The Golden Raspberry Awards (also known as the Razzies and Razzie Awards) is a parody award show honoring the worst of cinematic failures. Co-founded by UCLA film graduates and film industry veterans John J. B. Wilson and Mo Murphy, the Razzie Awards' satirical annual ceremony is predated by its progenitor, the Academy Awards, by five decades. The term raspberry is used in its irreverent sense, as in "blowing a raspberry". The statuette is a golf ball-sized raspberry atop a Super 8mm film reel atop a 35-millimeter film core with brown wood shelf paper glued and wrapped around it—sitting atop a jar lid spray-painted gold. The Golden Raspberry Foundation has claimed that the award "encourages well-known filmmakers and top-notch performers to own their bad."

The first Golden Raspberry Awards ceremony was held on March 31, 1981, in John J. B. Wilson's living-room alcove in Hollywood, to honor the perceived worst films of the 1980 film season. Sylvester Stallone has the most Razzies, with 12.

American publicist John J. B. Wilson went to see a 99-cent double feature of Can't Stop the Music and Xanadu and thought on his drive home that those movies deserved awards for their low quality, and subsequently started thinking of all the other films that disappointed him in 1980, particularly as he had watched hundreds of productions in his job making trailers. The following year during a potluck party held at his home in Hollywood on the night of the 53rd Academy Awards, Wilson passed ballots regarding the worst in film to the attendees, and invited his friends to give random award presentations in his living room. Wilson stood at a lectern made of cardboard in a tacky tuxedo, with a foam ball attached to a broomstick as a fake microphone, and announced Can't Stop the Music as the first Golden Raspberry Award Winner for Worst Picture. The impromptu ceremony was a success and the following week a press release about his event was picked up by a few local newspapers, including a mention in the Los Angeles Daily News with the headline: "Take These Envelopes, Please".

Approximately three dozen people came to the 1st Golden Raspberry Awards. The 2nd Golden Raspberry Awards had double the attendance, and the 3rd awards ceremony had doubled that number. By the 4th Golden Raspberry Awards ceremony, CNN and two major wire services covered the event. Wilson realized that by scheduling the Golden Raspberry Awards prior to the Academy Awards, the ceremony would get more press coverage: "We finally figured out you couldn't compete with the Oscars on Oscar night, but if you went the night before, when the press from all over the world are here and they are looking for something to do, it could well catch on," he said to BBC News.

In 2022, a dedicated award category, Worst Bruce Willis Performance in a 2021 Movie, was created after Bruce Willis starred in a number of poorly received low-budget films. On March 30 of that year, Willis's family announced that he had been diagnosed with aphasia. The Golden Raspberry Awards subsequently retracted the award category, saying it was inappropriate to award a Golden Raspberry to someone whose performance was affected by a medical condition. At the same time, the Awards retroactively retracted their 1980 Worst Actress nomination of Shelley Duvall in The Shining, stating "We have since discovered that Duvall's performance was impacted by Stanley Kubrick's treatment of her throughout the production". In 2023, following backlash for nominating 12-year-old Ryan Kiera Armstrong for Worst Actress, the Golden Raspberry Awards rescinded the nomination and said individuals under age 18 would no longer be nominated. The Razzies themselves later won the category for the blunder.

Members of the Golden Raspberry Award Organization pay for membership, and number 650 from 19 countries. The ceremonies have generally been scheduled with both nominations and awards revealed in the day before the Academy Awards with only two exceptions; the 32nd Golden Raspberry Awards had the nominees announced the day before the Academy Award nominees but the ceremony took place on April 1, and the milestone 40th Golden Raspberry Awards, the ceremonies of which were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic with the winners revealed online.

Paul Verhoeven was the first person to go to the ceremony in 1996 to receive his award in the category Worst Director for the movie Showgirls. Other recipients who have accepted their Golden Raspberry Award include Bill Cosby, who became the first to accept a Razzie award, but which was presented to him in The Late Show in 1988 for his work on Leonard Part 6 (Worst Picture/Worst Screenplay/Worst Actor), Tom Green (Worst Actor/Worst Director), Halle Berry and Sandra Bullock (Worst Actress), Michael Ferris and J. D. Shapiro (Worst Screenplay), Alan Menken (Worst Original Song), Dinesh D'Souza (Worst Director), and Fifty Shades of Grey producers Dana Brunetti and Michael De Luca.

Several people and/or films have received Razzie nominations while simultaneously receiving award nominations and other cultural honors from different organizations, sometimes for the same work or role.