The "Awards" Curse - Ep. 3

Winning an Academy Award is supposed to be the greatest moment of an actor’s career. 

So why do so many winners say it ruined their lives? 

In this episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela investigate the long-rumored Oscar Curse: the idea that winning an Academy Award can derail careers, destroy relationships, or both. 

The story begins in 1985, when Sally Field won her second Oscar for Places in the Heart and delivered one of the most famous acceptance speeches in film history, often misquoted as “You like me, you really like me.” But for some actors, that moment of triumph is followed by a strange pattern: stalled careers, typecasting, industry backlash, and very public divorces. 

From early Hollywood to the modern film industry, the supposed victims of the Academy Awards curse include actors whose careers seemed to falter after winning the biggest prize in Hollywood. 

We look at the mysterious case of Luise Rainer, the first actor to win back-to-back Oscars in the 1930s, only to see her Hollywood career collapse almost immediately afterward. We also explore stories involving actors like Cuba Gooding Jr., Mira Sorvino, Halle Berry, Hilary Swank, Reese Witherspoon, Sandra Bullock, and Kate Winslet, whose careers or relationships reportedly changed dramatically after their Oscar wins. 

But is there really a supernatural curse tied to the gold statue? 

Or are the real forces behind the so-called Oscar Curse things like Hollywood power dynamics, sexism, typecasting, ego, and impossible expectations placed on award winners? 

Along the way, we examine the psychology of fame, the strange patterns people notice after big career milestones, and the darker side of Hollywood success. 

Because sometimes the moment you reach the top of the mountain… 

is the moment everything starts to fall apart. 

On Cursed...ish, we investigate the story behind the superstition and ask the question: 

Is the Oscar Curse real, or just cursed...ish?

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.

Transcript

Angela 0:00

Michael can be winning Oscars. I'll be fine with that.

Daniel 0:02

Uh okay, but I mean, are you sure you want him to win an Oscar? Have you heard of the Oscar curse?

Angela 0:09

Oh yeah, no, keep keep keep him safe.

Daniel 0:23

Welcome, accursed ones, to Cursedish, a podcast where we seek out tales of the grim and the macabre to explore the fine line between a stroke of bad luck and something far more sinister. I'm Daniel Stevens.

Angela 0:35

And I'm Angela Mattes.

Daniel 0:36

Uh so Angela, before we dive into today's story, uh the Oscars are coming up this weekend, and I was just gonna ask you, who are you rooting for? What are your thoughts on the Oscars this year?

Angela 0:45

I've only watched one movie that has a lot of nominations. Um, I will say I'm just gonna root for it like as the day is along. I saw Sinners in the movie theaters. I went in cold. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. What? Like, I don't even know if I have the words to describe that movie. It was just like so many things, but all of them were so good. And I was just absolutely blown away. And it was so like artistically different, especially when you consider like Oscar movies. I feel like a lot of times you go into an Oscar movie and you're like, okay, I'm probably gonna like come out of this needing therapy or feeling like I've left a piece of my soul inside the movie theater. I'm probably going to have deep thoughts and zero fun. But Sinners is just like it's like everything. There's great experience. History culturally, it's just like you feel so like a part of something, even if I don't know, I just I it's hard to describe. I so I really want Sinners to go the distance. I will be happy to see a lot of Sinners wins.

Daniel 1:51

Yeah, I agree. I think Sinners Sinners was uh you know far and away one of the best movies this year. I I'm definitely rooting for Sinners. I am also rooting for Amy Madigan from Weapons for Best Supporting Actress. I think she that would be a great little kind of side win for a fun little horror movie that I really thought was good this year. Um, but if you're rooting for Sinners, you know, are you rooting for Michael B. Jordan from Sinners to win best actor, maybe? He that he does seem like one of the front runners. Okay.

Angela 2:18

I mean Michael B. Jordan can Michael B. Michael can be winning Oscars. I'll be fine with that.

Daniel 2:23

Uh okay, but I mean, are you sure you want him to win an Oscar? Have you heard of the Oscar curse?

Angela 2:30

Oh yeah, no, keep keep keep him safe.

Daniel 2:33

Okay, well, let's let me let me go back and we'll we'll talk a little bit about the Oscar curse and we can see if you still think Michael B. Jordan should win at the end. Okay. Um, so let's go back to March of 1985. Sally Field was had just won her second Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in 1984's Places in the Heart. She had won five years earlier for the titular role of Norma Ray. Nowadays, this moment is most famously and nearly universally misquoted as her having said, You like me, you really like me. We have right, you know that.

Angela 3:06

Yes.

Daniel 3:06

This is the thing. She never said that. She what she actually said was, I can't deny the fact that you like me. Right now, you like me. She never actually said you really like me, but it's almost like a Mandela effect. We all imagine that she said this. All of us can hear her saying that. Either way, regardless of the specifics of the quote, the question remains, did they actually like her?

Angela 3:29

I think also there's some question there in the two words that stand out the most to me, which is where she said, Right now you like me.

