MGK’s Tech Guy here! Some https certificates automation fell over behind the scenes, and it quietly broke for a while, so trying to browse over https would error out. I’ve nudged the automation back into place, and belatedly pointed our “is it working” checks to use https, so next time, it should make more noise.

This is the Call for Votes for

Wait wait wait wait wait. It’s May.

You see, May first is International Workers’ Day, and wrestlers are workers, as we all know, so –

Not buying that.

Well, we were trying to build this new site, and then decided not to do it, and then someone’s work exploded again – look, nobody pays us for this, you know? We don’t even have a Venmo or anything to beg change off you. We’re hoping that for the 2022 Awards we can have a system in place that automates a lot of the stuff that makes putting this whole thing together take so long, but for now it is what it is, and we’re asking for your forebearance and also to not let recency bias creep in when you vote. And we do apologize. We’re aiming to have the results ready for around AEW Double Or Nothing.

All right then. Continue.

Ahem.

This is the Call for Votes for the 2021 RSPW (Theszie) Awards. You can vote here.

The Theszies are the oldest fan awards in pro wrestling history, going back to 1990 (when Mr. Perfect quite appropriately won Best Wrestler and Junkyard Dog v. Ric Flair at Clash of the Champions XI won Worst Match). They offer a record of wrestling fan opinion lasting decades, and although we may not agree with some awards in retrospect, what matters is that they offer a snapshot of every year of wrestling as the fans loved it. We think that’s pretty cool.

As usual, following the nominations period, we have compiled all of the nominations into menus to make voting faster and easier (since the menus should include most or all of the most popular candidates for each award), while still allowing for write-in votes for those who don’t see their favorite choices as nominees. We do this strictly to streamline the voting process; this should not be construed as favoritism towards any wrestler for being nominated, as we do not nominate wrestlers ourselves. We have edited the nominations to remove some nominations that we thought were inappropriate, mistakes/errors, or unlikely to get enough votes to justify the nomination, as well as culling the nominations somewhat to make the ballot more manageable.

Remember, though: if your candidate for an award isn’t nominated, you can always write him in.

We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. Finally, we’ve also given fans the opportunity to include their own commentary on their voting choices for each award or just The State of Wrestling in General in 2020.

The deadline for entering votes is May 22, 2022. Have fun!

This is the Call for Nominations for the 2021 Theszie Awards (the rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards).

(Look, I started a new job late last year and my December was slammed. Sorry for the delay.)

To nominate candidates for all categories, you may use this form. Nominations are due by January 28, 2021.

Finally, to see previous years’ results, click here for 2020, here for 2019, here for 2018, here for 2017, here for 2016, here for 2015, here for 2014, here for 2013, here and here for 2012, and here for most older historical awards.

HOLD UP HOLD UP. It’s been like three months since the voting deadline! Where the hell have you been?

*sigh*

About a week and half after voting closed, my wife got Covid-19. She was sick into mid-March and had to stay in hospital for a while. She’s since made a full recovery (thank god), but between caregiving and sheer worry I didn’t have time to do anything else for all that time, and once she was better I had to spend the next six weeks catching up on work. Hence the massive delay. Covid-19: it hasn’t just fucked with wrestling, but also wrestling fans. Wear your damn masks and get your damn shots, everybody.

…okay, we retract the question. Please continue.

No worries.

This year we had 212 voters participating. As always, for next year we encourage all of you wrestling media people to nominate yourselves and your favorites, and try to get your fans out to vote for you. Fair is fair!

As always, thank yous to Justin Henry, Christopher Robin Zimmerman, Herb Kunze and all those who have previously run the Awards and contributed to their legacy; everybody who chipped in to promote the awards; all of you voters, of course; and finally and most importantly an extra-double-sized thanks to mgkdotcom’s Tech Guy, James Young, without whose invaluable assistance these Awards would almost certainly have failed to be anywhere near as successful and user-friendly as they in fact were.

The “Best” Award results can be found here.

The “Worst” Award results can be found here.

Finally, full ballot results for all Awards can be found here.

Thanks for voting, and we’ll see you next year!

This is the Call for Votes for the 2020 RSPW (Theszie) Awards. You can vote here.

The Theszies are the oldest fan awards in pro wrestling history, going back to 1990 (when Mr. Perfect quite appropriately won Best Wrestler and Junkyard Dog v. Ric Flair at Clash of the Champions XI won Worst Match). They offer a record of wrestling fan opinion lasting decades, and although we may not agree with some awards in retrospect, what matters is that they offer a snapshot of every year of wrestling as the fans loved it. We think that’s pretty cool.

