to “kill Chaos” (15)
• The insurance ads that try to one-up Liberty Mutual’s awful songs and gimmicks… by including awful songs and gimmicks that tell you they don’t use songs or gimmicks in their ads (15)
• Applebee’s “fancy like” “dance” commercials (14)

6. Count Dooku Award for Most Egregious/Silly Proper Noun in a Sci-Fi or Fantasy Property that Was Introduced or Gained Notoriety in 2021 (Girard)

• Ralph Bohner, WandaVision (18)
• Al G. Rhythm, Space Jam: A New Legacy (13)
• Duncan Idaho, Dune (11)
• Lyutsifer Safin, No Time to Die (9)
• EMMA, Persona 5 Strikers (2)

7. Juicero Memorial Award for Worst New Product or Technological Boondoggle of 2021 (Merve, The Wasp)

• NFTs (72)
• Facebook’s rebrand as Meta and its corresponding VR Metaverse (22)
• The Tesla car that isn’t rainproof (20)
• Disney Genie (11)
• Hand In Yo Face: become a better basketball player by strapping this cutout of a hand onto your face! (8)

8. Genghis John Award for Most Unfortunate Casting Choice (SadClown, Michael Weyer)

• Ben Platt, Dear Evan Hansen (47)
• The Death on the Nile trailer released this fall featuring: bigots, anti-vaxxers, abusers, and the IDF, AKA: Armie Hammer, Letitia Wright, Russell Brand, and Gal Gadot (25)
• Ansel Elgort. West Side Story (23)
• A Spaniard (Javier Bardem) as a Latino (Desi Arnaz), Being the Ricardos (13)
• Chris Noth, The Equalizer (2)

9. Most Baffling, Bone-Headed, or Banal Plot Twist, Development, or Ending (Wolfman Jew) (UpVoFoCo MoDo)

• 12 Minutes heavily features incest, and we’re only gonna send you the comment nominating it in case you want to know how bad it gets – but it’s bad (38)
• Deathloop ALSO features incest – video games! – so here’s an explanation (21)
• Everyone in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier suddenly forgiving John Walker in the finale (19)
• M. Night Shyamalan does… what is this supposed to be, Metal Gear? Some Michael Crichton thing?, Old (13)
• WandaVision decides to do something that… makes a lasting impact on this list (13)

10. The “2 Martha 2 Furious” Award for Worst Change in an Adaptation or Worst Retcon (LoveWaffle)

• Cruella doesn’t want to reallllly make a coat out of dogs. You know… that thing she’s known for, Cruella (45)
• You know Scorpion? The guy who shouts “get over here!” and breathes fire on people and shoots a rope-knife out of his hand to gut people? His powers all come from the love he has for his family, Mortal Kombat (35)
• What If…? Dares to ask, “what if we weren’t actually an anthology?” (15)
• Cyborg’s Dad is a Randian and turns his son into The Ubermensch so he could rule over everyone as a god, Justice League: The Snyder Cut (13)
• Sonya Blade is too Girl to be able to join Mortal Kombat she has to beat up Kano first, Mortal Kombat (9)
• Generic protagonist Cole-with-a-C, Mortal Kombat (9)

11. Worst “Joke” in a “Comedy” (Owen1120)

• James Corden calling his mousey dick a “Front Tail,” CInderella (31)
• Any time a decades-later sequel or reboot has one of the characters remark that ‘Hollywood needs to leave classic movies alone’ (cf. Coming 2 America, Home Sweet Home Alone) (15)
• Hey, remember how Pierce Brosnan couldn’t sing in Mamma Mia? Let’s have him do a song number that sucks, just like how he sucks at singing, and laugh at him!, Cinderella (12)
• “Serves me right for marrying a Scorpio,” Diana: The Musical (10)
• Perhaps I’m overstepping by this not being a comedy, but Jason Statham seals a guy up in a punching bag and beats the shit out of him – all played for laughs – in F9: The Fast Saga (8)

