A nomination is a marketing category too
The Razzies did not review the film. They reviewed the genre it arrived in.
What the nomination actually records
The Golden Raspberry Awards gave The Ugly Truth a Worst Screenplay nomination for the 2010 ceremony, covering films released in 2009. Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah, and Kirsten Smith shared the credit and therefore shared the dishonour — though McCullah and Smith had been here before: their earlier work, including Legally Blonde and 10 Things I Hate About You, operated in the same register and drew the same critical suspicion that anything engineered for laughs must be lazy.
The Razzies present themselves as a corrective to awards-season excess, but as Wikipedia's entry on the Golden Raspberry Awards documents ↗, the organisation has always been as interested in publicity as in criticism. A nomination functions as a press release. It attaches a memorable label to a title at the exact moment that title is cycling through home-video release and cable licensing, keeping it in print for a second news cycle. For a mid-budget studio comedy whose theatrical run had already closed, that is not nothing.
What the nomination does not do is engage with what the screenplay was built to accomplish. The structure of The Ugly Truth — antagonists forced into proximity, positions reversed by the third act — is the same machine that runs His Girl Friday and every screwball successor. Calling the mechanism cynical is accurate; calling it incompetent is something different, and the Razzies rarely distinguish between the two.
The genre's standing in critical culture is the real subject here. Romantic comedy occupied a strange position in 2009: commercially reliable enough that Columbia Pictures kept financing it, culturally devalued enough that any example could be nominated for a Razzie without much argument. The CinemaScore audience grade — reportedly in the B+ range for opening weekend — sat in a different universe from the critical reception, which ran cold. Those two verdicts describe two different objects: the film critics reviewed and the film audiences paid to see.
The Worst Screenplay nomination lands in that gap. It is a critical instrument wielded against a popular one, and the mismatch tells you more about institutional taste than about the writing. Three credited writers produced a script that served its cast, hit its marks, and returned roughly five times its production budget at the worldwide box office. By the measures the industry actually uses, that is a functional screenplay. The Razzies use a different measure, and that measure has a long, well-documented history ↗ of conflating "popular" with "bad" — particularly when the audience buying the tickets is women.