It’s another bright and balmy, yet listless, weekend afternoon. You’re aimlessly scrolling through a streaming platform and click on a movie. The poster features a name that is both familiar and strange to you: Nicolas Cage. You have some memory of him—the chemical weapons expert in The Rock, the man behind the classic “face-swap” in Face/Off. You even vaguely recall that he once won the Oscar, the statuette coveted by actors worldwide, for his heartbreaking, searing performance in Leaving Las Vegas.
However, what is happening on the screen right now plunges you into deep confusion. Cage’s facial muscles are contorting in a way that defies the laws of physics, and his roars are pushing your speakers to their limits. The entire logic of the story, like a runaway horse, is galloping into a boundless field of the absurd. A giant question mark rises in your mind, mixed with a sense of pity and disbelief: “Is the Oscar curse… actually real?”
Driven by this curiosity, you pause the movie and fall down an internet rabbit hole. A quick search reveals a fierce debate with no clear winner. You find cautionary tales everywhere, from Halle Berry’s infamous post-Oscar flop Catwoman to the so-called “Love Curse” that seemed to follow actresses like Sandra Bullock to a swift, public heartbreak. Yet for every supposed victim, skeptics scoff, pointing to an entire universe of counter-examples. They argue the curse seems utterly powerless against the enduring A-list royalty of Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise, the hard-won triumph of Leonardo DiCaprio, or the god-tier status of Meryl Streep. The curse, it seems, is a ghost in the Hollywood machine—passionately believed by some, rationally debunked by others. The question remains: can we move beyond anecdotes and find something solid in the data?
Luckily, you managed to get your hands on a massive dataset merging TMDB and IMDb with nearly a million movies, along with a precise list of all Oscar winners.
To be continued…