12. The Grey’s Anatomy Award For Most Bizarre Music Choice In A Scene (Michael Weyer)

• Black Widow‘s Bond-style opening credits set to a cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (which Bones actually enjoyed just so we’re clear) (34)
• The mashup of “Whatta Man” and “Seven Nation Army,” Cinderella (16)
• Another awesome one (it’s “most bizarre,” not “worst”), but “Chief Irons gets gunned down by HUNKs set to ‘Don’t Stop Believing,” Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (5)
• The repeat motif of “Hotel California,” Shang-Chi (4)
• The OP for Part 2 of Tales of Arise being a piano-driven power ballad completely incompatible with the anime scenes over which it plays (2)

13. Doing It All the Ways and Calling it Pop-Pop Award for Worst Sex Scene (Merve)

• Dan Stevens twisting into an odd shape to hide his penis, I’m You Man (3)
• So much of Sex/Life, but the “leaking nipples” scene is the topper (1)

14. The Kevin James and the A-Bomb Award for Worst Tonal Misfire (Girard)

• In Mary Worth, Eve’s recollections of her late husband’s abuses go abruptly from “He liked to trip me and was generally just kind of a mean bully” to “oh, and one time he shot my dog.” (68)

• Apparently, WandaVision has… some very strong ideas of victimization and sacrifice (51)
• Dear Evan Hansen emphasizing the worst aspects of the musical in him taking advantage of a grieving family to look and feel better about himself. Shout-out for how he tries to get to know the other kid better by reading his favorite book: former Peely’s target Ready Player One! (32)
• The Falcon and Winter Soldier pal around with U.S. Agent because what’s a little law enforcement homicide among friends (23)
• Netflix Cowboy Bebop, general poor attempts at humor, and most notably the incredibly jarring ending where it jump cuts from massive tragic fallout to Johnny Test level annoying cartoon comedy in the midst of more specific bizarre adaptational choices (16) 

15. Most Accidentally Offensive Moral / Theme (Owen1120)

• WandaVision, the town you tortured will never understand that you are in fact the real victim (40)
• J. Edgar Hoover is a hero, Being the Ricardos (36)
• Home Sweet Home Alone creating literal class warfare by making the hero a rich kid beating up on economically insecure criminals who are only breaking into the house to retrieve one of their valuable possessions that the kid already stole (23)
• “Maybe there’s no such thing as a “good cop.” Maybe the entire system is the problem… No wait, there totally are good and bad cops, and the only thing standing between us and police reform is that the good cops haven’t tried hard enough yet!,” the final season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine (18)
• Hey, everyone, let’s have Edgar Wright’s not so great take on sex work!, Last Night in Soho (16)

16. “The “You Know How Fun Malignant Was? That, but Made by Total Dummies” Award for Best Dumb but Still Fun Lizard-Brain Moment” (Owen1120)

• “KANO WINS!,” Mortal Kombat (17)

• Roman and Tej: But They’re in Space?,” F9: The Fast Saga (13)
• A dude Isekai’d into the world of Final Fantasy I snarls “I’m here to kill Chaos!,” the trailer for Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin (13)
• That scene in Cruella where her pals drive up in a dump truck, drop a bunch of fabric in front on the swanky ball, Cruella pops up, and then they drive away with her hanging off the side like she’s the Joker from The Dark Knight (10)
• Later preview footage for Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins: that same dude says “bullshit!”… and then low-rent Limp Bizkit-style nü-metal suddenly plays! (8)
• Jamie Dornan’s awesome beach dance, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (8)
• The “magnet truck” car chase, F9: The Fast Saga (8)

17. The “We Spent How Much Of the Budget on CGI?!” Award for Worst Visual Effects of the Year (Comfy Headphones)

• The last battle Shang Chi being an especially egregious case of reducing everything to cgi mush (18)
• Clifford the Big Red Kaiju Dog (13)
• Black Widow (7)
• Cinderella’s talking mice (7)
• No Way Home‘s final battle having no personality and mostly being a pile of mush (3)

18. The Christopher Nolan “I Bury My Dialogue Intentionally” Award for Worst Sound Mix of the Year (Comfy Headphones)

• Kano does a “sad trombone” noise to make fun of Sonya, but the sound is so bad that you only know he did it because of the HBO Max captions, Mortal Kombat (18)
• Cinderella’s bad lip sync (7)
• The Witcher’s sound mix and weird fantasy names making it impossible to follow without subtitles (7)
• Dune turning up the bass and Hans Zimmer to 11, Nolan-styles (7)
• Star Wars: Visions having so much mumbled dialogue it was at times unwatchable without subtitles (4)

