The heavy weight of Oscar glory
The golden statuette’s ‘curse’ has crippled the careers of some of Hollywood’s brightest stars
BEING nominated for an Academy Award can make or break a Hollywood career.
But sometimes, actually winning an Oscar can be unexpectedly damaging to an actor’s professional and personal life.
Box office bombs, critical flops, and no job offers at all ... winning an Oscar did some stars more harm than good in the years that followed.
Professionally, Halle Berry, Cuba Gooding Jr, Renée Zellweger, Mira Sorvino, Catherine Zeta Jones and Adrien Brody, among others, have fallen victim to the post-Oscars “curse”.
Oscars are meant to define an actor’s career but in these cases, ended up derailing it.
News Corp Australia movie critic Leigh Paatsch said post-Oscars slumps had more to do with poor career decisions and ageism in Hollywood than a so-called “curse”.
For male nominees, Paatsch said bad roles after an Oscar came because “you either won in a soft year or you were a one-trick pony that found a role of a lifetime”.
“If you’re a woman, you can also apply ... if you won after the age of 30, it (an Oscar) is completely meaningless,” Paatsch added.
Screen siren Halle Berry perhaps said it best. “People win Oscars, and then it seems like they fall off the planet,” Berry told The Guardian in 2015.
“And that’s partly because a huge expectation walks in the room and sits right down on top of your head.”
Berry was the first African- American actor to win the Oscar for Best Actress in 2002, for her role in gritty drama Monster’s Ball.
What followed was a string of box office and critical failures — notably, Catwoman, which is widely considered one of the worst movies ever made and earned her a Golden Raspberry (aka the Oscars of bad movies) for Worst Actress.
Definitely not the sort of accolade she was used to.
“The moment I won the Oscar, I felt the teardown the very next day,” Berry told The Guardian.
“I thought, ‘If I’m going down, I’m going down taking chances and daring to risk’.”
Paatsch said Berry’s Oscar win came too late in her career to have an impact on the sorts of roles she was cast in afterwards.
“Halle Berry was pretty much in her mid-30s when she won for Monster’s Ball. The window was closing on her career when she won that,” Paatsch said.
“( Catwoman) did much more damage than any kind of mythical ‘curse’ did. It’s all about how you play your cards across your entire career.”
Jerry Maguire star Cuba Gooding Jr’s acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actor is often singled out as one of the Oscars’ memorable moments (yep, he punched the air and told the audience “I love you! Everybody!”).
But Gooding didn’t receive a single job offer in the 12 months that followed his 1997
Oscar win (he has since made a comeback with his role as OJ Simpson in The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story).
“I won the damn Oscar and went a year without an offer and now it’s crazy. It’s crazy,” Gooding told News Corp Australia in 2014.
So what did he make of his post-Oscars snub by Hollywood?
“It was an overpowering personality,” Gooding said. “I mean, s---, you saw when I won what I did: I damn near jumped around like a crackhead! I didn’t even know how I could control the energy. I’m a very physical, energetic guy.”
What Oscar voters liked about Gooding’s Jerry Maguire performance — the same kind of “energy” he showed onstage during his Oscars speech — ended up turning Hollywood off him. “The thing that put me in handcuffs,” Gooding said. “That’s right. That’s it.”
Mira Sorvino was named Best Supporting Actress for her role as a prostitute in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite —a part that should have made her a leading lady in 1996.
Instead, Sorvino’s postOscar resume included a string of commercial and critical disappointments: The Replacement Killers, Mimic and Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, a comedy that became a cult hit years later.
But in reality, it was disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein who truly derailed Sorvino’s acting career.
She, along with more than 50 other actors, last year accused Weinstein of sexual harassment and intimidation. Sorvino alleged the former Miramax boss had black-listed her from Hollywood after she rejected him, including having her barred from a role in The Lord of the Rings because Weinstein told director Peter Jackson she was a “nightmare”.
“There may have been other factors, but I definitely felt iced out and that my rejection of Harvey had something to do with it,” Sorvino told The New Yorker.
After Lord of the Rings director Jackson confirmed Weinstein had told him not to cast her, Sorvino tweeted: “Just seeing this after I awoke, I burst out crying”.
“There it is, confirmation that Harvey Weinstein derailed my career, something I suspected but was unsure,” she added.
For others, Oscar-worthy roles just never came again after they won.
Adrien Brody won Best Actor for Holocaust drama The Pianist in 2002, then followed it up with a string of poor choices including a King Kong remake and Predators. These overshadowed Brody’s credible work in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.
Catherine Zeta-Jones achieved Oscar glory with the role of Velma Kelly in big screen musical Chicago, which nabbed her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2003.
Like Brody, Zeta-Jones failed to follow up that careerdefining performance with any decent parts afterwards, including straight-to-DVD romantic flick The Rebound and another musical, Rock of Ages.
Her Chicago co-star Renée Zellweger faced a similar postOscars slump after she won Best Supporting Actress for period drama Cold Mountain in 2004 (she had been nominated for — and lost — Best Actress in the years prior for Chicago and Bridget Jones’ Diary).
A series of forgettable parts followed for Zellweger: A rehash of her Bridget Jones role in sequel The Edge of Reason, Miss Potter, and about a six-year break from Hollywood entirely. After her hiatus, Zellweger looked almost unrecognisable, which led to “what happened to Renée Zellweger’s face?” tabloid headlines.
But is it as simple as ... you win an Oscar and your career is done?
“The Oscars, business wise, have no influence or ripple effect after they have been won and run,” Paatsch said.
“Only a particular type of film becomes an ‘Oscars’ film, it’s very rare you’ll get a film that grosses more than $US150 million ... most often, we’re dealing with films that are quasi-art house films that are released strategically to try and get an Oscars campaign.”
Paatsch said the favourites to win at Monday’s 90th Academy Awards — Frances McDormand (Best Actress nominee for Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri), Gary Oldman (Best Actor nominee for Darkest Hour), Alison Janney (Best Supporting Actress nominee for I, Tonya) and Sam Rockwell ( Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri nominee for Best Supporting Actor) — would escape the dreaded postOscars curse.
“Alison Janney is essentially a TV actor who found the perfect role for her (in I, Tonya),” Paatsch said.
“Sam Rockwell is one of the greatest character actors alive, so it’s not going to hurt him in any way.
“It’s a very soft year. The Oscars mean so little in the scheme of how show business works now.”
“The moment I won the Oscar, I felt the teardown the very next day.” HALLE BERRY, WINNER OF BEST ACTRESS IN 2002 , FOR HER ROLE IN MONSTER’ S BALL