Is the Oscar more of a curse than a blessing?

[ultimatefan]

Interesting article, and very timely...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070131/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_oscars_curse

By Sue Zeidler
Wed Jan 31, 3:46 PM ET



LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - It's awards season in Hollywood, with all red carpets leading to the Oscars. But winning that prestigious award can sometimes lead to nothing more than bad roles and even oblivion.

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"It's known as the curse of the Oscar, which is very real. The actor's ultimate dream can turn out to be the ultimate nightmare," said movie pundit Tom O'Neil, awards columnist for the Web site The Envelope (http://theenvelope.latimes.com/).

Winners like F. Murray Abraham, Brenda Fricker, Linda Hunt, Marlee Matlin and Louise Fletcher are hardly household names despite earning the film world's most coveted award.

Other better-known Oscar winners, like Gwyneth Paltrow and Richard Dreyfuss, have complained that winning the award brought them personal and career troubles.

"Winners from Joan Fontaine up to Gwyneth Paltrow and Richard Dreyfuss have all said it was a curse," said O'Neil, noting the Oscar made Paltrow almost too expensive to hire at the age of 26, while Dreyfuss spiraled downward for a while with a high-profile drug habit and a string of flops after his Oscar win for his role in "The Goodbye Girl" in 1977.

Paltrow won for her leading role in "Shakespeare in Love" and has said she was unequipped to cope with the pressure, leading her to make several bad choices.

"I think part of the downside about being so successful and winning the Oscar at the age of 26 is that I sort of became insouciant about the things that I chose. I thought 'Oh, I'll just try this, it'll be fun or I'll do that for the money'. Things like that now I would absolutely never do," Paltrow was quoted as saying by the Internet Move Database.

Louise Fletcher, who picked up the Best Actress award for her role as the inflexible Nurse Ratched in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", went on to scare up roles in such B-films as "Exorcist II: The Heretic", "Firestarter" and "Flowers in the Attic".

"It'll make you wonderfully happy for a night," Fletcher has said of winning the Oscar. "But don't expect that it'll do anything for your career."

RAZZIE

Indeed, many winners seem to have sunk to new lows after Oscar victories. Halle Berry, Faye Dunaway and Liza Minnelli have all won both the Academy Award for Best Actress and a Razzie Award, the industry's version of an Oscar lampoon that is bestowed to the worst efforts of any given year.

After winning the Oscar for her turn in the 2001 film, "Monster's Ball", among the first roles Berry was seen in afterwards was as a female superhero in action flick "Catwoman".

O'Neil said the list goes on and on, citing Oscar winners from Rita Moreno, who won for "West Side Story", to Dianne Wiest and Cuba Gooding Jr., who have all struggled to recapture glory after winning an Oscar.

"Sometimes people win because the stars are in alignment and the perfect actor found the perfect role at the right time, but that doesn't guarantee a lifetime of follow-ups to what may be serendipitous circumstances," said Leonard Maltin, film critic and historian with entertainment news program Entertainment Tonight.

He said the phenomenon is known in Hollywood circles as the "F. Murray Abraham syndrome", named after the well-regarded stage actor who earned the Best Actor Oscar for his role in the 1984 film "Amadeus" but has hardly been a big star since.

"He was great in 'Amadeus' and he's a fine actor but for whatever reason or combination of reasons, he didn't get the same opportunities again in film, although he's continued to work onstage," said Maltin, noting that Fletcher is the "poster girl" for the same phenomenon.

Maltin said various factors could play a part in why some actors never follow up their Oscar success, such as bad choices, bad luck, bad agents or letting the win get to their head.

"As tough as it is to make a career in the movie business, it's just as difficult to maintain one," he said.

Film critic Richard Schickel said he did not view an Oscar as a viable predictor of immortality for a star or a movie.

"People get carried away by a particular performance, but it doesn't mean the actor has a lot of long-term viability. The only worthwhile judge of careers is history," he said.

"It's the movies that we decide we'll go back to watch a decade or so later that remain important to people. Often a week after the Oscars ceremony, you can't even remember what won," he said.

 

[Cinemaman]

I think it depends on the actor or actress themselves. Just look at PSH, who won Oscar Award last year. Later he played role of the main villian in MI3 and now he is preapring for a shooting of new Kaufman's movie.

So I don't believe in this "Oscar curse".

 

[matrix_ghost]

I wouldn't call it an Oscar curse per se , just more of a culimination of bad events.

Winning an Oscar means that you you're status in Hollywood grows , as does you're salarary.
As an actor or actress , you're now rolling with the big guys and it does become difficult when choosing you're project if you get a big paycheck or get tons more scripts . I tink that especially the actors/actresses who were never quite proved themselves in their earlier movies , have problems with the "so called OScar curse".

I mean if you look at Hally Berry , she really hasn't made a movie where she shows the acting talent displayed in Monster's Ball.
Even her earlier works where she really acted were minimal. And what you get afterwards is just get the big project which are wrong and you just fail on all fronts.

