What does winning an Oscar even mean anyway?

Ah, the Oscars. Sunday night’s 96th Academy Awards are the night of a thousand stars and a thousand dreams (hello, Moonlight!) — or heartbreaks, if you’re among the losers (sorry, La La Land). The victorious moment can send a career careening to new heights (hello, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck!) or nudge it in exactly the same direction it was previously headed. (sorry to Mo’Nique.)

“Winning an Oscar changed my life, but I can’t say it changed it for the better,” Melissa Leo, who won 2011 Best Supporting Actress for The Fighter, said in a 2022 interview. “Post-Academy Award, I was like, ‘Oh, this is so great! So the work is just going to come in now, all these leading roles!’ I began to have expectations, and I had to get over that.”

Seldom is a career trajectory a straight line; for every Daniel Day-Lewis whose career remains ascendant after their first win, there’s a Leo, whose unforgettable performance didn’t necessarily translate to a career payoff. At times, the overexposure of an Oscar campaign can backfire; actresses like Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei have had to suffer through years or even decades of backlash for their Oscar wins. The backlash against Diablo Cody for ... writing an Oscar-winning script while being a woman ... was so intense that it not only wrecked her career for over a decade, but shut women out of winning the screenwriting category for a full 13 years.

Many of these complicated outcomes boil down to three things that always seem to go hand in hand with the Oscars: sexism, racism, and the toxic combination thereof, misogynoir. Sometimes, though, the Oscars and the subsequent choices of the people who win them are just weird. The ins and outs of Oscar nominations and wins — who gets them, who benefits from getting them, and what happens after you bring home that funny gold statuette — are so complicated that we decided to call in reinforcements to get to the bottom of what it all means. Here, three experts weigh in on what makes the acting Oscars matter, and what the criteria are for a true Oscars success story.

The interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Katey Rich, Vanity Fair editor and creator of the podcast Little Gold Men

Do you think an Oscar win has any type of consistency and impact for an actor? I’m not sure that it does.

I think it really depends on who you are and at what point in your career you are. La La Land [for which Emma Stone won Best Actress in 2017] was made because Emma Stone was already a star. She had been in big movies. She was something you could pin a movie like that on. But then she wins the Oscar and immediately goes and gets cast in The Favourite, which leads to this collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos [who directed Stone to an Oscar-nominated performance in this season’s Poor Things]. It kind of gives her this sheen of prestige that she wouldn’t have had having graduated up from Superbad and Crazy, Stupid Love. It kind of helped her level up in this way and be able to exercise her power. Certainly the same for Jennifer Lawrence. She won really early on in her career.

But those are also people who already had the attention of the industry, who were already on their way to being stars. They’re young, beautiful women. But then you have artists like Mo’Nique — she wins Best Supporting Actress [for Precious], but she had specific ideas of what she wanted her career to be and really wasn’t trying to climb up a ladder as a result of it. I don’t think winning the Oscar had a ton of impact on her career at all, partly because of her choice, and partly because she did not fit the mold.

I think there’s a huge race component to that, but even Melissa Leo had been a character actress for a long time, wins an Oscar for The Fighter, continues being a character actress.

I feel like the supporting category is often reserved for one-hit wonders — which is not to disparage those actors but just to describe how we think about the parts that they play. You can give a supporting actor the kind of quirks that you don’t necessarily get from a lead role. That doesn’t necessarily lend itself to career longevity.

The one-hit-wonder aspect comes in those categories more for nominees than for wins. Barkhad Abdi who gets nominated for Captain Phillips — everyone’s like, oh, he’s this Somali refugee, he’s breaking out. And then because he’s not someone who Hollywood was going to be able to find a lot of spots for, they continue to not find a lot of spots for him after that.

But the winners — I don’t know if it’s a chicken or an egg thing, but the winners can often be more in the “beloved character actor who now gets to be a slightly more beloved character actor” category. Like J.K. Simmons had been “that guy” and then Whiplash [for which Simmons won the Oscar in 2015] breaks him out, and now he’s “that guy” who you recognize but is playing a lot of similar parts. But I bet if you ask J.K. Simmons and his agents, he’s getting paid better. He’s getting better offers. There’s a subtler difference between what you’re seeing as a moviegoer and the differences in their fortunes.

Alece Oxendine, director of industry and festival outreach, Columbia University Film Program

What do you think the Oscar means, if anything, and has that meaning changed over time? Has it never really meant anything at all?

I think that it’s always meant something for different types of people. It’s always been something that was the culmination of your career, but I think the biggest [change] has been because of the 2015 #OscarsSoWhite campaign with April Reign, who really pushed for this new way of thinking about what it means to achieve this if you are from a marginalized community. What it has meant all these years is excluding extremely talented people because of who they are, who they love, who they represent, what color they are, or what country they’re from. So I think this is a bigger question of what are the Oscars than just like, oh, this is a pretty gold statue.

It seems like the awards night itself is part of the performance. That means that the campaign trail is also part of the performance, right? The marketing campaign, the promos, the interviews, all of it.

Oh yes, it’s a machine. And there are specific companies dedicated to this machine, the companies that help service the campaigns. You can’t buy an academy vote. But in a creative way of getting people excited and talking about these films, watching these films, whether it’s via screenings or having the actors there. That always makes a difference in how the voters feel about the film.

