Winning an Oscar is the highest accolade any movie actor can achieve. So, there’s an expectation in Hollywood that having “Academy Award-winner” before your name automatically skyrockets your career — but that’s not necessarily the case for everyone.
Whether it’s better roles and bigger paychecks, some Oscar wins completely revitalize actors’ careers. However, over the years, it’s become equally common to see a sudden decline in people’s work after their wins — so much so, they’ve coined it the “Oscars curse.”
With all this in mind, Oscar-winning actors and filmmakers always face intense scrutiny over their career choices in the years following their wins, with immense pressure on the opportunities they pursue.
As you may know, Brendan’s Academy Award win came after a long break from the spotlight during the 2000s and 2010s, and so, it was widely expected that his Oscar would mark the start of a major movie comeback. However, in an interview with Discussing Film to promote his new film, Rental Family, Brendan said that landing top film roles isn’t all that easy, even when you’ve got an Oscar win to your name.
“The fallacy is that you have the pick of the litter [of roles]. It’s not true, actually, because it depends on what’s being made,” he said.
Suggesting that the current landscape in Hollywood has led to a decline in high-quality film roles, Brendan said: “We’re at a point in the industry right now where we’re reckoning with, What is streaming? What is cinema? What is television?”
“How we consume pop culture, art, ‘content’— I mean, there’s an ongoing debate about how we do this, and it’s not unified yet,” he continued, before taking a more optimistic stance. “The good news: Good work is good work. No one sets out to make a dud, necessarily, and you want to make the best you can do.”
Finding strong lead roles in Hollywood is difficult for many stars, but it’s undoubtedly more challenging for non-white actors, even those with Academy Awards. For example, Lupita Nyong’o won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2014 for her breakout role in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, and since then, she’s talked openly about the lack of diversity in the roles that are offered to her.
“My winning an Academy Award came at the very start of my career. It was for the very first film that I had done. So, it really did set the paces for everything I’ve done since,” she said on CNN’s Inside Africa in November last year. “After I won that Academy Award, you’d think, ‘Oh, I’m gonna get lead roles here and there.’ [Instead, it was], ‘Oh, Lupita, we’d like you to play another movie where you’re a slave, but this time you’re on a slave ship.’ Those are the kind of offers I was getting in the months after winning my Academy Award.”
“It was a very tender time,” she said, recalling that there was a big “expectation for you and your career.” “There were think pieces about: ‘Is this the beginning and end of this dark-skinned, Black, African woman’s career?’ I had to deafen myself to all those pontificators because, at the end of the day, I’m not a theory; I’m an actual person.”
It’s certainly a very important discussion. What do you make of this? LMK in the comments.