Daniel 3:37

Exactly. And I think that will kind of tie into one of the potential explanations for the curse that we'll see. But at the time, were they actually blessing her with this amazing award? Or was she really flirting with danger on her second ride on the Oscar train, in that she could easily become the next victim of the Oscar curse? Because for many, what should be the crowning moment of glory for any actor's uh career, their artistic achievement, many in the Hollywood press and even a lot of winners themselves end up looking back on that moment as an inflection point where that's when all those good offers for roles started drying up, or when like that passion project turned, you know, collapsed and never happened, or even when their personal relationships started going into chaos and eventual divorce. It's almost like they flew too close to the sun and they're now being punished for it.

Angela 4:26

Oh my God, exactly. Like that I exactly was just about to say, it sounds like they're flying too close to the sun. But it's interesting because you mentioned that like projects fall apart or their careers dry up. And I feel like when somebody wins an Oscar, always within like six or seven months, I'm looking at their IMDB to see what they have coming up next. Because I'm like, ooh, they're getting like like good movies. So that's interesting. I'm curious to hear more about that.

Daniel 4:50

You'd expect there to be lots of people wanting to see them, see them in movies. So therefore, there'd be, you know, offers, there'd be big movies with them. They are now a marketable star, you would think. But let's lay it out clearly. It is a pretty straightforward curse. It goes like this you win an Oscar, especially best actor or best actress, and the blessing comes with a catch. Either your career stalls or your relationships do, sometimes both. We'll see examples of that. So whichever side of the curse you're afflicted with, the golden statue, it really isn't this reward. It's more like a tombstone for your career. I mean, it's a shiny tombstone you get to put on your mantle and brag to people about for the rest of your life. So maybe it's worth it.

Angela 5:28

Especially because like we hear a lot of like creepy little stories coming out of Hollywood of things people have done to get there. So you get to the mountaintop, you get the golden statue, you get it with a curse. Which you're right, to your point, sounds very diamond cursed like.

Daniel 5:44

Yeah, yeah, it's it it reminds me of like the classic diamond curses where it's just like, oh, these rich people, these successful people with a nice thing. Let's like anything bad must be because that niceness actually cursed them. Well, let's go back to the very first. So what I, when I in my research on this, generally what I saw was the the first person that was the the curse is attributed to. And that was Luis Reiner. So she came to Hollywood in 1935 from Germany, and she signed with MGM pretty immediately, and then won back-to-back best actress Oscars for 1936's The Great Ziggfield and 1937's The Good Earth. I mean, this is an incredibly hard feat to accomplish. The only other people who have won back-to-back lead actor Oscars or lead actress Oscars are Catherine Hepburn for Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner and The Line in the Winter in the 60s. She's got four best actresses total, so she's like one icon. Yeah, she uh so so to be even complicated. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then um of men to do it were Spencer Tracy, also back in the 1930s for Captain Courageous and Boystown, and then more recently Tom Hanks in the mid-90s for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. So only four people have ever won back-to-back best lead actor or actress Oscars. The other three are pretty household names, they're very famous actors. And yet we've probably never heard of Luis Reiner, right? I hadn't. Yeah. So back when she did win the Oscars, the Oscars were kind of different too. So it was, you know, we're used to now this big televised spectacle, hours long musical numbers, stars and everything. Yeah. Yeah. In the mid-30s, when she was winning, they were still evolving. And at the time, they were it was more of like a banquet, uh, a banquet dinner uh held at like a uh swanky LA club or uh hotel, different venues. So there wasn't the same venue, only a couple hundred people attended.

Angela 7:41

Um that sucks for Luis. She gets the curse and none of the none of the trappings.

Daniel 7:47

Yeah, and it was also much more studio insider-y than it is today, if that even seems possible. Because to me, the Oscars always have kind of just seemed like studio marketing.

Angela 7:56

I don't even want to know what that would mean.

Daniel 7:59

Apparently, it was even more. Oh, also another wild aspect of the like for the first handful of years, they used to just announce the winners weeks in advance and give it to the press and like say, here's who the Oscar winners are. And like there was no secret to how did this thing even get off the ground?

Angela 8:16

Like a nasty banquet or just like a list sent to the newspaper is like, okay.

Daniel 8:21

I mean, they weren't they weren't even officially calling it the Oscar then. Yeah, it was still the Academy Award. The Oscar name was sort of starting to come, so it was really in its infancy of the Oscars. So luckily, they got some sense about them. They decided we need to be more dramatic, we need to be more secretive, and they've, you know, the Oscars have become what they were today. Um, and people also at the time they had just started following the Oscars back then, too. There were there were newspaper articles, there were radio broadcasts of it, and then eventually TV. So people cared about the Oscars, viewers cared about the Oscars, the studios cared about the Oscars, they seemed like a big deal at the time, and she won two Oscars. Louise Reiner won two Oscars, but then afterwards, she was in a couple more MGM movies, none of them were successful, really, none were super well reviewed. She was always well reviewed, her performances were well reviewed in all her follow-up films, but there was just nothing that catapulted her to that stardom. She eventually would sour on Hollywood, she got she got into many creative and salary differences with the studio, and she eventually tried to get out of her contract. The MGM did something really mean. They didn't let her out of her contract and kind of held it over her for years. Even after she left Hollywood, there was always this threat that she could be, you know, if she tried to act, she could be called in for breach of contract, or she'd be forced to go work to go act in another MGM movie. Basically, the studios were not treating her well.

