Founding Lancaster and Wright offered the annual Stinkers Bad Movie Awards, which was a parody of the
Academy Awards. The Stinkers were similar to the
Golden Raspberry Awards (the "Razzies"), which debuted four years after the Stinkers. Aside from the usual categories one might expect in an Oscar
parody (Worst Picture, Worst Actor, etc.), the Stinkers offered other categories such as Worst Fake Accent, Most Painfully Unfunny Comedy, Least 'Special' Special Effects and Worst On-Screen Hairstyle. Unlike the Razzies, the Stinkers did not have an awards ceremony.
The Stinkers' first ballots for
Freddy Got Fingered. Since he never accepted it, they then offered it to
Halle Berry for
Catwoman to no avail. The Stinkers' first ballots were handed out to the public in 1997. In the years that followed, the Razzies and Stinkers rarely agreed on a list of nominees or winners. The Stinkers initially opened their balloting to the general moviegoing public but soon discovered that most people surveyed hadn't seen many of the films on the ballot and often just voted for the person they hated the most, usually someone like
Mariah Carey, the
Spice Girls or anyone connected with the film
Gigli. In 2001 the Stinkers created
100 Years, 100 Stinkers: The Worst Films of the 20th Century, a list that parodied ''
AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies'' list. The next year the Stinkers made a special trophy of a miniature flushing toilet with film wrapped around it for comedian actor
Tom Green. Green's
Freddy Got Fingered was nominated for seven awards and won Worst Film, Worst Sense of Direction, Worst Actor and Most Painfully Unfunny Comedy. That same year the Stinkers gave a special award to
David Manning, the controversial Sony Pictures fictitious movie critic. The Stinkers included in 2003 another special category for Worst Performance by a Child, dedicated to child actor
Spencer Breslin. In 2004, the Stinkers went to a more selective way of obtaining votes. They dismantled their membership and offered ballots by invitation only to a small, select group of film geeks and critics, who had seen a majority of the films during the year.
Nominating Paris Hilton In 2006, the Stinkers refused to nominate hotel heiress
Paris Hilton for her supporting role in the
horror film House of Wax. Said Lancaster, "To get on the Stinkers ballot you are judged on your performance, not your tabloid persona. Anyone that would put Paris Hilton on a list of the five worst supporting actresses in 2005 didn't see a lot of movies in 2005. I could list twelve actresses who gave worse supporting performances than Paris Hilton."
Closure In late January 2007, following the announcement of
the year's winners, the Stinkers website announced it would be officially closed down after ten years on the internet. On July 1, 2007, four months after both the announcement of the worst of 2006 winners and the release of
its expanded 1981 ballot, the site was taken down. == Award categories ==