Oscar: a curse or a blessing?
2007-02-01 10:40
Los Angeles - 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.
"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 website The Envelope.
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 spiralled 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.
Unequipped to cope with the pressure
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.
Scare up roles in B-films
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
Excorcist 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."
New lows after Oscar victories
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.
The F Murray Abraham syndrome
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.
'The only worthwhile judge of careers is history'
"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.