However you can also go the other way. Take Kevin Spacey . He has proven himself to be an exceptional actor even before he got his two oscars. And he still proves himself a worthy actor when it comes to movies.

I think that with actors/actresses you have the ones who really are good but have had bad roles and the Oscar finally shows that what their qualities are.
Example : Charlize Theron , , Jamie Foxx , Tom Hanks

You also have actors who just to get more fame and money , gave everything for a role and got rewarded in the end but after the oscar just never show the same acting qualities and drive in other movies.
Example : Hally Berry


Also i think that one thing that truly shows that you are a great actor , is that you're performance is praised whether it's a good film or a crappy film.
Look at Ian McKellen. That guy was the saving grace in Da Vinci Code and is IMO the best actor in all of the X-Men series.
Whether he's paid millions for a role or not , he still gives a great performance.
That's why i don't think there's such a thing as the Oscar curse , cause if you truly are a worthy winner of the OScar , you can give a great performance. ALWAYS.

 

[Catman]

So I don't believe in this "Oscar curse".

Agreed. Some actors have bad luck. Others aren't affected. Case in point:

Robert De Niro (two time Oscar winner)
Jack Nicholson (three time Oscar winner)
Al Pacino
Tom Hanks
George Clooney
Morgan Freeman
Gene Hackman
Dustin Hoffman
Paul Newman

 

[Kevin Roegele]

Look at Best Actress winners, though.

 

[Electrix]

The problem with Halle Berry is that she won an Oscar and because she was an Oscar winner, and the first black woman to win a major Oscar as leading actress, there was a lot of pressure put on her shoulders.
As with most Oscar winners, lots of projects come their way and Halle probably chose the projects which brought her a high salary ($14 million for Catwoman, 14+ million for X-Men 3, 6 million for Gothika). Before she had had to audition for roles, whereas now she is having them given to her with higher salaries. She got $600,000 for Monster Ball so she probably jmped at the chance to earn $$$.

Halle then won an Razzie for Catwoman, which I think was her wake up call. Now she has done X-Men 3 the rest of her movies arent huge blockbusters. She has a thriller with Bruce Willis, a drama with Benicio Del Toro and another drama about a teacher named Tierney Cahill who gets help from her student to help her congressional campaign. Which is based on a true story.

Other actors who did this are Charlize Theron with Æon Flux and many more.

 

[ultimatefan]

I think the Oscar or a huge BO hit can also be more of a curse when you´re very young, cuz you can be naive and make choices for the wrong reasons and star in flops/bad movies that ruin your career. There´s a number of talented actors whose careers went bad cuz they picked the wrong roles.

 

[Kevin Roegele]

I think the Oscar or a huge BO hit can also be more of a curse when you´re very young, cuz you can be naive and make choices for the wrong reasons and star in flops/bad movies that ruin your career. There´s a number of talented actors whose careers went bad cuz they picked the wrong roles.

Very true. Also, winning an Oscar is the pinnacle - their is a sense that once you've won it, everything is downhill from there. Peaking too early.

 

[Goddessreicho]

The Oscar mean nothing more than a stellar performance that time. Most people who have won the Oscar have had great performances in the past.

People use Halle as an example but most forget that she was a critical sucess despite the flops. With roles in Queen, Their Eyes were Watching God, Losing Isiah, and Jungle Fever it's quiet obvious that she can and will do lower budgeted films.

Same thing with Paltrow. It's the films themselves that the actor's have to choose. If they and their management continue to make dumb decisions about films, of course they won't get any where.

Personal lives will be a media draw, but most like Travolta and Berry can come back and perform well by being in *GOOD* movies, either critically or financially.

 

[ultimatefan]

I do think that actors should try to know as much as they can about screenwriting. Not that they should be writers, but they should learn about in order to be distinguishing of the scripts they choose, when they get to the point where you can choose. Of course BO succcess and critical acclaim can be somewhat unpredictable, but at least you´d know you´d be choosing your movies for the right reasons. You see some of the stuff some talented actors work on, you´d think they didn´t even bother to read it.

 

[matrix_ghost]

Very true. Also, winning an Oscar is the pinnacle - their is a sense that once you've won it, everything is downhill from there. Peaking too early.

Doesn't have to be that way .
Tom Hanks , Kevin Spacey to name a few.

I think its up to the actor to get the roles that still require him/her to act. I mean look at Meryl Streep. She's still a higly respected actress , has two an oscar two times and also has a 14 nominations.
And she's still going strong.

To me at least , it's the admiration you get from the audience as well as the acting community that shows where you're peak is , not an Oscar.

 

[green]

If there's a curse somebody sure forgot to tell Meryl Streep.
She won for her second nomination and still went on to get 12 more.

 

[Wolfwood]

If there's a curse, Cuba Gooding Jr. sure felt the sting of it.