19. The Naruto and Bleach Award for Worst Animation (Merve)

• Ex-ARM, if you can even call this animation: (23)

• What If…? Did you ever look at the mouths of those CGI puppets as they talked? It’s unnerving (12)
• Blade Runner: Black Lotus frequently obscuring mouths during dialogue to hide how bad the facial animations are (9)
• The fucking slideshow that ended Season 2 of The Promised Neverland (3)
• Chicago Party Aunt on Netflix (2)

20. The Sylar Wearing the Black Hat after Hiro Learns that Bad Guys Wear Black Hats Award for Worst Costuming or Makeup (Shit-Master Sløtface)

• Dear Evan Hansen, Ben Platt’s “youthful haircut” which was inexplicably not a wig (39)
• Annie Live, Harry Connick Jr.’s distracting bald cap (9)
• The shallow, poorly implemented costumes mechanic in Balan Wonderworld (2) 

21. The Lionized John Gotti Award for Worst Depiction of Real World History in a Work of Fiction (Michael Weyer, Megara Justice Machine, Sir Simon Milligan, SadClown)

• The King’s Man turning World War I into a cinematic universe by making everyone a wacky spy and then putting Young [NOPE!] in at the end of the credits like Thanos (32)
• Diana: The Musical for turning Princess Diana’s life into a trashy “girlboss” soap opera that felt like a third season of Smash (24)
• Being the Ricardos putting three years of events all happening in the same week (15)
• Jungle Cruise, whose main villain, Prince Joachim, was a real person. He spent WWI in Europe, not exploring South America to try to find a magic flower. He committed suicide in 1920 at age 30 (13)
• House of Gucci compressing the timeframe to twelve years instead of twenty-five for no discernible reason (8)

22. Worst Tabloid Exploitation Pretending To Be A “Documentary” (Goat Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen)

• What Happened, Brittany Murphy? From the title that implies it was Brittany’s fault that she died, to the videos of youtube sleuths speculating about her death while doing makeup tutorials, this piece of crap was an affront to a great actor, and the people who made it don’t deserve to be called filmmakers or documentarians (37)
• Tiger King 2 (30)
• Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (7)

23. The “Good Lord Seymour, What Is Happening in There?!” Award for Most Egregious Corporate Malfeasance (Merve)

• Everyone getting in on NFTs (35)
• Netflix’s handling of the Dave Chappelle special (33)
• The arrival of suborbital space tourism, with its ill effect on the environment without any benefit to anyone but Branson and Bezos (31)
• The Kelloggs strike, including Kelloggs hiring scabs and flooding social media (28)
• Management at IGN and GameInformer intervening to have their articles about how to support Palestine taken down (13)

24. The Activision Will Almost Certainly Win It but We Should Have an Award for It Nonetheless Award for Worst Labor Abuse in the Entertainment Industry (Merve)

• A blanket victor for Activision-Blizzard, some of whose many sins we’ve decided to list (49)
  • Having multiple, decades-long cultures of extensive sexual abuse that gained greater recognition due to a lawsuit by the California government
  • Responding to demands by the state that they turn over their HR records by shredding the records outright
  • Hiring one of the Bush Administration’s chief torture apologists
  • Laying off contract QA staff at Raven Software after luring them in with the promise of permanent employment
  • Setting a “zero tolerance” policy for sexual abuse that they immediately stated would not apply to CEO Bobby Kotick, a man with years of sexual misconduct allegations
• Amazon for, among other things, making their employees in Kentucky go to work despite the warning that a tornado was heading directly towards their warehouse (38)
• The NFL for reinforcing its cavalierness towards player health with its refusal to cancel any games due to COVID and even adding an extra game this season (19)
• Tesla for its infamous abuses of its factory workers (19)
• G/O Media forcing the A.V. Club’s staff to relocate from Chicago to Los Angeles if they want to keep their jobs even though most of them could be done remotely (19) 

