A Brief History of Post-Oscar Career Choices, the Good, the Bad, and the Tomb Raiders

You’d think winning the Academy Award would be the mountaintop, but no. This is America, and as the great Ivy Lynn once told us about America, they just keep moving the line. And so once you win that Oscar, the question then becomes what are you going to do to follow it up. Choose wisely, and it’s onto speculation over whether you can win another one. Choose poorly and forever people will be talking about how you fell victim to some kind of “Oscar curse” nonsense.

It’s a lot to think about! And a lot of pressure to put on that next movie of yours. Two recent examples illustrate this pretty starkly, as Alicia Vikander’s re-boot of Lara Croft in Tomb Raider just premiered on HBO GO. That was Vikander’s first project she signed onto after winning Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Danish Girl. The film fizzled with critics and faltered at the box office. Meanwhile, Viola Davis won that very same Supporting Actress award the next year and now she finds herself back in theaters in a lead role in Widows, one of the best movies of the year and perhaps the single best star vehicle of her career. The post-Oscar roles give and they take.

It should be said that perception and reality might not exactly be the same thing when talking about these post-Oscar roles. How much career-grooming intention goes into picking a post-Oscar role? We may well never know. So we can only speak of our perceptions, and how these follow-up roles affected how we see these actors’ careers.

Generally, a post-Oscar follow-up role follows one of two paths: an artistic indulgence or a commercial cash-in. You can understand the appear of either: the clout of the Oscar win gives you the space to take a chance on a riskier project that otherwise you might not have been able to. But it also gives you what is very probably your first chance at a huge pay-day. Why else were you toiling in micro budgets anyway but for this eventual windfall?

Two very recent examples of both sides of this coin have been recent Best Actress winners Brie Larson and Emma Stone:

• Larson won for Room in February of 2016, and her next big project was to co-star with Tom Hiddleston in Kong: Skull Island, and soon after that she was snatched up by the Marvel Cinematic Universe to play Captain Marvel in the upcoming film. The former film wasn’t very good, and it certainly didn’t give Larson much to work with, but Captain Marvel promises to be more rewarding. Still, this was a highly commercial path to tread.
• Emma Stone won Best Actress for La La Land the very next year, and her next roles were a different story. She’d already made Battle of the Sexes before winning the Oscar, but filmed The Favourite directly after. Teaming up with director Yorgos Lanthimos to play one third of a Machiavellian psycho-sexual power struggle in Queen Anne’s court is certainly an artistic statement.

Some performers manage to play both sides of the coin. Nicole Kidman emerged from her big Oscar win for The Hours and had another big Oscar-y epic already filmed: the Civil War opus Cold Mountain. Unfortunately, the Oscar buzz for that one faltered severely, and by nomination morning, Kidman was snubbed. Kidman moved on from that by splitting her efforts between the commercial (a remake of The Stepford Wives) and the artsy (Birth). Lucky for her, we remember the artsy classic one a lot better than we do the commercial bomb.

The danger of screwing up your post-Oscar film is high. Halle Berry (Gothika), Charlize Theron (Aeon Flux), Angelina Jolie (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider) and Adrien Brody (The Village) are among the performers who have misstepped while standing atop the mountain. Hilary Swank managed to screw up her post-Oscar movie TWICE. She took a role she fully shouldn’t have as the lead in the costume drama The Affair of the Necklace after winning for Boys Don’t Cry. Then, she followed up her Million Dollar Baby win with The Black Dahlia (no more period pieces, Hilary!) and Freedom Writers (no more soft-pedal Dangerous Minds ripoffs either).

Some of the best responses to a big Oscar win come from the most unexpected places:

• After the backlash Gwyneth Paltrow got for winning Best Actress for Shakespeare in Love, you’d think she would have panicked and tried to get excessively crowd-pleasing. Instead, she had The Talented Mr. Ripley already filmed and ready to go, and by the time she returned with another new film, it was the small, assured pet project Duets.
• Russell Crowe was beginning to have people turn on him after his grumpy-Gus public appearances during the awards run of Gladiator. But he managed to follow that up with A Beautiful Mind in 2001 and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, both critical and commercial hits.
• Tom Hanks followed up back-to-back wins for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump — which had him riding the precipice of possible backlash by being such a Dad about it all — by going to space with Ron Howard in Apollo 13 and then making his feature film debut with That Thing You Do! THAT is how you use your Oscar-winning capital.

Sometimes, though, the best decision after winning an Oscar is to calm the heck down and wait:

• After winning for The Blind Side, Sandra Bullock spent four years where the only movie she made was a supporting role in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Yes, she was weathering the tabloid fallout of her marriage at the time, but by the time she returned in 2013’s fantastic cop comedy The Heat, she was at the top of her game. And then later that year came Gravity and her second Oscar nomination.
• Kate Winslet wore herself OUT trying to win an Oscar throughout the ’90s and 2000s, and after she won for The Reader, it was three years before she was back on a screen. She returned on HBO in the mini-series remake of Mildred Pierce, for which she won an Emmy.
• Natalie Portman, who was quite pregnant when she won for Black Swan in February of 2011, didn’t make a new movie besides Thor: The Dark World until she came back in 2015 with Jackie, her next Oscar nomination.
• Leonardo DiCaprio still hasn’t made his The Revenant follow-up. He’s due to appear in Quentin Tarantino’s Charles Manson epic Once Upon a Time in Hollywood next year.