Oscar's Dark Side | Hollywood.com

By Thomas Leupp , Hollywood.com Staff | Friday, March 05, 2010

For most actors, winning an Academy Award represents far more than a pat on the back for a job well done. That little gold man can be a powerful ally at the Hollywood negotiating table, bringing greater clout, expanded access, increased opportunities, and, of course, a substantial salary boost to its lucky beholder. But there’s a dark, faustian side to the power Oscar wields, and if not used judiciously, it can quickly derail a promising career.

The actors who walk away with statuettes this year's Academy Awards would be wise to avoid these five potential post-Oscar pitfalls:

The Passion Project

It takes a village to make a film as bad as The Wolfman, but the greatest share of the blame for Benicio Del Toro's ill-conceived monster movie belongs to Oscar. In a recent interview, Del Toro said his 2001 Best Supporting Actor win (for Traffic) allowed him to realize his lifelong dream of making a crappy werewolf flick: “There’s something about the Oscar that gives you stripes. You feel you can dare to walk into a studio like Universal and say, ‘Hey guys, how about an idea of me playing a wolf man?’” Indeed, many actors harbor similarly misguided passion-project ambitions, which Oscar is all too happy to help them fulfill.

Rocky III Syndrome

So many times, Oscar-winning actors trade their passion for glory and fall back on their laurels, cherry-picking easy roles and then phoning them in. The greatest gift the Academy ever gave to Al Pacino was to snub him for his Oscar-worthy work in Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, and the first two Godfather flicks, for they arguably forestalled his tragic descent into blustery caricature — a process his charity Oscar, for 1992's Scent of a Woman, undoubtedly accelerated.*

Oscar Addiction

Once they get a taste of Oscar, some actors will do anything to get back on that podium, tossing out fetid chunks of overwrought awards bait, from pretentious period pieces to ponderous art-house pap to the now now-infamous disability drama, in the hopes of reeling in another coveted nomination. Jamie Foxx (The Soloist) and Hilary Swank (Amelia) are two talented performers who have fallen into this trap in recent years.

The Cash Grab

Some actors take the opposite road, courting high-paying roles in empty-headed popcorn movies and using Oscar as their personal ATM. No one in Hollywood better exemplifies this rueful phenomenon than Nicolas Cage, who followed up his 1996 Best Actor win (for Leaving Las Vegas) with a pair of Jerry Bruckheimer flicks, The Rock and Con Air — the former of which was directed by that celebrated auteur, Michael Bay. Ironically enough, those turned out to be two of the better films of Cage’s post-Oscar career.

Fatal Overreach

An Oscar can be especially perilous for skilled character actors accustomed to ceding the spotlight to less talented leads, causing them to take on ill-advised starring roles in projects for which they aren’t necessarily well-suited. The Rotten Tomatoes chart for Kevin Spacey’s career after his American Beauty Oscar, littered with one disastrous flop after another, reads like a Baghdad coroner's report. When all is said and done, Spacey may very well turn out to be Oscar’s greatest casualty.

Got any favorite examples of Oscar's dark side? Let us know in the comments section below.

*Bet you thought I was going to talk about Stallone, didn’t you? Nah, Sly was never really the Oscar type: