Explainer: Should Hollywood actors be scared of Oscar love curse
What's the story
Film awards season can be nerve-racking, especially when you're contending with terrific contemporaries in the Best Actor categories.
Add to it an infamous superstition that is believed to wreak havoc in the lives of female actors, and the Academy Awards become much more formidable than it should be.
For years, a notorious superstition has attached itself to the Oscars: The Oscar love curse.
Meaning
This is what the curse means exactly
Put simply, the Oscar love curse applies mostly to the recipients of Best Actress Academy Award winners and sometimes Best Supporting Actresses and Best Actors.
It means that soon after winning this award, the fiancé, husband, or partner of these women would cheat on them/leave them/divorce them.
Another version is strictly professional: The careers of these awardees will "collapse" shortly after the Academy wins.
Origin
How did it all start?
The curse can be traced back to Hollywood actor Luise Rainer, who was reportedly adjudged the Best Actress two consecutive times in the 1930s.
She reacted, "Nothing worse could have happened to me. When I got two Oscars, they thought [they could throw me into anything]. I was a machine...a tool in a big factory. So I left. I just went away. I fled."
Examples
Did these actors get impacted by the notorious curse?
The curse has allegedly impacted several female actors.
Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for The Blind Side in 2010, and divorced Jesse James the same year; Kate Winslet bagged an Oscar for The Reader in 2008, but her relations with Sam Mendes deteriorated and they divorced in 2011; Charlize Theron won for Monster in 2004, and split from Stuart Townsend, though in 2010.
Research and data
Does meticulous research support the supposed curse?
A research paper by Michael Jensen and Heeyon Kim, titled The Real Oscar Curse: The Negative Consequences of Positive Status Shifts, states, "We find most evidence of a male personal Oscar curse: survival analysis shows that the divorce rates of male Oscar winners and nominees increase following the Oscars but not the divorce rates of female Oscar winner and nominees."
Research's findings
This research called it 'Hollywood folklore'
The research adds, "The curse is not only an intriguing piece of Hollywood folklore that continues to capture the public imagination, but it provides also a vivid example of the paradox that positive events can have negative consequences."
"Economic progress is often associated with higher suicide rates because it disrupts social relations and creates insatiable demands for more, regardless of one's current status position."
Jensen's views
How does it impact male actors?
Jensen told LiveScience, "Suddenly becoming a big shot increases [a divorce's likelihood]."
Per Mint, the study reportedly found that "Male Oscar winners are three times as likely as other actors to get a divorce during their first year of marriage and male actors nominated for an Academy Award are twice as likely as non-nominated actors to get a divorce [in their first married year]."
Halle Berry's opinion
Here's how the 'curse' impacted Halle Berry
Halle Berry, recipient of an Oscar for Monster's Ball, told EW, "When you have a historic win like that, you think, 'Oh, this is going to fundamentally change.' It fundamentally changed me, but it didn't change my place in the business overnight."
"I still had to go back to work...I still had to try to fight to make a way out of no way."