Angela 9:43

I'm really I'm so glad that that is not how it is today. Like that whole concept of like you sign essentially your life away to one studio and you belong to that studio, and they it's like from everything I've heard about that time period, they were I think they were like using and be using all the control that they were getting. And a lot of times it was over women.

Daniel 10:03

Definitely. Uh Luis Reiner has a great quote about the Academy Awards, and she basically says that it was bad. She said, For my second and third pictures, I won Academy Awards. Nothing worse could have happened to me. When I got two Oscars, they thought, oh, they can throw me into anything. I was a machine, practically a tool in a big, big factory, and I could not do anything. And so I left. I just went away, I fled. Yes, I fled. And that to me is like she's summing up basically the entire concept of the Oscar Court. So she was the first victim, and she had it clocked from day one, it seems. And and it it's you know, it it's really sad that that that is how her career in Hollywood ended. And she she did end up she had more acting career elsewhere, and she did act in a couple other movies, but she just she never reached I mean she is not spoken with next to Catherine Hepburn.

Angela 11:00

Wow, and that is that I mean, like if you think about it, because she those were her first and or for her second and third picture, she won an Academy Awards. She was probably in the industry for like five years and she was out, in and out.

Daniel 11:12

She she arrived in Hollywood in 1935, she won her second Oscar by 1938 and was gone by the end of the 1930s. Uh she there was a movie in the 40s, but yeah, yeah. So there are some long-standing issues in the Hollywood industry that I think we're all aware of that could be explanations for this. The first of which is sexism. I mean, a lot of the women we're going to discuss that are supposed victims of this curse, they're actresses in their 40s by the time they're winning an Oscar. And I think Hollywood is it's no one would argue if I said Hollywood is blind to women past a certain age.

Angela 11:47

Oh yeah, 100%. Which yeah, I mean, at first I was sort of thinking about this in terms of like still my brain was in like the 1940s, 50s, thinking about Louise, but unfortunately, I think a lot of these things are very, very, very much alive and well today, as we see in some of the like Ozumpic Botox craze kind of reaction. It's still kicking.

Daniel 12:14

There's yeah, a lot, a lot of good work has been done on the issue in Hollywood and in society in general, but obviously nowhere near completed. And the other the other side uh other than sexism is also racism. So many of the winners that we're gonna talk about ended up being offered only typecast roles for very specific types of things. For example, one of the one of the earliest supposed victims of this Hattie McDaniel, she won Best Supporting Actress. She when she won her Oscar, it was still in a segregated venue. She and her Oh, she wasn't even allowed inside the venue. Yeah, they had to sit at a separate table. It is a very complicated, very complicated example of this. I think it's just so straightforward that I mean just blatant racism stopped her career from the world.

Angela 13:04

I recently tried to watch I recently tried to watch Gone with the Wind, and not only was there like a disclaimer at the beginning about just like the blatant racism in the movie, but like I didn't even watch it because it made me so turned off to it. And like I thought of Hattie McDaniel and how she basically was put into the mammy role for that film and then got typecast in like the typical tropes as the mammy.

Daniel 13:32

And I mean, we can say it was old Hollywood, but even Lupita and Yango, after winning an Oscar for supporting actress in 12 Years a Slave, she said she in an interview said after she won that role, she had to turn down so many roles of being a slave because that's what she had been offered constantly. And she cut she like specifically said to herself, I need to turn these roles down because I do not want that to become my career. And I think she's had a great I I I hope she's very happy with her career.

Angela 14:00

She's had anything like literally thinking about like, oh good, she did not let that happen to her. And I feel like she has had some really interesting roles, like um, what is the not get out, but what is the m movie she was in that was with Jordan Peel?

Daniel 14:16

Oh, oh, us, yeah. She was so good in us. Hope hope the curse is not real so her career continues to be amazing.

Angela 14:24

Yes, yeah.

Daniel 14:25

I can't wait to watch her for decades plus in all everything she's gonna do. Let's get let's let's just go down some examples of the Oscar curse and we can kind of just talk about if we think cursed, not maybe we can talk about their career. So let's go back to Sally Field. Um she in interviews she never said she was cursed. She s did say at times that she thought that her wins changed how Hollywood saw her, and she did, but she doesn't think that her career suffered from it. She has a great career, she was really Oscar for her nominated for another Oscar for Lincoln in the past decade. She has a lot of people.

Angela 14:59

Yeah, I was gonna say, I feel like she's incredible in everything she does.

