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Best Actress Oscar nominees are considered Hollywood’s crème de la crème — beautiful, talented, intelligent… and headed for divorce?
For years, mutterings of a so-called “Oscar Curse” have tainted the buzz around female nominees, claiming that married actresses who are lucky enough to win an Academy Award are also unfortunate enough to be on the fast-track to a tabloid-frenzied divorce.
While on the surface evidence for the curse may seem obvious (just ask A-listers Reese Witherspoon, Halle Berry and Sandra Bullock, whose marriages ended after taking home Best Actress statuettes), researchers from the University of Toronto have taken the hype a step further by studying the trend and determining that, indeed, a curse (or highly coincidental pattern) does exist.
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By comparing the leading ladies who were named Best Actress to those who were nominated, but didn’t win from 1936 to 2010, the researchers found that winners were 1.68 times more likely to divorce than non-winners, while an impressive 60% of married nominees eventually divorced. Conversely, no such pattern exists for male nominees.
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So should the ladies who were honored with Best Actress nods this year be worried? NewsFeed thinks not, as only two nominees (Annette Bening of The Kids Are All Right and Nicole Kidman of Rabbit Hole) are currently married, while one (Natalie Portman of Black Swan) is engaged.
And it appears to be smooth sailing for the remaining nominees, Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone) and Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine), who are both respectfully navigating their way through Hollywood’s tricky dating land. (via The Huffington Post)