 Starring: Renee Zellweger, Catherine Zeta Jones, Richard Gere, Queen Latifah, John C. Reilly
Director: Rob Marshall
Year Of Release: 2002
Plot: When she discovers he lover was lying about setting her up with show business contacts, Roxie Hart shoots him dead and is locked up awaiting trial. There she meets fellow murderess Velma Kelly, who charged with killing her sister and husband. A rivalry develops between the two, particularly over how much press each of them can score (with the help of lawyer Billy Flynn). However as her trial approaches, Roxie realises that it doesn’t matter how famous she’s become, if she ends up getting sentenced to death. |
Winning an acting Oscar is good, right? It’ll give your career a major boost, won’t it? Well, you’d think so, but the fact is, the Best Supporting Actress category seems cursed. Unlike winning in any of the other categories, a Best Supporting Actress Oscar appears to either do nothing for the person who wins it or their career tumbles in the abyss directly afterwards.
Take Chicago, for example. Catherine Zeta Jones won the Best Supporting Actress award for playing Velma Kelly in the movie, which you’d think would have solidified her stardom. Before her win she was fast becoming an a-list star in hits like The Mask Of Zorro, Entrapment, Traffic and America’s Sweetheart, but since Chicago she’s been mostly notable by her absence, with her only real success coming in Ocean’s Twelve, where she played second fiddle to Clooney and co. Other than that she’s just made flops like No Reservations, or completely forgettable movie such as Intolerable Cruelty and The Terminal.
The following year Zeta-Jones’ Chicago co-star, Renee Zellweger, picked up the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Cold Mountain. Again, while you’d have thought it would have given her career a boost, her only solo success since then has been Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason. It’s also noticeable that she was nominated for an Oscar in 2001, 2002 and 2003, but since her win, she hasn’t even had a sniff at an Academy Award.
These are not isolated examples. If you look back through the last 20-or-so Best Supporting Actress Oscar winners, it’s almost shocking how few of them went on to bigger success afterwards, and how for many it virtually seemed to be the end of her career. The year after Renee Zellweger, we had Rachel Weisz, who won for The Constant Gardener. Since then every film she’s appeared in, from The Fountain and Eragon to Fred Claus and The Lovely Bones, has flopped.
Moving up to 2006, Jennifer Hudson won for her debut role in Dreamgirls. Despite the fact you’d think Hollywood would be queuing up for a woman who could win an Oscar the very first time she made a movie, since then she’s only appeared in a minor (pretty pointless) role in Sex and the City, and in The Secret Life Of Bees. While the tragic murder of several of her family members didn’t help, it doesn’t exactly seem like she’s been flooded with great movie offers since her Oscar win.
Hudson is certainly not alone in being unable to use her Best Supporting Actress Oscar leverage to become a bigger star. Mira Sorvino won an Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite in 1995 and has barely been heard of since. It’s the same story for fellow Best Supporting Actress winners Mercedes Ruehl, Marisa Tomei, Brenda Fricker and Marcia Gay Harden. However perhaps the most notable case, where it really did seem like an Oscar ended someone’s career rather than boost it, was with Kim Basinger, who won for LA Confidential in 1997.
Up to that point she’d been doing pretty well in films like Nine ½ Weeks, Batman, and The Getaway. Then came LA Confidential, which brought with it huge amounts of acclaim, an Oscar and talk of how she’d emerged as a far better actress than anyone expected. But then a very strange thing happened. She didn’t make any movies for three years. Just at the moment it looked like she’d broken through, she completely disappeared.
When she returned in 2000, she tried to capitalise on her LA Confidential success by taking leading roles in I Dreamed Of Africa and Bless The Child, but both flopped terribly. Basinger then went back to supporting roles, getting acclaim for 8 Mile, but being pretty forgettable in films like Cellular and The Sentinel. It really does seem her Oscar for LA Confidential marked the turning point from her being a fairly big star, to being virtually forgotten. The Academy Award brought with it such expectation that her fame almost crumbled under the weight when later roles revealed she was just the same actress she’d always been (which seems to be a common theme with Best Supporting Actress winners, such as Zeta Jones, Jennifer Connelly and Zellweger, all of whom got a-list top billing after their Oscar, but the movies generally failed).