As usual, following the nominations period, we have compiled all of the nominations into menus to make voting faster and easier (since the menus should include most or all of the most popular candidates for each award), while still allowing for write-in votes for those who don’t see their favorite choices as nominees. We do this strictly to streamline the voting process; this should not be construed as favoritism towards any wrestler for being nominated, as we do not nominate wrestlers ourselves. We have edited the nominations to remove some nominations that we thought were inappropriate, mistakes/errors, or unlikely to get enough votes to justify the nomination, as well as culling the nominations somewhat to make the ballot more manageable.

Remember, though: if your candidate for an award isn’t nominated, you can always write him in.

We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. Finally, we’ve also given fans the opportunity to include their own commentary on their voting choices for each award or just The State of Wrestling in General in 2020.

The deadline for entering votes is February 14, 2021. Have fun!

This is the Call for Nominations for the 2020 Theszie Awards (the rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards).

To nominate candidates for all categories, you may use this form. Nominations are due by January 3, 2021.

Finally, to see previous years’ results, click here for 2019, here for 2018, here for 2017, here for 2016, here for 2015, here for 2014, here for 2013, here and here for 2012, and here for most older historical awards.

Following Joel Schumacher’s death earlier this week, there was the inevitable return of one of nerddom’s longest-living arguments, namely the quality of the two Batman films he directed. Granted, the man directed all sorts of other movies, including at least two undeniably great ones (The Lost Boys and Tigerland), and one fascinating and questionable one (Falling Down) and of course a whole lot of trash as well, but nerds be nerds and if we’re not talking about Batman somehow we’re just not happy.

The arguments boil down to two sides. The first, much more mainstream argument is that they are the bad sort of trash, because Batman’s costume has nipples and because of all the butt shots and because they’re campy and queer-coded. This argument, most of the time, boils down to not much more than thinly veiled homophobia. (And this was so mainstream that MadTV – hey, remember MadTV? Yeah, me neither – literally aired a sketch where “Joel Schumacher” explained that his first choice for Batman was Tommy Tune.) The second argument, the contrarian one, is that they are good precisely because of these things – the argument advanced first by Chris Sims and elaborated upon this past week by Anthony Oliveira. And, because the internet is the internet and polarization is the natural endpoint of any argument on the internet, there is no middle ground in this mostly-one-sided opinion war.

Well, call me Nuance Bob, because that is what I seek to introduce right now. I don’t think the Schumacher Batman films are good Batman films, and I don’t even think they’re particularly good films in and of themselves. That said, my dislike for them has nothing directly to do with their campiness, queerness or the butt shots, and when people complain about these things I think they’re mostly calling themselves out as narrow-minded dorks and/or prudes (and nerddom has both in great amounts, although the prudishness is of course mostly from a straight white male permissive perspective). Honestly, a lot of the time the queerness is the best part of these films for me. I have other reasons to dislike them.

That said, I do think the Schumacher Batman films achieve what Schumacher set out to do with them, and in that sense they are definitely successes. If you want what Schumacher is selling, then his Batman films – and especially Batman and Robin, which is simply better than Batman Forever on all counts – give you exactly what you desire. This is, of course, a concession to the idea that the audience’s subjective choice matters in determining the quality of a work of art, which is a minefield of debate all on its own (“is Thomas Kinkade good now?”) but I don’t think it’s something we can dismiss. Schumacher was a queer man who injected queerness into his films whenever he could, and if you look at his ouevre he mostly did a lot of buttoned-down stuff across his career. Getting to direct two Batman movies was a rare opportunity for him to go as wild as he could under Hollywood circumstances and justify it with “it’s superheroes!” Who can fault him for that? Who can fault people who find pleasure in that? I certainly can’t. But I do think the campiness of Schumacher’s films is the core of why they don’t work for me – and, by extension, a lot of other people.

By this, I don’t mean that they are too out there or too gloriously weird: I mean, my favorite Batman movie and the one I think is objectively the best of them all is Batman Returns, a movie that features rocket-equipped penguins, an evil circus troupe where the most dangerous member is a trained poodle, and Michelle Pfeiffer trying to eat an entire canary just to make a point, plus a pretty kinkily-sexualized relationship between Batman and Catwoman to boot. That said, Batman Returns is mostly not a camp film, for all its fantastical and weird elements. It is, like a lot of Tim Burton’s work, somewhere between goth and emo in terms of its aesthetic, and the reason it works (and Burton’s earlier Batman, although it is less successful than Returns) is because, whatever you might consider the flaws of these films, they are sincere.