Daniel 15:03

Yes, yeah. The one thing that she has said is she thinks her relationship suffered. I don't know if she would explicitly say it, but she did say in an interview that Burt Reynolds, whom she was dating at the time of her Norma Ray win, um, he had grown resentful over that, the buzz, and that led to their breakup.

Angela 15:21

Well, I feel like that I'm curious, and I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about it, but I feel like when it is the breakup and divorce, it's often like I know obviously like Ben Affleck Jennifer Garner. I remember he had that speech where he kind of I think it was misconstrued what he meant, but like it was you know, he called their marriage work, and then they ended up getting divorced shortly thereafter. I'd highly doubt the two things were super correlated. I think they were already anyway, none of my business. But at the same time, um, I feel like uh it's often like the reason I'm like stealing all your spot here. No. But Reese Witherspoon, I think that's what happened with her, is like Ryan Philippe and it kind of couldn't take couldn't take the heat and throw out all the examples you can, because I have too many examples. The tiny baby egos of men just couldn't handle it.

Daniel 16:14

I do, I did find a study that looked into divorce rates of winners and nominees. There was I found two studies, and we'll get to that. Um, another commonly cited victim of the curse is Mira Sorvino. She won Best Supporting Actress for Mighty Aphrodite in 1995. Since then, though, she has been in movies I would call quite amazing. At least in my personal filmography, she was in Romeo and Michelle's high school reunion.

Angela 16:38

Yeah, I feel like everybody knows her for Romeo and Michelle's.

Daniel 16:41

Yeah, so those were both after her Oscar Wynn, but she did say she saw a noticeable stalling of her career. And in in hindsight, in interviews, she has said she believes it was because she personally rebuffed Harvey Weinstein and he actually went and tried to tank her career for that reason. There is a reporting, even that Peter Jackson, the director of Lord of the Rings, kind of confirms this when he says that Weinstein told him not to cast her in early stages of casting for Lord of the Rings. So that's just straight up a vendetta of sexism and a horrible person who ruined her career.

Angela 17:16

Yeah, but I also feel like this is where cursed versus cursed-ish comes into play. Because I know it's not all across the board, but like, is the curse the Oscar or was the curse Harvey Weinstein? Because I think he had so many, like, like again, kind of following my like train of thought from where I was thinking about like, oh, back in the 50s and 60s and all those contracts that the female actresses had with the studios and the control they got, that sort of morphed and shifted into something even more insidious in Harvey Weinstein, where of I'm sure back in the day there was all kinds of sex abuse and things um going on as well. But Harvey Weinstein like was one of those petty, nasty people with power. And I do think that he had power and a lot of, I mean, a lot of the movies that he was producing were those Oscar movies. So is the curse the Oscar curse or is it the Harvey Weinstein curse? But it sounds like you have a lot of examples that I don't think Harvey Weinstein was that prolific.

Daniel 18:10

No, he he this will be his only his only showing up in this. But I mean, is the curse that Hollywood gave people like that power over young people's careers? And and that, yeah, you know, and this a lot of this comes from people who had power who made decisions about other people. Okay, uh a couple more examples that I saw cited a lot of the the career side of the curse. Here's a couple men there, Cuba Gooding Jr. and F. Marie Abraham. Uh Cuba Gooding Jr. was in Boys in the Hood, A Few Good Men, Outbreak, and then Jerry McGuire, for which he won Best Supporting Actor. After his win.

Angela 18:44

Um, and he was in Pearl Harbor. Don't forget about that. Yes, true, true. Exactly.

Daniel 18:48

Yeah, so he was in, he was like a very in all these big Hollywood movies. Then after he won, he was in Snow Dogs and Boat Trip. Um, he did have a little bit of a resurgence in TV when he played O.J. Simpson in American Crime Story, The People vs. OJ Simpson. But he did call his Oscar, quote, a curse, and he said that he was banished to the wilderness of director video films after he won.

Angela 19:12

Okay, but like, isn't there some like there's like sketchy stuff about him though, too. Like there's stuff that's come up in was he involved in like the Diddy stuff?

Daniel 19:20

Uh that no, I'm not sure about that, but he, yes, much more recently, far after his Oscar and his career. Yes, yes, he has to be a good idea.

Angela 19:28

Yeah, but I'm sure it didn't sexual misconduct me. Yeah, I'm sure the sexual misconduct didn't just get started recently.

Daniel 19:33

Very like, very likely. But do are we suggesting that Hollywood ruins the careers of men who do that kind of stuff, especially in the 90s?

Angela 19:41

As of late. I mean, look at Kevin Spacey. Look at look at Army Hammer. Like, for once, I do actually have some examples of where, you know, men have behaved badly and had I mean, Harvey Weinstein is dying of gangrene in prison right now.

Daniel 19:56

I mean, the the my next example, he also recently has come under some accusations of impropriety uh on one of the things. Oh, F. Mary Abraham. F. Mary Abraham, yes, in the world.

