What is an Oscar or Academy Award really? It’s the highest possible award in the movie world. For most people it’s a crown on their work, once you’ve won and Oscar you’re pretty much at the peak of your career. What if you win the Oscar at a young age or even get nominated at a very young age?
We’ve seen quite a few young actresses be nominated in recent years, if we just look at the last two years we have Abigail Breslin for her supporting role in Little Miss Sunshine, Saoirse Ronan for her supporting role in Atonement and Ellen Page for her starring role in Juno. We will however not really look at them seeing they didn’t actually win and because they were nominated not that long ago. So what it will do to their career in the long run isn’t really known yet.
So lets take a look at a young actress who won an Oscar not that long ago. Anna Paquin won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her part in The Piano in 1994, she was only eleven years old making her the second youngest winner ever behind Tatum O’Neal. So what happened for Anna Paquin after the Piano?
In all reality she isn’t doing half bad, being part of major movie franchises like X-Men. Movies like She’s All That and Finding Forrester didn’t do too shabby either, there however is one thing about her biggest movie successes after The Piano. She won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and that’s the thing she does in most of her movies. She’s rarely the sole female lead in a movie.
Right now she has a couple of smaller movie projects going but her most notable role of the year is the lead role in the vampire themed series True Blood on HBO. Despite it also getting some cheap publicity due to several nude love scenes on the show it also gets good critical reviews. In fact Anna has just been nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series – Drama. Quite a mouthful it shows that the Oscar might be her biggest prize to date she’s hardly doing bad. It’s not like she completely disappeared off the map after winning it.
The thing is just that she can never live up to it. When you talk to someone about Anna Paquin it’s usually “who?”, a lot of people don’t know who she is until you tell them that it’s the girl who won an Oscar when she was eleven years old. That’s now almost fifteen years ago, almost seems like forever when you consider that Abigail Breslin wasn’t even born yet when Anna won her Oscar. So she’ll always be the young Oscar winner even though most actors would kill to have a career like Anna since then.
For the coming Oscars there is only one teenager in contention for an award; as mentioned before on this site Miley Cyrus is a contender for the Oscar for Best Original Song. She wrote the song I Thought I Lost You together with Jeffrey Steele for the Disney animated movie Bolt. She already has the Critics Choice Award and Golden Globe nomination so an Oscar nomination wouldn’t be a very big surprise. By some media outlets she’s even being pinned as the favorite for the award.
So if Miley was to win an Oscar in February, would she be known as a young Oscar winner as well? I don’t think so, you can’t even compare the situations of Anna and Miley. For one it’s for a completely different award, even though it’s an Oscar the ones for acting are held in higher regard by the general public than the ones for music. Not to mention that before Anna won an Oscar no one knew who she was, if you don’t know Miley yet you must have been living under a rock.
Abigail Breslin didn’t win an award two years ago but right now people still see her as an Oscar nominee. Thing just is that none of the roles she played so far were able to live up to that Oscar nomination. Of course Abigail is only twelve years old so she still has plenty of time to form her career. In ten years people might still remember that she was nominated but if she had won it would have been dragged along much further.
So is an Oscar at a young age something bad? Not really, it might be a stigma somewhat at times but it doesn’t mean people don’t have a career afterwards. An Oscar might give someone a buzz for a while but in the end it all depends on the career choices they make. Even if they’re at a lower level than Oscar nominated movies that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Like Miley Cyrus said about her Golden Globe nomination that she doesn’t do things because she wants an award, she does it because she loves it; awards are just little extras that keep her going.
Tags: Abigail Breslin, Anna Paquin, Ellen Page, Miley Cyrus, Saoirse Ronan