The Burton films, and especially Returns, are achingly, almost embarrassingly sincere in their emotional cores, in a way that the “more realistic” Christopher Nolan Batman films often cannot manage with the same depth, because the Nolan films are desperate to make the ludicrous thing that is the entire idea of Batman “work” in an ostensibly real-world setting, and as such their emotional arcs are shortchanged because if you’ve got a guy dressing up like a bat, you either roll with it or find excuses. (I like the Nolan Bat-films, don’t get me wrong – but as time progresses, they’re aging with less and less grace simply because of this fact.) And, indeed, Adam West’s Batman – in both TV and movie form – is sincere as well, despite being also goofy and silly, because it’s sincere about being goofy and silly.

Sincerity is not something that is necessarily at odds with the camp aesthetic – John Waters, for example, has spent an entire career bridging that gap. But camp by definition is grounded in irony, and a sincere work that is also ironic has to find sincerity within its irony, and I don’t think the Schumacher films manage that. Batman Forever certainly doesn’t; it’s a messy hodgepodge of a flick, with no central emotional core whatsoever in a movie that is about Batman and Robin coming together as a partnership. I have to consider that a stunning failure. No amount of entertainment derived from Jim Carrey’s wonderful, queer-as-hell Riddler really changes how lifeless most of the rest of the movie is. (Tommy Lee Jones’ Two-Face is, for me, too frenetic to really be entertaining at all, but I know opinions vary sharply about this and I don’t want to get into that right now.) Really, when I think of Batman Forever as a whole, for me the entire film is encapsulated by the “holey rusted metal” gag from Forever – a wink and a nod to previous Bat-camp that isn’t as funny as the original and doesn’t serve as much more than a reference to it. It’s the queer Batman equivalent of “cake is a lie” T-shirts: hey, kids, remember this thing you liked on TV? We remember it too! But: they didn’t like it so much that they weren’t willing to wink at us and snicker about how dorky it was, and that’s how Forever truly fails.

Batman and Robin at least has a sincere emotional core, but it isn’t a narrative emotional core at all: it’s simply a film about the eroticism of Batman as a concept. It sincerely loves getting off about Batman. (I mean, Uma Thurman’s super-great Poison Ivy performance only really makes sense in that context, right?) Which: fine, it’s not a traditional superheroic arc or anything but at least the film is about something – except for when the movie is taking extended sequences to handle the story arcs of Alicia Silverstone’s Batgirl or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze, when the film is about nothing beyond bright, colourful visuals and actors who are terribly, terribly miscast in their very important roles. I don’t remember which queen on RuPaul’s Drag Race said it, but I do remember one of them saying it: camp that isn’t funny is bad camp. The problem with big chunks of Batman Returns is that Silverstone and Schwarzenegger are just not funny at all. (Chris O’Donnell, bless his heart, is at least trying to run with it in the most whitebread way possible, but really, only Uma Thurman in this movie is actually suited to what the movie wants to do.) When someone tells me to just shut my brain off and try to enjoy the seemingly endless series of grade-school-level ice-themed puns Schwarzenegger spouts off in the most perfunctory way, my response is always to think “but why couldn’t they have just written funny lines instead?” I mean, it’s not like Arnold doesn’t know how to toss off a decent one-liner. Or, and here is an idea, maybe don’t play the single most tragic Bat-villain for laughs – particularly when you’ve adopted the Nora Fries backstory from Batman: The Animated Series entirely for your movie, which makes all of the puns land that much more awkwardly – just because you’ve decided to embrace a camp aesthetic for the film in toto. Schumacher could have, instead, chosen to play Freeze straight and keep the camp visual aesthetic intact, which would have made for a more impactful movie. Or he could have made funny jokes instead of once again indulging in the holey rusted metal aesthetic of doing dumb jokes and asking us to celebrate their stupidity.

I get that Schumacher obviously didn’t want to make that sort of movie! That’s fine, that’s a choice – but at that point, why even use Mr. Freeze when he’s going to work against what you want to do? Granted, at this point we’re almost certainly running Schumacher’s desires up against studio demands to use visible, marketable characters in the movies so they can sell toys, but movies like this are always going to be about improvising your way towards what you want to do with what you’re given, and I don’t think Schumacher succeeded in that respect. This is why I have to consider Batman and Robin a failure – not because it’s queer, not because of its fetishization aspects. Those are the good parts, and they don’t outweigh all of the bad.

Welcome to the results of the 2019 Theszies / Rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards.

(Editor’s note: Some of you may be wondering “what took so long?” The answer is: 1.) Immediately after the voting period ended, my wife and I went on a previously-scheduled vacation to Italy, which was great, and 2.) then when we got back we had to get screened for Covid-19, which took a while. Don’t worry, we’re fine.)