Angela 20:05

I know I was I was just thinking about him because he's one of those people who like I mean, he's got like that famously pockmarked face and he shows up and things, but he was in here.

Daniel 20:14

Let me give you, I'll I'll give you his career rundown before and after an Oscar. So he was he was in Serpico, Scarface, All the President's Men. So very, very like iconic American movies, and then he won Best Actor for Amadeus. And then after that, he floundered for a long time. It just never really seemed to break through to become like this to follow up all those huge iconic movies it was in. If you look at his filmography, there's nothing super notable. I tried to pick out the things I recognize. There's a bonfire, the vanities, mimic again. Love that movie. Star Trek, he was in a Star Trek movie, and he was also in 13 Ghosts, which I can't believe we're bringing up 13 Ghosts. It's notable.

Angela 20:52

That is okay. Also, of all the movies in the world, why has 13 Ghosts come up so many times?

Daniel 20:58

I I apparently need to watch it. It's been a while, but great, great movie.

Angela 21:01

So no, I will not be it's like I will not be watching that movie again.

Daniel 21:04

But he's had a great theater and TV career, and you know, he did he was quoted to say that after he won an Oscar, he quote, got full of himself and he started turning down roles and the phone stopped ringing. So he kind of blames it on himself. And then there's I'm just gonna run off a couple of quotes from you know notable winners who said that the Oscar had a negative effect on their career. Monique said that the offers are less than I got 11 years ago, and that was before I won the Oscar. Marcia Gay Harden said that winning was, quote, disastrous on a professional level, and said that the roles offered and the roles were offered were less and the money got smaller, which made no sense to her.

Angela 21:42

And she seems so iconic to me. Wow.

Daniel 21:45

Yeah. Uh Melissa Leo, she famously campaigned for her Oscar for the fighter back in 2010. But now she has said that after her Oscar, she was only offered older nasty women roles, and that winning an Oscar has not been. Good for me and my career. I didn't dream of it. I never wanted it. And I had a much better career before I won. So she a hunt is just explicitly saying this ruined my career.

Angela 22:10

That's interesting. Because when you consider in the reverse, I don't want to get too ahead of ourselves. Look at like Emma Stone. She's won twice now. She's like the darling of the Oscars. Yeah. Um, anything she does with Jorgis Lanthamos is like immediately nominate her, maybe give her an Oscar. Yeah. Um it seems to have not had any negative impact on her to be one of these like Oscar darlings.

Daniel 22:38

Yeah, I think it's very hit or miss. That's that's the main thing. If if this is a true curse, it's hit or miss.

Angela 22:44

Because Andennifer Lawrence, she's also won twice. And I don't know. I think she's I don't know if she she seems to get good roles and she's never seemed to have a problem with that. Although it I she hasn't been in a whole ton lately, but she's also been living her life. So yeah.

Daniel 22:57

Well, I would say still another, probably one of the more famous career examples that I have left is Halle Berry. I mean, yeah. So she before she won, she she ended up winning Best Actress for Monsters Ball. Um, but before that, she was, you know, a leading role in the X-Men movies, which comic book movies were just starting. They were gonna be great, yes.

Angela 23:17

Oh, I remember that.

Daniel 23:19

She was Swordfish, which was another pretty major movie. Um, and then right around the time she won Oscar, she was also in a James Bond movie. She was in Die Another Day, which kind of was like whole, like, you know, that is another movie.

Angela 23:30

Oh, yeah, no, I remember that.

Daniel 23:31

Yeah. And then, but so she won right around that time, a little before the Bond movie, and then kind of, you know, didn't do much more. She was in the X-Men sequels. There's actually a really I don't even know how true this is. This is just something I've always heard about those the productions of those movies, is that they kind of tricked her to come back to those movies because they treated her character Storm so poorly that they would give her like fake scripts that had larger parts for her character and to get her to agree to be in the movie, and then in the final script, she was always pared down to like a supporting character. Yeah.

Angela 24:04

Alright, well, she should have negotiated her contract based off of that first script, and then it really just sounds like Hollywood treated her horribly.

Daniel 24:13

But she was, you know, she was she was in that catwoman movie, and that was not a like it kind of killed her idea of like a leading lady movie. I mean, I think she's been in I love her career. She's been in wonderful movies. I even modern movies, uh, Cloud Atlas. I love she's wonderful in that movie. So I don't I mean, I mean, I think Halle Berry's had a good career, but she's generally considered someone who just didn't whose career never continued to soar after her Oscar. Um, she was quoted as saying, they call it the Oscar curse, and you're expected to turn in award-worthy performances. So she sort of said it creates this false expectation that everything you're gonna do is Oscar worthy, and no one can be Oscar worthy at any point.

Angela 24:52

No, I mean that's gotta get that's gotta be very stressful.

Daniel 24:56

So Halle Berry is also one of the people I saw quoted or cited many times on lists of victims of the curse on both lists, the career side and the relationship side. Because when she did win best actress for yeah, when she won best actress for Monsters Ball, she thanked her husband at the time, they would divorce within a few years.

