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Health & Fitness

Streep Faces an Uphill Climb at the Oscars

Why Meryl Streep will not win the Academy Award for Best Actress at the Oscars this Sunday.

Meryl Streep faces more than just a talented set of actresses competing against her this year at the Academy Awards. She is also competing against Oscar history, where it’s incredibly difficult for two-time winners, like her, to capture a third award. 

There have been only four times in the history of the Academy Awards that an actor or actress has won more than two awards for acting. Jack Nicholson, Ingrid Bergman and Walter Brennan have won three each, while the legendary Katharine Hepburn has won four. Given the legacy of the four, it’s easy to see how difficult it is to win a third Oscar.

For Streep, there has been considerable thought that she may finally claim her third victory for “The Iron Lady” in Sunday’s Oscar ceremony. Despite her legacy as the best actress of her generation and her gargantuan number of previous award nominations, it’s extremely unlikely that she will win.

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Of all the 15 times she has been nominated in the past and not claimed victory, is “The Iron Lady” really the role for her third win? Can it even compare to her other roles? This nomination is nothing more than a token that she has received because her name is Meryl Streep.

The consensus is that “The Iron Lady” is simply a bad movie, with Streep’s performance as an exception. After all, how bad can a movie be if Meryl Streep is playing the lead? She seems to be able to get a nomination for any movie that she appears in.

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But regardless of that, the fact that she has won two Oscars already is what holds her back—and could hurt her again this year. If she had not won Best Supporting Actress for “Kramer vs. Kramer” in 1979 or Best Actress for “Sophie’s Choice” in 1982, then she clearly would have won for one of her other past nominations.

Streep is already in rare company. It’s unusual for an actor or actress to win two awards as it is, and even rarer for one to continuing challenging themselves with strong acting roles after taking home two Oscars.

Because of the difficulty of remaining critically successful after a second Oscar win, many actors simply stop trying and opt to become “paycheck” actors. An excellent example can be found in Denzel Washington. He won two academy awards, for “Glory” in 1989 and “Training Day” in 2001. Now, he’s making generic February release action junk instead of trying to offer up another Academy Award-winning role. Another example is Hilary Swank. She won two Oscars in close proximity to each other in 1999 for “Boys Don’t Cry” and 2004 for “Million Dollar Baby.” Now she is appearing in “New Year’s Eve,” a lifeless, uninspiring excuse for a romantic comedy.

But Streep is not just up against history, she faces a considerable opponent in her way on Sunday. The woman who will be winning the Academy Award is Viola Davis. Her role in “The Help” is deep, touching and is the kind of flat-out excellence in a strong movie that will be remembered for years to come.

Davis hasn’t won before – something Academy voters have been known to factor in. And Academy voters may also be thinking that Streep—someone who can conjure up Academy nominations almost at will—will surely have more chances in the future.

History will treat Streep kindly, and it’s only a matter of time until she wins her third Academy Award, but it will not be this year.

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