25. The Worst Reporting Award for Most Glaring Inaccuracy in a News Story (Merve)

• The hysterical rightwing coverage of “critical race theory” (46)
• The many stories about the “banning” of racist Dr. Seuss books that obfuscated that they A) were not being “banned,” just pulled by the rights owners in a way that happens all the time across the media landscape, B) were books Seuss himself had been ashamed of anyway, and C) weren’t even the Seuss books people actually like (33)
• Fox News coverage of the January 6th insurrection (8) Dale Smith. That’s it. That’s the entire nomination (3)
• General widespread distribution of misinformation in entertainment media press (2)

26. The Words of the Prophets Are Written on the Subway Sandwiches Award for Worst Thinkpiece,. Essay, or Inexplicable Screed (Wolfman Jew)

• “My Turn,” David Ayer’s demented, freeform rant after critics a critic made jokes about his monstrous, grotesque Suicide Squad movie being cosmically outclassed by this year’s much better Suicide Squad movie. We’re making an exception to our “no links” rule because it’s so insane (31)
• “I Miss the Thrill of Trump,” Alexander Nazaryan, The Atlantic” (30)
• The recent Atlantic piece where they writer said only coastal elites care about the pandemic any more and “real Americans” don’t wear masks or even pay attention to it (22)
• Aaron Sorkin’s bit in Entertainment Weekly talking of “truth vs accuracy”… which then turns into defending why Being the Ricardos has events that happened in three different years all occurring in the same week (17)
• “Dear Metroid Dread: Samus Doesn’t Need To Be An Emotionless Robot To Be Badass,” Ian Walker, Kotaku, an article that actually tells one of gaming’s most famous heroines to smile more (17)
• The Jacobin’s disquietingly positive article on QAnon (and tacit support for some of its beliefs) in the wake of the January 6th insurrection (17)

27. The [Spoiler Redacted] Award for Worst Character Death (Sir Simon Milligan)

• Really, even our comedy characters aren’t safe from COVID?, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (15)
• We ain’t even hiding this; Cruella’s mom gets kicked off a cliff by dalmatians, Cruella (13)
• A widely misinterpreted muddled special effect-driven villain exit, Shang-Chi (11)
• The Wheel of Time does that thing where you make a new character who exists to die before our preexisting characters, and it even fails to hit that low bar (11)
• We’re also not gonna hide that Mr. Big dies on a Peloton in And Just Like That… (10)

28. The C’mon, Pal Award for Worst Part of an Otherwise Good Work (Merve)

• Any of the English dialogue in Squid Game (21)
• Ansel Elgort, sexual predator and human shaped void of anti-charisma, in West Side Story (17)
• “They’ll never know what you sacrificed for them”, WandaVision (16)
• West Side Story goes “somewhere” off the rails with a musical choice (11)
• In the Heights says “yeah, why not just cut off a character’s entire arc?” (9)

29. The Letdown Award For Postponed 2020 Work that Wasn’t Worth the Wait (Michael Weyer)

• Black Widow (28)
• Ghostbusters: Afterlife (15)
• No Time to Die (6)
• Halloween Kills (6)
• Candyman (3)
• Cowboy Bebop, Live Action Edition (3)

30. The “Ob’m Know. Maybe Eat It, Kids” Award for Worst Attempt at Pretending that the COVID-19 Pandemic Is Over (Merve)

• Making people go back into the office instead of letting them work from home (49)
• Every movie that was exclusive to theaters (28)
• Spider-Man: No Way Home’s box office returns shattering even pre-pandemic numbers (17)
• Grey’s Anatomy’s “this takes place after the pandemic” disclaimer (8)
• The Texas Rangers allowing a sellout crowd of 38,000+ without Covid restrictions on opening day (6)

31. Best Show or Movie Locked Away on a Streaming Service You Don’t Want, New and Old (LoveWaffle)

• All of Star Trek, now on Paramount Plus and gone from Netflix after years (26)
• Ted Lasso, AppleTV+ and winner in this category last year (19)
• Reservation Dogs, FX On Hulu (15)
• Yellowstone, Paramount+ (10)
• We Are Lady Parts, Peacock (7)