Angela 25:15

Who was she married to? Like I vaguely remember them being like an A-list marriage, but I literally Eric Bene. Okay, I have not thought about this in I mean an acceptable amount of time based on how unimportant in the big scheme of things in my life this is. But still, oh my god, I remember they were like such an A-list couple, and it was so shocking when they got divorced.

Daniel 25:39

Yeah, I would I did find two academic studies that looked into divorce rates of Oscar winners, Oscar nominees, and compared them in different ways with the population, everything. Unfortunately, the two con the two studies found almost exactly opposite uh conclusions. One found that women actors who win are more likely to get divorced, the other found that men actors who get divorced who are more likely to divorce.

Angela 26:03

How do they have two aren't these just statistics? Isn't it like cold hard data?

Daniel 26:07

I think that's the thing is we're we're talking out so about such small groups of people. We're talking about handfuls of uh of Oscar-winning actors. There's only, you know, there's only a so many of them.

Angela 26:18

85 times, yeah. Yeah. And so how many, how many um it was about a we're on the bottom. I'm not gonna try to do math. Who am I?

Daniel 26:25

It's it started in 1929, so we're coming up on the hundredth Oscars.

Angela 26:28

Um, I was off.

Daniel 26:30

Yeah, it it it it just seems like the way they analyzed, you know, the data. So it kind of I was like, oh, these studies, they're gonna prove it. And then it was like, oh, they say the opposite. The way I looked at it is one said women winners have a higher likelihood of divorce, the other said men winners have a higher likelihood of divorce. I'm choosing to just interpret that as winning means you're more likely to be divorced, and they all proved it. But I I I know you can't interpret that.

Angela 26:55

Although I still don't understand how this can't be a finite study because there are there is data.

Daniel 27:00

I think I think because some in one of the studies they compared it to the average population likelihood of divorce. So there's just different analyzing data, but essentially two in the sauce, and now here we are. It seems like there is some effect. That's what it regardless of if it's men or women, that comes down to the science of doing the study. But they were both able to show a statistically significant effect. And so here's there's a couple. I I think I think these are some of the more famous things people think of when they think of the Oscar curse, or the people whose relationships, especially in the last decade or so, it's become more kind of the the way that it's looked at. Um I mean, so Halle Berry is an example, right? Um, another example is Hillary Swank. So she's a an interesting example because she won two Oscars for Best Actress. Apparently, when she won her first her first award for Boys Don't Cry in 2000, she actually forgot to thank her husband at the time.

Angela 27:57

That was Chad Lowe, right?

Daniel 27:58

Uh yes, I think so.

Angela 28:00

Then they were like a big deal A-list couple.

Daniel 28:03

She won five years later and did thank him. She remembered to thank him the second time around, but then they got divorced uh about a year later.

Angela 28:10

Right. Like I remember that.

Daniel 28:13

Yeah. Um, you you already brought up Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Philippi. That happened within a a couple years after she won for Walk the Line. Kate Winslit divorced from Sam Mendys soon after winning for The Reader. Um, Sandra Bullock is probably the most one of the more famous examples. She won for the blind side, and weeks later her her uh relationship with Jesse James, you know, very publicly for the best. For the best yes, but but it was still. Yeah, she was in the tabloids for it. I it goes far like the the career curse seems to go back all the way to Luis Reiner. As far as I saw, relationship curse. Some of the earliest cited example was Emma Thompson in uh 1992. She won for Howard's End and then shortly divorced from Kenneth Branaugh after that.

Angela 28:59

And like, do you know the whole deal with their divorce?

Daniel 29:02

No, tell me.

Angela 29:03

Oh my god, it's so spicy and like sad. Um, he they were married, and I mean, I it's not like I'm a scholar on this, so I'm gonna keep this high level, but they were married, and I think it was like they were an A-list couple and they were very much in love, and I think there was a whole kind of a lot of press around their marriage. And then he cheated on her with Helena Bonham Carter. And it was, and a lot of people, I don't think she has um, first of all, all three of them were in Harry Potter together, by the way. I don't think that she has admitted this, but a lot of people think that the scene from Love actually, where she so famously plays a scorned that the wife and like that iconic scene where she sits down on the bed with the Joni Mitchell CD and like cries and then has to get herself. I think people maybe like conflated this. I don't think she's ever said this is correct, but it just kind of like once people realize that she had been that woman at one point in time and maybe she was pulling from um some kind of like emotional experience. Because I mean that scene is so well acted, and then you find out that she yeah, so apparently it was like a very, very heartbreaking, messy divorce.

Daniel 30:17

I guess those studies I talked about, they sort of went into maybe some of like there's basically gender role ideas of why, you know, if a woman winning that makes her husband resentful of like her you super usurping the like breadwinner role, maybe. Right. There's also like men win, they there's ideas they might they might feel themselves as like better and they they therefore then act differently in their relationship. So there's a lot of ways that this could be mechanized.