So why is the Best Supporting Actress Oscar seemingly cursed, leaving actresses out in the cold after they win (it should be noted this isn’t always true, as, for example, Angelina Jolie found great success after her win, although not because of the Oscar)? Well, the reason seems to be the difference between who the Academy likes to give acting Oscars to in the different categories. Although not always true, the Best Actor and Actress awards go to already established stars, who may get a minor boost from winning, but who are already well known enough that their careers to be safe with or without an Oscar.
In the Best Supporting Actor category, while there is a mix of winners, the tendency is for the gong to go to an older actor, almost as much in recognition for all the work they’ve done, rather than that particular role. For example, in the last 20 years, 10 of the Best Supporting Actor Oscars have gone to someone aged over 50, while in the Supporting Actress category, there’s only been one (Judi Dench for Shakespeare In Love). Again it means that these men are already well established and while an Oscar may have some effect on their career, people already know what to expect from them and Academy Award was never going to make much different.
The Best Supporting Actress category is different, as it tends to go to younger, less established actresses for a particular breakout role. 13 of the last 20 winners have been under 40, with three aged 25 or under. The difference from other acting categories is particularly noticeable when you consider the youngest ever Best Actor winner was Adrien Brody, aged 27 when he won for The Pianist. Likewise no one under 25 has ever won the Best Supporting Actor Award, while in the Best Actress Category, the youngest in the past two decades was Hillary Swank, who was 25 when she picked up the award for Boys Don’t Cry.
More than any other acting category, the Best Supporting Actor Oscar tends to go to younger and/or less established stars, or those who are well known, but haven’t tended to anchor movies by themselves (for example, Zeta Jones and Basinger were rarely the main star of any of the films they made before their Oscar win). Winning an Oscar brings with it huge expectations for some of these actresses, which they often can’t live up to. It means that an Oscar can actually hurt a promising career, because suddenly everyone’s paying attention to what they’re doing, and if their next role isn’t as good, they more likely to get pilloried for it than before.
While winning an Oscar can help, to be honest it doesn’t have as big an effect on people’s careers as you might imagine in terms of their actual stardom, although it undoubtedly increases their asking price significantly. Hollywood is full of people who shine briefly and then fade, and as the Best Supporting Actress Oscar tends to go to younger, less established stars, it perhaps not surprising many of them disappear from view almost the moment they get their award. It would have happened anyway, but the fact they’re an Oscar winner makes it more noticeable.
The Best Supporting Actress Oscar may not be genuinely cursed, but looking back through the lists of people who picked up the award and then had a career crash or were rarely heard of again, it’s still probably best not to win one, just in case.
Here’s the last 20 Best Supporting Actress Winners, just so you can decide for yourself whether the category really is cursed.
2008 – Penelope Cruz – Vicky Cristina Barcelona
2007 – Tilda Swinton – Michael Clayton
2006 – Jennifer Hudson – Dreamgirls
2005 – Rachel Weisz – The Constant Gardener
2004 – Cate Blanchett – The Aviator
2003 – Renee Zellweger – Cold Mountain
2002 – Catherin Zeta-Jones – Chicago
2001 – Jennifer Connelly – A Beautiful Mind
2000 – Marcia Gay Harden – Pollock
1999 – Angelina Jolie – Girl, Interrupted
1998 – Judi Dench – Shakespeare In Love
1997 – Kim Basinger – LA Confidential
1996 – Juliette Binoche – The English Patient
1995 – Mira Sorvino – Mighty Aphrodite
1994 – Dianne Wiest – Bullets Over Broadway
1993 – Anna Paquin – The Piano
1992 – Marisa Tomei – My Cousin Vinny
1991 – Mercedes Ruehl – The Fisher Kind
1990 – Whoopi Goldberg – Ghost
1989 – Brenda Fricker – My Left Foot
TIM ISAAC
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