32. Shittiest Thing A Celebrity Did This Year, both the Ones You Liked and Otherwise (Mr. Glitch) DOUBLE WINNER!

• Dave Chappelle says a bunch of gross and horrible things about trans people, and he gets millions of dollars in Netflix money for doing so (60)
• Donald Trump trying to overturn an election and inciting an insurrection at the Capitol, resulting in several deaths including the apparent death of faith in democracy, was also pretty bad (60)
• JK Rowling being JK Rowling (44)
• Letitia “Shuri” Wright aggressively embracing and promoting transphobic, anti-vaxxer, and anti-science beliefs to a massive platform (37)
• Aaron Rodgers lying about being vaccinated and then going full Joe Rogan about it (34)

33. The Jump Off a Cliff to Hit Another Cliff, Then Another, Then… Award for Spectacular Failure of a Promising Start or Easy Slam Dunk (Mr Ixolite) (q-pa)

• Mary Worth, the story begins with Wilbur being a truly abusive asshole and he gets rightfully dumped by Estelle. Rather than Wilbur learn anything or suffer consequences for his behavior, Mary all but forces Estelle to take Wilbur back, and nobody grows at all (43)
• The ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic (40)
• Jacksonville Jaguars coach Urban Meyer racking up more controversies and unforced errors in 8 months as a head coach than most do in 20 years. Also being an utterly awful coach when it comes to actually winning games (26)
• The finale of WandaVision (23)
• The San Diego Padres (22)

34. Apologies to Previous Peely Winners for Being Less Bad than Me, You, Madness (Wolfman Jew)

• To Game of Thrones Season 8, I actually didn’t dislike you nearly as much as literally almost every other person who watched your show. But you had a lot of issues. And yet, you did have “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” which was a good episode and had far more style than Me, You, Madness. I mean, if nothing else, you never gave Cersei or the Night King first person narration that aped American Psycho and Dexter and Sex in the City. You didn’t, because you had more tact and dignity than Me, You, Madness. So please accept my apologies (13)
• To Fallout 76, I am sorry. Did you deserve to win “Worst Game of the Year” twice? Probably not, but once? Probably yes. But even your anti-consumer and anti-worker policies, even your outright being what your own series satirizes, even your weird carcinogenic promotional bag is less noxious than Me, You, Madness. So please accept my deepest apologies (11)
• To Gotti, I am… sorry. There, you happy? You were garbage and morally rotten to the core, your style was forgettable, and your music choices were idiotic, but at least having the Shaft theme made for a better experience than Me, You, Madness. T’was a more fun popular music cue, at least. You were also easier to make fun of by several leagues of magnitude, and sometimes, that’s enough to keep you from being as viscerally unpleasant as Me, You, Madness (9)
• To Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, I am sorry. Yes, I made sure you were the first work of entertainment to get a whole Peely category just for itself. And yes, you are an incompetent and bloated sack of bad takes. But you ain’ Me, You, Madness. And for that, I apologize for my meanness (9)
• Just a giant blanket apology for all the years previous because goddamn (8)

35. Worst Thing the Avocado Watched Together in a Live Show (Wolfman Jew): DOUBLE WINNER!

• The One and Only Genuine, Original, Family Band, a midcentury American musical that lionizes the Confederacy, makes light of Native American genocide, and is all about how assaulting people with different political positions is just good fun. And all the songs are the absolute worst (14)
• 1967 Dr. Dolittle, a film so utterly abysmal that its characters can’t even correctly identify the color of a slug snail (14)
• Me, You, Madness (which is, to be clear, probably actually the worst thing we’ve ever done, let alone this year. But the others were really bad, too!) (10)
• Rover Dangerfield, which on top of sucking tremendously also directly inspired a very special recent open thread (8)
• Naruto Night: The Neji Ones, an interminable fight in a series of interminable fights in which the hero violently teaches his rival, a classmate justifiably aggrieved for being an actual slave to his cousin (and the hero’s future love interest), that he should be happy for his slavery and needs to simply “get over” the angst over having a bomb tattooed on his head (8)