Angela 30:45

Shall we take a whole other hour to unpack Levi Caprio?

Daniel 30:49

I mean, yeah uh exactly. I mean, his his romantic history is a whole psychology.

Angela 30:54

Well, I think we'd only need about 25 minutes.

Daniel 30:58

So I in the end, though, it it seems like you know, there's a lot of people that win an Oscar and then have bad things happen to them. If I'm really if I was really trying to look at numbers, I mean, of course, I I found a bunch of people who weren't who won Oscars and did well. I even found people who were called Oscar Cursed victims who I was like, how are they a victim? Like Gwenneth Peltro, people call her a victim. She's still super famous. She's had maybe she doesn't have the acting crew. Yeah.

Angela 31:24

No, I would say Gwyneth Peltrow is somebody, and I don't I don't need to like get up on my soapbox, but A, she is divorced. I don't think it was any time. I don't think she was in her mind. So that's not related.

Daniel 31:37

Yeah, it's so divorced from her Oscar story.

Angela 31:40

Are so polarized by her, and let me tell you, if you have a Gwyneth Peldro cookbook and you cook out of it, you're about to make some fucking fire food. That woman, her cookbooks are incredible, and honestly, people can hate on her all day long because Goop is out of touch, but I think that's like what it's doing on purpose. I don't think it's meant to not be out of touch, but she's hilarious, okay? Give that woman a break.

Daniel 32:03

I think Gwyneth has the career she is happy.

Angela 32:05

I didn't realize I was gonna get on my Gwen soapbox today.

Daniel 32:08

You were the pro Gweneth's.

Angela 32:10

Leave Gwyneth alone!

Daniel 32:11

Yeah. Um, people also cited Adrian Brody, and it's like he just pulled this most hilarious move last year because he's the youngest best actor winner. He was like 21. And Timothy Chalamet last year was kind of a front runner, and he would have beaten his record, but then Adrian Brody won another Oscar last year, and now Timothy Chalamet might win this weekend, and he's older than Adrian Brody was, so he can't break the record anymore. So it almost seems like Adrian Brody was like, What do you think you're doing, Timmy? You're not coming for my Oh, Timmy Tim. He just pulled like a blocker.

Angela 32:41

You know, Timmy Tim, do we want him to win an Oscar this weekend?

Daniel 32:44

I'd be fine. I'd prefer Michael B. Jordan to win, but I'd be fine with it. Yeah.

Angela 32:48

Um, I think of course I'm going to vote for Michael B. Jordan. The I've I find Timothy Chalamet to be so interesting, and his way of campaigning is very interesting.

Daniel 32:58

Yes, yeah.

Angela 32:59

The I but there's like these There's like these anomalies to him that just like something like I like him, but I'm like, like you turn your head sideways and you squint and you're like, something's weird here. Yeah, yeah. Well we'll say about it.

Daniel 33:15

Maybe he'll he'll maybe he'll win and we'll have to we'll have to watch his career and see if he's cursed. Alright, fine by me. Because maybe he'll go the way of some of the people we talked about, or you know, Merrill Streep is another clear non-victim. Also like Francis McDormand, Emma Stone, like you said. So that we'll see if Timothy Chalamet can go the way of them and have a wonderful time.

Angela 33:32

I feel like if a curse came for Francis McDormand, she would turn one look and the curse would wither and die. It would like it would let out a little sob as it crawled away.

Daniel 33:42

Uh, one one little side curse I found while I was researching this that I thought was uh almost to me, like kind of the real Oscar curse is there's these people who have been nominated a shit ton of times and never won, and they like keep Oh yeah, yeah. Like Peter O'Toole nominated eight times. Well, he yeah, it took him a while, but he did end up winning. Um Peter O'Toole is like uh the the quintessential actor who's nominated. He's got eight nominations, he never won. Glenn Close is is now like that part of that unfortunate club. Amy Adams and Annette Benning are some others who are like they've got time.

Angela 34:19

Like Arrival is one of the best. She wasn't even nominated for that, which is oh my god, that movie is incredible. And she like it's like she carries that movie so well. Yeah.

Daniel 34:30

But my favorite perennial nominee is the do you know who Diane Warren is? Yeah, yeah, I love it. She's my favorite. Songwriter is, yeah. Yes, exactly. But she gets nominated like every year now. She clearly she wants an Oscar, and bless her for it. She just really wants an Oscar, and she campaigns so hard, and like the people, the voters just keep nominating her every year. She gets nominated for the most random movies a couple years back, maybe even last year. She was nominated for a song she wrote for a movie about flaming hot Cheetos. And it's like that's an Oscar-nominated movie because of Diane Warren. So I the day Diane Warren wins an Oscar, I will scream so loud, I cannot wait for it.

Angela 35:06

Okay, you know what that's funny because I didn't know about that, but I feel like I have had that moment of looking at the nominees list and being like, what the hell is this random Diane Warren song? So okay, Diane Warren's. I love it when I hear it when I see the stuff in action. But I did not know about the Hot Ones Flaming Hot Cheeto song.