This year we had 395 voters participating. As always, for next year we encourage all of you wrestling media people to nominate yourselves and your favorites, and try to get your fans out to vote for you. Fair is fair!

As always, thank yous to Justin Henry, Christopher Robin Zimmerman, Herb Kunze and all those who have previously run the Awards and contributed to their legacy; everybody who chipped in to promote the awards; all of you voters, of course; and finally and most importantly an extra-double-sized thanks to mgkdotcom’s Tech Guy, James Young, without whose invaluable assistance these Awards would almost certainly have failed to be anywhere near as successful and user-friendly as they in fact were.

The “Best” Award results can be found here.

The “Worst” Award results can be found here.

Finally, full ballot results for all Awards can be found here.

Thanks for voting, and we’ll see you next year!

The Theszies are the oldest fan awards in pro wrestling history, going back to 1990 (when Mr. Perfect quite appropriately won Best Wrestler and Junkyard Dog v. Ric Flair at Clash of the Champions XI won Worst Match). They offer a record of wrestling fan opinion lasting decades, and although we may not agree with some awards in retrospect, what matters is that they offer a snapshot of every year of wrestling as the fans loved it. We think that’s pretty cool.

As usual, following the nominations period, we have compiled all of the nominations into menus to make voting faster and easier (since the menus should include most or all of the most popular candidates for each award), while still allowing for write-in votes for those who don’t see their favorite choices as nominees. We do this strictly to streamline the voting process; this should not be construed as favoritism towards any wrestler for being nominated, as we do not nominate wrestlers ourselves. We have edited the nominations to remove some nominations that we thought were inappropriate, mistakes/errors, or unlikely to get enough votes to justify the nomination, as well as culling the nominations somewhat to make the ballot more manageable.

Remember, though: if your candidate for an award isn’t nominated, you can always write him in.

We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. Finally, we’ve also given fans the opportunity to include their own commentary on their voting choices for each award or just The State of Wrestling in General in 2019.

The deadline for entering votes is February 8, 2020. Have fun!

To nominate candidates for all categories, you may use this form. Nominations are due by January 5, 2019.

Finally, to see previous years’ results, click here for 2018, click here for 2017, here for 2016, here for 2015, here for 2014, here for 2013, here and here for 2012, and here for most older historical awards.

So Martin Scorsese said that the Marvel movies are “not cinema” and the internet kind of blew up because it is inherently polarizing, and the possibility that Scorsese is both one of our most talented living directors and also wrong about this particular subject is not particularly fun discourse for a lot of people on the internet, which often demands that only one take be right and correct. That said, I am now going to present to you the one take on this particular subject that is right and correct.

What Scorsese here is saying is the old standard of “that’s not art.” He says “cinema” instead of “art,” but that’s what he means. When he likens Marvel movies to theme parks, the point of such a comparison is invariably to dismiss the artistic merit of the works in question. I note that this is essentially the same comparison Roger Ebert made when he famously argued that video games weren’t art, which made Penny Arcade, among others, get all angry and stuff. Ebert was wildly wrong, but that didn’t make him one of the greatest critics in film history, because he was one. Sometimes people who are really good at things get something wrong. Especially this happens when the person who is really good at something is in the twilight of their career and their lived experience can sometimes blind them to possibilities outside of that experience. (Martin Scorsese is 76, incidentally.)

Are the Marvel films art? I go here by the Scott McCloud definition of “art,” wherein any creative expression that isn’t rooted in the survival or mating instincts is by definition “art,” because honestly it’s the only useful definition of “art” that I have ever found. It is possible for creative expression to be sublimated into the survival or mating instinct, of course (most marketing, for example, is creative but it’s also only extant because people need to keep a roof over their head). I don’t think the Marvel movies sink to that level at all, though, simply because of the amount of effort and love that goes into them. Granted, not everybody who works on a Marvel film is dedicated to the ideas in them. (Gwyneth Paltrow in particular has been open about her strictly mercenary reasons for working in the Marvel movies and that she doesn’t give two shits about them, which has led a lot of anti-populist film writers to celebrate somebody whose actual reason for making movies is to enrich herself and stay culturally relevant in order to give her hokum-peddling “wellness” empire more power. Basically my point here is that Gwyneth Paltrow is a bad person and if you find yourself celebrating her reasons for doing anything maybe give it a second think-over.)

But film has always been a commercially defined artistic endeavour. It’s too expensive not to be, outside of the true indie renegades who manage to shoot a 16mm gritty whatever on their spare time and never care about the money (which excludes most well-known “independent” directors who in fact live and die by whatever financial success their movies achieve, since it is only that which allows them to make more movies). There are always going to be people on any set who are just there to do the work and get paid. Martin Scorsese does passion projects; Martin Scorsese’s gaffer is paying down his mortgage by making sure people don’t get electrocuted. C’est la vie.