36. Worst Obscure Thing that You Want to Draw Everyone’s Attention to Because It’s Just that Bad (Merve)

• All-American Christmas by Rachel Campos-Duffy and Sean Duffy (37)
• Mrs. Doubtfire: The Musical (13)
• Daniel Farrando’s serial killer films: Ted Bundy: American Boogeyman with Chad Michael • Murray and Aileen Wunros: American Boogeywoman with Peyton List (8)
• Flying Over Sunset, a new Broadway musical in which a drugged Cary Grant sings that he’s a “Giant Penis Rocket” (8)
• Blade Runner: Black Lotus (6)

37. The “Nobody’s Gonna Take Credit for This Shit” Award for the Worst Aspect of the Second Half of The Promised Neverland‘s Disastrous Second Season (Merve)

• Over half of the final episode is a wordless montage, with all of its big plot resolutions, including introducing multiple characters, happening there (12)
• The last two episodes have no credited screenwriter as no one will admit to being responsible for it, and based on the episodes themselves there’s a good chance they straight up had no one writing them (9)
• There is no villain, just bad guys who get swept aside in like 1-2 episodes and replaced by some other schmuck for 1-2 episodes so you don’t care about any of them (9)
• The good guys literally can not fail (8)
• Norman having a “MARTHA” moment when he finds out the demon he was about to kill was named “Emma” (8)

38. The Jeffrey Katzenberg Award For the Unjustified Arrogance (Merve)

• For the first time, the Oscars makes the Best Male Actor award the last one on the show, predicting it would be posthumously given to Chadwick Boseman. Then Anthony Hopkins wins, and he’s not even at the ceremony (75)
• Mike Richards selecting himself to host Jeopardy (49)
• Aaron Rodgers thinking he could get away with saying he’d been “immunized” (45)
• The Capital Rioters thinking they could overthrow an entire country (44)
• Johnny Depp warning against dangers of cancel culture while accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award (41) 

39. Worst Project Title, non-Eric Roberts Division (Sir Simon Milligan)

• The Sex Lives of College Girls (40)
• Needle in a Timestack (30)
• Licorice Pizza (18)
• = by Ed Sheeran (12)
• F9: The Fast Saga (10)

40. Worst Title for an Eric Roberts Movie Released in 2021

• A Town Called Parable (27)
• Pandemic Pillow Talk (21)
• Mommy’s Deadly Con Artist (16)
• Heavy Duty Lovers (7)
• Mr. Birthday (6)

41. Worst Video Game of 2021

• Twelve Minutes (24)
• Balan Wonderworld (13)
• Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition (13)
• It Takes Two (7)
• eFootball (6)

42. Worst Album of 2021:

• Kanye “Ye” West, Donda (19)
• Sia – Music: Songs From and Inspired By the Motion Picture (18)
• Our Lady Peace, Spiritual Machines 2, nominated less for its contents (which haven’t been heard by most people) than for the fact that it came out as an NFT. This is an especially bold move for an album whose lead single is called “Stop Making Stupid People Famous” (10)
• Imagine Dragons, Mercury – Act 1 (7)
• Maroon 5, Jordi (6)

43. Worst Television Season of 2021

• Cowboy Bebop, Netflix recipe (21)
• Promised Neverland Season 2 (19)
• Dexter: New Blood (14)
• What If…? (13)
• Q Force (9)

44. Worst Book, Comic or Prose of 2021

• The year in 9 Chickweed Lane that got it booted from the LA Times (39)
• X-Corp, an incompetent comic book about mutants running a business written with as much depth as Bojack Horseman’s Vincent Adultman saying “Business-wise, this all seems like appropriate business” (12)
• Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson (7)
• Justice League by Brian Michael Bendis (6)
• Nü-Nancy (6)

45. Worst Film of 2021

• Space Jam: A New Legacy (46)
• Me, You, Madness (21)
• The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (18)
• Justice League: The Snyder Cut (16)
• Home Sweet Home Alone (13)
• Cinderella (12)
• Music (9)
• Tom & Jerry (8)
• Dear Evan Hansen (8)
• Cruella (7)
• Halloween Kills (7) 

Once again, thank you all so, so much.