Daniel 35:22

Yeah, exactly. That was like last year, I think. This is a movie that they made about the guy who invented Flaming Hot Cheetos, and she wrote a song for it, got nominated for an Oscar.

Angela 35:30

There was a movie about a that's like the studio did like the Kool-Aid Man.

Daniel 35:36

Like well, maybe that the Flaming Hot Cheetos movie could have been where some Oscar winners who got cursed. That's where the careers wound them up in that movie, maybe.

Angela 35:44

And everything goes full circle.

Daniel 35:46

I guess so that now that we've talked, I mean we've talked it through, it seems like there's some people whose careers stall. Like, what are you thinking? You know, I've got a couple theories about why this pattern is there.

Angela 35:56

Um, I think, you know, I think you said something interesting when you said it's kind of like the diamond curses, where it's really just this confluence of like money, hubris, power. I think the things you have to do to get to those places often create whether it's bad karma or just fallout, and that potentially puts you into the curse, the cursed path. Um I think when it comes to like the divorce and the relationship chaos, that's just small ego, well, large egoed, small-minded people being twats. I don't know. Honestly, I think all of it is like explainable by societal issues. So I'm gonna say no curse.

Daniel 36:38

Okay. I think there's a little bit of, like you said, there's the idea that something someone wants and what they've done for it, it's this like this achievement that so few people do. It's natural for us to put a little bit of like be careful what you wish for energy into it. So that like it it's primed for that. I do think yeah, I think Hollywood is set up to curse people in a non-supernatural way because horrible, you know, horrible decisions are made for horrible reasons by horrible people at times. And those those real decisions and those real actions did curse people's career. But I don't think that there's like actually a supernatural element to the Oscars necessarily. There's just too many people who have had no issues whatsoever. I think it's it's and I mean a large part of it is like even among Oscar-winning ask actors, a successful Hollywood career might just still be really hard to make happen. Like, just because you win an Oscar, that doesn't mean you're gonna have a great career. A great career might still be so hard to get even among that elite group of Oscar-winning actors.

Angela 37:42

It feels like there's so much more political machination machination, and even sometimes just coming down to like there is a such thing as casting. I know you can get typecasted, but like I feel like, yeah, it's it feels to me like there are so many factors at play in how really anything and everything works in Hollywood. Some of it malicious, some of it just how business works.

Daniel 38:03

Yeah, and there's like you said, there's so many factors, but I think there's and there's like so many ways for this supposed curse to be effectuated. There's the actors themselves can act differently after winning. The studios and the the movie makers can look at them differently, audiences can look at them differently. I mean, audiences might not want to see a comedic role from a dramatic Oscar-winning actor anymore. If they used to do comedy, like big comedies, maybe that kind of thing can happen. There is there. I have two quotes from from some Oscar-winning actresses that kind of shed light on how they think about it. One is Louise Reiner herself. She said the Oscar is not a curse. The real curse is that once you have an Oscar, they think you can do anything. So she's saying the studios and the audiences, they put expectation on you. An interesting kind of different uh perspective I saw from Viola Davis, who won the best supporting actors for fences a few years ago. She said that people talk about the curse. There's no curse. What happens is you get the gold statue and then you get precious because you think the statue means something. It's like I can't go back to what I was doing before. You're more discerning, there's more money. What's affecting your decision is the trophy. So she's saying it changes your internalness as an actor.

Angela 39:21

I mean, the way that like the way that the human brain and the human psyche would respond, it's like lottery winners. Like, you know, the way that you would respond to something like that, that makes total sense to me. Like the kind of like mind warp, and it's true. Like, even in my own career, it's like I'm not gonna go back to an entry-level job. Are you kidding me? Yeah, you know, like I totally get that. That's how I honestly would probably to some extent be feeling as well. Like, I work so hard, I want an Oscar. Like it's a it should be a meritocracy. I have an Oscar, I should then have certain certain rights or certain things should be expected because of doing so, certain prestige. So, but then I also understand how that could totally be your downfall. It's just kind of like the balance of your own hubris.

Daniel 40:08

Well, and even if it could just be as simple as an actor thinking, oh, I'm gonna have this amazing career, and then they still have a decent career, but it just wasn't what they imagined.

Angela 40:17

Thought, and yeah.

Daniel 40:18

Yeah. So a lot of it does just seem to be like expectations not met. And Hollywood is filled with that, it seems. And and I, you know, it's it seems like just explaining this away as a curse is kind of, you know, where stuff stops being completely cursed and starts being cursed-ish.

Angela 40:34

Maybe cursed, maybe not. See you all next week.

Daniel 40:48

Cursedish is an ish media production. It explores stories of alleged curses, historical mysteries, and supernatural claims. While we do investigate the history and the evidence behind these stories, ultimately you should decide for yourself what to believe. If you have questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share, send us a hex at uh oh at cursedish.com. That's uh oh h all one word at cursdish all one word.com.