This is emphasized, I might add, by The Band Wagon, which I mention because it is one of the 85 films Martin Scorsese lists in his must-see films list/”films to see before you die” list/”instant film school” list/(it’s been named a lot of things). Now, I don’t take issue with Scorsese liking The Band Wagon, because it’s a fantastic film, one of the best musicals ever made, and definitely a film you should see if you haven’t. But it is also a celebration of populism. The entire film is about Fred Astaire starring in an artistic play that is unwatchable and saving it by turning it into a popular revue – and all of this in a genre which was explicitly predicated on being popular, unchallenging mass entertainment and frequently produced mediocre dreck as often as not. There’s a reason The Band Wagon and An American in Paris are on the list and, say, Navy Blues or It’s Always Fair Weather aren’t.

All of this is to say that Marvel films are art – but like musicals, there’s good ones and bad ones and a whole lot of mediocre ones. Logan is definitely great art. I’d put the first two Captain America films in the “great art” category as well, along with Black Panther. After that there’s a reasonable number of pretty good ones that do well by their larger themes (both Guardians of the Galaxy movies, Thor: Ragnarok, you can guess them easily enough), a couple of really great action blockbusters (and it is worth remembering that Scorsese has never particularly liked action films and has always tended to discount them as critically skillful fare) and a lot of passable entertainments and a few mediocre and bad ones. The best ones do tend to stand alone as individual films more than as chapters of a whole, but that’s a pretty banal observation to make about this genre anyway.

In short: either Scorsese was wrong to assert that the Marvel films aren’t art or he was wrong to imply that they’re uniformly bad art. But he’s still a master filmmaker and anybody claiming the Marvel movies are uniformly great is just being silly. But he’s still wrong.

Welcome to the results of the 2018 Theszies / Rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards.

This year we had 508 voters participating. As always, for next year we encourage all of you wrestling media people to nominate yourselves and your favorites, and try to get your fans out to vote for you. Fair is fair!

As always, thank yous to Justin Henry, Christopher Robin Zimmerman, Herb Kunze and all those who have previously run the Awards and contributed to their legacy; everybody who chipped in to promote the awards; all of you voters, of course; and finally and most importantly an extra-double-sized thanks to mgkdotcom’s Tech Guy, James Young, without whose invaluable assistance these Awards would almost certainly have failed to be anywhere near as successful and user-friendly as they in fact were.

The “Best” Award results can be found here.

The “Worst” Award results can be found here.

Finally, full ballot results for all Awards can be found here.

Thanks for voting, and we’ll see you next year!

This is the Call for Votes for the 2018 RSPW (Theszie) Awards. You can vote here.

The Theszies are the oldest fan awards in pro wrestling history, going back to 1990 (when Mr. Perfect quite appropriately won Best Wrestler and Junkyard Dog v. Ric Flair at Clash of the Champions XI won Worst Match). They offer a record of wrestling fan opinion lasting decades, and although we may not agree with some awards in retrospect, what matters is that they offer a snapshot of every year of wrestling as the fans loved it. We think that’s pretty cool.

As usual, following the nominations period, we have compiled all of the nominations into menus to make voting faster and easier (since the menus should include most or all of the most popular candidates for each award), while still allowing for write-in votes for those who don’t see their favorite choices as nominees. We do this strictly to streamline the voting process; this should not be construed as favoritism towards any wrestler for being nominated, as we do not nominate wrestlers ourselves. We have edited the nominations to remove some nominations that we thought were inappropriate, mistakes/errors, or unlikely to get enough votes to justify the nomination, as well as culling the nominations somewhat to make the ballot more manageable.

Remember, though: if your candidate for an award isn’t nominated, you can always write him in.

NOTE: This year, we’ve changed several categories (Best and Worst Heel, Babyface and Promos; Most and Least Favorite; and Most Underrated and Most Overrated) to allow for voters to vote for tag teams in those categories.

We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. Finally, we’ve also given fans the opportunity to include their own commentary on their voting choices for each award or just The State of Wrestling in General in 2018.

The deadline for entering votes is February 10, 2019. Have fun!

This is the Call for Nominations for the 2018 Theszie Awards (the rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards).

To nominate candidates for all categories, you may use this form. Nominations are due by December 31, 2018.

Finally, to see previous years’ results, click here for 2017, here for 2016, here for 2015, here for 2014, here for 2013, here and here for 2012, and here for most older historical awards.