Will the latest acting winners be able to avoid the Oscars curse?
This year’s crop of acting Oscar winners was about as diverse career-wise as it’s possible to get. Newcomer Mikey Madison won ‘Best Actress’ for Sean Baker’s indie drama Anora. Adrien Brody won ‘Best Actor’ for Brady Corbet’s historical epic The Brutalist more than two decades after winning the same award for The Pianist. Zoe Saldaña won for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ for Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language musical Emilia Pérez after decades headlining three of Hollywood’s most lucrative franchises. And Kieran Culkin won ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for his role in Jesse Eisenberg’s comedy-drama A Real Pain after a career as a child actor-turned television star.
While logic would suggest that each of these performers are headed for greater heights now that they have been bestowed the industry’s greatest accolades, history would indicate otherwise. The so-called ‘Oscars curse’ dictates that an actor will see their standing in the industry plummet after securing their award, a paradox that would be completely unbelievable if it didn’t have so much precedent to back it up.
Think of Hilary Swank, who won two Oscars and seemed to disappear from the industry after that, or Jean Dujardin, who won for The Artist and has been pretty anonymous ever since. Marcia Gay Harden, who won an Academy Award in 2001, summed it up pretty succinctly. “The Oscar is disastrous on a professional level,” she said. “Suddenly the parts you’re offered become smaller and the money less. There’s no logic to it.”
Of all this year’s winners, Madison is the least likely to be affected by the curse. In the past decade and a half, the Academy has favoured young female stars, and it hasn’t hurt their prospects one bit. Jennifer Lawrence was 22 when she won for Silver Linings Playbook. Brie Larson was 26 when she won for Room. And Emma Stone was 29 when she won for La La Land. None of these actors suffered a career downturn. On the contrary, their careers took off. At the moment, Madison is reportedly being courted by Greta Gerwig to star in her big-budget Narnia adaptation, suggesting that she is probably at the beginning of her ascent rather than the end.
Until this year’s ceremony, Brody looked like a textbook example of the curse. After becoming the youngest person to win the ‘Best Actor’ Oscar in 2003, he faced a rocky two decades of character acting and artistic compromises before returning to form. His performance as a Hungarian architect in The Brutalist is a stunning accomplishment, but he seems more likely to slide back under the radar than Madison. His next film is a historical epic from the director of xXx²: The Next Level, Lee Tamahori, which will be followed by a crime thriller with Vince Vaughan. We’ll check back in with him in 2047.
Saldaña’s trajectory is more tricky to predict. At 46, she is past the age of when female actors in Hollywood are thrown out with the rubbish, and yet, she is still part of three incredibly successful franchises, including Avatar, which will supposedly involve at least three more instalments, Guardians of the Galaxy, which is rumoured to be returning at some point, and Star Trek, another instalment of which is also in the works. Whether she will have time in her schedule to return to the types of films that garner Oscar attention remains to be seen, but her prominence in Hollywood isn’t slipping anytime soon.
As for Culkin, he is probably the one who will decide his trajectory. He is currently working on a stage version of Glengarry Glen Ross, suggesting that he is interested in stretching himself as an actor. On the flip side, many of his recent projects have been voice work, which is the usual haven for actors who want to be paid well but not leave their families for long periods of time. It’s hard to see him ever outrunning his associations with his Succession character, Roman Roy, but given the fact that he was able to bridge the gap between child actor and childish adult actor, it seems possible that he could do it again. That said, he may not want to.
There was no pattern in who the Academy decided to hand acting Oscars to this year, which suggests that their susceptibility to the curse will be variable. Madison seems poised for the greatest success, while Brody is likely to suffer the most. As for Saldaña and Culkin, their career trajectories seem pretty promising, largely because they secured prominent places in the industry long before an Oscar was in the cards.
