Not every movie an actor makes can win Oscar gold. Often, Hollywood performers agree to star in cheesy blockbusters with broad commercial appeal because of the potential box office payoff. That’s one reason why an actor sometimes turns in an Oscar-winning performance in one movie and a cringeworthy effort in another within the span of one year.
Here are some examples of A-list actors who have won the Oscar for best actor or actress the same year they starred in horrible movies that offended critics and audiences alike.
-
In 2004, Jamie Foxx won the best actor award for his portrayal of singer and composer Ray Charles in Ray, and was nominated for best supporting actor for Collateral. But the same year Foxx made these two career-making films, he also ended up in a stinker of a romance: Breakin’ All the Rules.
Not every movie has to be tear-jerking Oscar bait, but Breakin’ All the Rules was worse than just bad – it was bad and complicated. The plot, which revolves around an editor who turns his pain at being dumped into a bestselling book, subjects viewers to new twists and characters again and again, then fails to deliver much of a resolution. According to The Washington Post’s Michael O’Sullivan: “No movie this stupid should need a plot synopsis this complicated.”
What do you think?
What were they thinking?
-
Not everybody is a fan of The Blind Side, the 2009 drama about a future NFL lineman who’s encouraged by his adoptive parents to pursue his dreams. Still, Sandra Bullock won the Oscar for best actress for her starring role in the sentimental sports movie. The award opened doors for Bullock, allowing her to escape the world of rom-coms – but not before starring in All About Steve.
Unlike Miss Congeniality, another Bullock film, All About Steve is a Bullock-led comedy few people have fond memories of. It’s the story of a quirky woman who becomes obsessed with a cable news cameraman (Bradley Cooper) and begins chasing him as his news team travels across the country. The movie was panned by critics as tonally challenged, playing up the relationship between a deranged stalker and the subject of her obsession for uncomfortable laughs. Although most of Bullock’s supporters will no doubt defend her Oscar-winning picture, as one critic wrote, All About Steve is “destined to disappoint even the most diehard of Bullock fans.”
-
In 2009, Jeff Bridges played a deadbeat dad in two movies: Crazy Heart and The Open Road. One of those movies won Bridges the Oscar for best actor. The other… took some wrong turns.
The Open Road casts Bridges as a washed-up former baseball pro, as opposed to the washed-up country star he plays in Crazy Heart. But where Crazy Heart embraced the prickliness of confronting the past, The Open Road is a sentimental, by-the-numbers story about a father and son who set aside their differences to repair their relationship. Reviewers noted that Bridges, Justin Timberlake, Kate Mara, Harry Dean Stanton, and Mary Steenburgen put in admirable performances, but the cast failed to fight off the film’s “movie-of-the-week vibe.”
-
Sean Penn’s portrayal of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician to be elected to public office in California, was exactly the role the actor needed to win his second Academy Award for best actor, five years after his first win for Mystic River. That same year, he turned in another performance, as himself, in the Robert De Niro-fronted satire What Just Happened. The movie might not have looked like a stinker on paper to Penn when he first read the screenplay, but the eventual product ended up being an embarrassing footnote to an otherwise impressive year of his career.
In What Just Happened, De Niro plays a movie producer tasked with retooling a film that stars Penn. High-minded parodies about the inside politics of Hollywood are often beloved by critics and others inside the film industry, even if they don’t always make tons of money at the box office. Criticized by reviewers for being “artistically disjointed and lacking in courage,” this satire ended up pleasing nobody.
-
Jennifer Lawrence was already a household name in 2012 thanks to the Hunger Games movies, but Silver Linings Playbook made it clear she was capable of more than just action-adventure flicks. Starring alongside Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro, Lawrence turned heads as a young widow struggling with her mental health. That same year, however, critics were turning up their nose at a horror movie that also starred Lawrence.
House at the End of the Street lives up to its boring name, according to critics, who said the movie delivers zero excitement, thrills, or chills. Though Lawrence gets credit for “elevat[ing] subpar material,” the movie as a whole was slammed by the The New York Times for being “a choppily edited, poorly timed mess.” Despite the bad reviews, the movie ended up making a decent amount of money, grossing $44 million for a film that cost around $10 million to produce.
-
Few can forget Colin Firth’s Oscar-winning turn as King George VI in The King’s Speech, which depicts the newly crowned monarch’s struggle to overcome his speech impediment ahead of a historic speech declaring war on Germany in 1939. But almost everyone has forgotten another film Firth starred in the same year: Main Street, a drama that combined a phenomenal cast with an exceptional screenwriter to create something completely ordinary.
Main Street was written by Horton Foote, the Pulitzer Prize-winning screenwriter of To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies, after the playwright visited Durham, NC, and found it depressingly empty. The movie makes the implicit insult of the city personal by actually setting the story in Durham, where a newcomer played by Firth brings an unorthodox plan to revitalize the city. Also starring Orlando Bloom, Ellen Burstyn, and Amber Tamblyn, the movie was panned by critics. Variety wrote that Main Street suffered from “uneven performances, flat direction, and an overall sense of narrative arbitrariness.”