The mechanism by which you win the Oscar is almost like a collective group effort.

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. That’s why people say I couldn’t have done this without my team. And the team is massive. It’s massive, and it goes so much deeper than you can ever imagine. People really supporting everybody. That’s why people always say — like an actor, especially — doing the campaign is a business in and of itself.

I think that’s really interesting, especially when you consider that sometimes this doesn’t actually even yield that much for the actor in the long run.

Well, it does and it doesn’t. I think the three buckets I see are the Stalwarts. They’re the Meryl Streeps, the Anthony Hopkins, Daniel Day-Lewis, Helen Mirren, Cate Blanchett, Viola Davis. These are super A++ stars. They won multiple awards. The benefit they get after winning an Oscar is like, I am confirmed that I’m the best, I can command any role at any price. I’ll always be assumed to be top-billed. This is Oscar with a capital O.

And then the next category I think of is your Rising Stars. These are the breakouts. These are the ones, the first time they ever do a major motion picture, they’re winning. Lupita Nyong’o, Jennifer Hudson, Emma Stone, Jared Leto. I would even include Mahershala Ali in this as well. So they worked hard at what they wanted to do. This is who we’re rooting for. Lily Gladstone, Colman Domingo, America Ferrera, Da’Vine Joy Randolph — that is my personal favorite to win forever.

But here’s the problem that they have. They’re going to struggle to command the respect and the money afterward. They’re the ones who take the biggest risk on their future projects, but sometimes it takes time for them to get back to that level. They’re the ones who are most affected by the Oscar curse.

And then you have your Comeback Homies, and those are like your J.K. Simmons, your Chris Plummer, even Morgan Freeman. These are the ones who have been formerly snubbed, who’ve had decade-long careers, and they’re finally getting their due, literally finally getting the recognition they deserve. We cheer them on the hardest because they represent us. There’s a sense of the audience that they represent that if they can do it, I can do it too.

If I’m on a team and I want the best for my celebrity, how do I push them into the next tier bucket?

It’s hypnotism. It’s putting a rune on somebody, a book of spells, that kind of thing.

Saying, I believe in you. I believe in your work and I believe you make the right decisions for your next project. Because ultimately it does come down to their decision and encouraging them.

Or, well, what’s the old saying? Make a deal with the devil.

Michael Schulman, New Yorker staff writer and author of Oscar Wars

I thought the actor categories would be the easiest Oscars to quantify. But as I’ve been looking for consistency in terms of what happens to the winners and their careers after that, they’re not very easy to quantify at all.

The inconsistency is kind of the theme. Some people have complete upswings after their big Oscar moment, and some people fall prey to the Oscar curse. Every once in a while it doesn’t add up in the way that you think it would. Austin Butler has been doing great since he was nominated last year for Elvis, but that was also a star-making role, so I’m not sure you can separate the two. It’s hard to parse. I don’t think anyone would say that Charles Melton being in the mix this year was bad for him, even though he didn’t get nominated. Obviously, his star’s rising and the Oscar conversation helped.

There are so many counterexamples as well. Two that come to mind immediately to me are Anne Hathaway in 2013, when she won for Les Miserables and faced the Anne Hathaway backlash period. And in my book, I also wrote about Halle Berry in 2002. She had this historic win for Monsters Ball, and the next movie she did was Catwoman and she won a Razzie award, and there was a big backlash to her as well. Maybe the theme is that this happens to women.

In a way, winning the Oscar isn’t as important as getting nominated or even being discussed. The meta-narratives around campaign season can sort of crystallize an actor’s public image in a way that is or isn’t helpful to them. Also, there’s a big difference between an Oscar nomination or win putting someone on the map and a veteran actor getting the career award, the sort of —

The “I’m here to collect my Oscar” award.

The Brendan Fraser Comeback Award. Yeah. And that’s also different between men and women because historically, Best Actress winners tend to be younger, and they tend to be ingenues, whereas Best Actor winners are always a little bit older. It’s very rare that you get a young, up-and-coming hot new actor in the acting categories, but that always happens for actresses. I don’t really know why. Maybe it’s just the obvious — that there’s this perception that women peak earlier in their careers than men, which is obviously terrible. And then they come back when they’re 60 or 70, Annette Benning, and have another go at it.

So does that mean that the “Oscar curse” is another way of framing misogyny against women in the industry?

I think so. There are male Oscar curses for sure. Bradley Cooper might be walking into an Oscar curse right now — he’s sort of in the Anne Hathaway role this year where we’re all going to need a break from him, fairly or not. But there’s certainly a strain of misogyny in how an actress can win an Oscar and then everyone decides they hate them the next day.

Some of these people were just going to be on a different trajectory anyway because that’s not what they want. I don’t think we’re going to see Sandra Hüller in the next Marvel movie. She’s going to go back to Germany and be in a play. That’s what she was going to do. But we all know who Sandra Hüller is now, and she probably will have a lot more opportunities to do whatever she wants, and I think she’s going to make interesting, weird choices, and that’ll be great. But I don’t think that she’s necessarily after a big Hollywood career.

In the best-case scenario, an Oscar gives you more clout to make the choices that you want in a very constrained industry. But I don’t think that is what happens to everyone.