Another week, another 12 Rudy Giuliani appearances on cable news show gone awry.

As Giuliani tries and fails to walk back statements from his past few interviews, and as rumors swirl that even Donald Trump has tired of his lawyer’s repeated gaffes, it’s time for us to reveal the nominations for this year’s Giulianis – the Oscars of incriminating your boss on national television.

We would like to promise the winners will be announced soon, but knowing Giuliani there will probably be an entirely new shortlist by mid-March.

The not-knowing-when-to-stop award

A flurry of nominations just in the last few days. Last week the Trump administration was handed something of a lifeline when a spokesperson for Robert Mueller disputed an explosive BuzzFeed report that Trump had instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. Giuliani just had to do nothing.

Instead, he went on CNN and admitted Trump may have spoken to Cohen before his testimony, saying doing so would have been “perfectly normal” and asking belligerently: “So what if he talked to him?”

His next nomination came when Giuliani told the New York Times Trump was involved in discussions to build a skyscraper in Moscow throughout the entire 2016 presidential campaign. This apparently confirmed Trump was involved with Russian authorities at the same time he was calling for an end to economic sanctions, a major line of inquiry for the Mueller investigation.

After both missteps, Politico ran a story about Trump’s displeasure with Giuliani, which Giuliani himself provided a comment for, in which he apparently outlined the way he stretches the truth during interviews. “I do have a mastery of the facts, which is why I can spin them honestly, argue them several different ways,” he said.

Inviting comparison to the famous line by Kellyanne Conway that she presented alternative facts, Giuliani added: “The problem is people don’t understand, or people don’t want to understand, alternative arguing, which is what you do in court all the time.” That’s right, it’s definitely people’s fault.

Best supporting Mueller award

Giuliani: ‘I do have a mastery of the facts, which is why I can spin them honestly, argue them several different ways.’ Photograph: ABC

Giuliani scoops all three nominations here. First for his continual offering of new information to the investigation. From the Trump Tower meeting to the payment of Stormy Daniels, Giuliani has continued to help Mueller fill in the gaps by giving away previously confidential information. If we ever get to see Mueller’s report, we should expect to see Giuliani’s name come up repeatedly in the citations. He might even get a shout-out in the dedication.

But he’s also nominated for accepting that Trump’s “spygate” and “witch-hunt” claims about the Mueller investigation are really just nonsense to drum up anti-Mueller sentiment among the public. “It is for public opinion,” Giuliani told CNN in May. “Because eventually the decision here is going to be impeach or not impeach.” This quote may come in handy when Mueller’s findings are inevitably rejected by the president.

Finally, Giuliani gets a nod for his Wednesday announcement that he never said there wasn’t collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia – only that Trump himself was not involved. Painting a picture for the prosecutor, he spelled out that he “never said there was no collusion between the campaign, or between people in the campaign”.

The volte-face award

Speaking of the C-word, Rudy has to be honoured for his ever-shifting understanding of what exactly it means. He has mostly repeated Trump’s line that there was no collusion, but at one point tried out the defence that collusion isn’t a crime. Now he’s saying that he never said there was no collusion, even though he’s on video saying exactly that over and over again.

But Giuliani’s comments on Michael Cohen are a clear frontrunner. On 6 May 2018, Giuliani called the former Trump confidant “an honest, honorable lawyer” but months later, once Cohen had made clear he was willing to turn on Trump, he became a “devious little rat” and “a pathetic serial liar”.

Still, there’s an outside chance here for Giuliani’s comments on truth itself. Having presumably once believed that observable facts occur, Giuliani in August of last year told Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, that Trump couldn’t just tell the truth to the Mueller investigation because – and you can now get T-shirts printed with Giuliani’s face and these words on – “truth isn’t truth”.

To be fair to Giuliani, it’s a statement he has pretty much lived by ever since.