Jack, Jill and Razzie

When a bowling ball does what Adam Sandler did at the Razzie Awards Sunday night - hitting all ten available prizes - it's called a "strike." But when you make a movie and it breaks a precedent by winning a total of ten awards from the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation - with two Razzies given to you and the director for both the movie in question and another movie as well! - it's called a strike-out. It means your movie - in this case Jack and Jill, in which Sandler played both title roles, fraternal twins - sucks big time. It means it sucks so badly that the second worst movie of 2011 - which apparently was Just Go With It, which, like Jack and Jill, starred Sandler and was directed by Dennis Dugan - can't even come close to meeting its awfulness. It means that Sandler - a fixture on television and in the movies since beginning a four-year stint in the repertory company of "Saturday Night Live" in 1991 - has no right to complain when people start calling his career into question. And it means that Mencken wannabes like myself - who enjoy interrupting themselves in print with clauses bookended by hyphens - will quickly want to take advantage of tearing down Sandler further.

But I think I've already done all the damage to Sandler that I possibly can on my own. So I'll let the record do the rest of the damage. Here, in its entirety, is the full list of the ten awards Sandler won at the Razzies ceremony on April 1:

Worst Picture (Jack and Jill)

Worst Actor (for Sandler’s work in Jack and Jill and Just Go With It)

Worst Actress (as Jill in Jack and Jill)

Worst Supporting Actor (for Al Pacino’s cameo as himself in Jack and Jill)

Worst Supporting Actress (for David Spade as Monica in Jack and Jill)

Worst Screen Ensemble (for the entire cast of Jack and Jill)

Worst Director (Dennis Dugan for Jack and Jill and Just Go With It)

Worst Remake, Rip-off or Sequel (Jack and Jill for ripping off Ed Wood's camp classic Glen or Glenda)

Worst Screen Couple (for three -count'em, three couples in Jack and Jill - Sandler and Katie Holmes, Sandler and Al Pacino or Sandler with himself)

Worst Screenplay (Jack and Jill)

I can't understand why Al Pacino had anything to do with this  Did he need the money for doing a self-portraying cameo in this picture that badly?

The fact that this movie even made it to the theaters speaks volumes about Hollywood. It means that Hollywood cannot and will not stop making movies that appeal to young dumb males, i.e., every American male under 35. It means that the movie studios would rather bankroll a grade-zero piece of cinematic vulgarity than make a greater number of serious dramas about blacks or Hispanics, offering prima facie evidence that racism in Hollywood is alive and well. It also means that Hollywood is putting out "comedies" that increasingly fail to merit the term.

And that's not the worst of it. Despite Jack and Jill, or more likely because of it - to date, it's grossed $142 million worldwide against its $79 million budget, $73 million of that gross coming from the U.S. and Canada alone - Sandler can count on continuing to get work. He's already slated to appear in two more movies, including a sequel to the ironically titled Grown Ups. That says more about the movie-going public than I care to mention.

Adam Sandler has made a lot of terrible movies, but, as Roger Ebert might say, the celluloid that goes into producing them obviously supplies plenty of raw material for the ukulele pick industry.