Jennifer Aniston & David Oyelowo: Are They Done with Oscar?

As part of my reaction to the Oscars, I've been thinking in particular the strangeness of Jennifer Aniston and David Oyelowo, and their surprise snubs at the Oscars, and I thought it would be interesting to put some numbers behind their particular misses, principally because of their Golden Globe nominations in the lead drama categories.

Now everyone knows that, particularly with Best Actress, a nomination in the Drama category doesn't necessarily translate into a nomination with Oscar.  Usually at least one person misses in translation, either for a lead in a Musical/Comedy or for a film that wasn't quite the HFPA's fancy.  However, from what I am gathering, most of the time the one that misses happens to be someone that either is an Oscar nominee or is about to be one.  With Best Actress, of the women that didn't get nominated for the Oscar in the past ten years, 76% of them were Oscar nominees or, in one case (Maggie Gyllenhaal) were about to become Oscar nominees; with men, it's 71%.  So adding in the preponderance for Globe nominees to make it to the Oscars, and that almost all Globe nominees either are or are eventually nominated for the Oscar, and you have to ask yourself-just how rare are Jennifer Aniston and David Oyelowo, and is this the end-of-the-road for their Oscar dreams?

It's actually extraordinarily rare to win a Golden Globe nomination for drama and not go on to win an Oscar nomination for the same role if it's your first chance, in fact.  In the 72 year history of the awards, only 18 men and 31 women have been nominated for a lead Golden Globe for Best Drama and not gotten an Oscar nomination at some point in their careers (including, now, Aniston and Oyelowo).  The bulk of these nominees, it should also be noted happened before 1984-in the past thirty years only 20 of these people have been part of this statistic.  This is partially because the modernized campaigns for Oscars make the actual field of potential nominees smaller.  We know headed into Oscar nomination morning, for example, that only 7-8 nominees have a legitimate shot at being selected, and that list almost always includes a Globe nominee for Best Drama.  Aniston and Oyelowo become even rarer when you subtract candidates such as Tobey Maguire in Brothers, Idris Elba in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, and Maria Bello in A History of Violence, all three of whom were not considered serious candidates with AMPAS or were competing at the Oscars in a supporting category.

These 49 men and women run-the-gamut in terms of star power, though it's worth noting that most of them were giving what would be considered their defining cinematic performance.  Only a couple (such as Rita Hayworth and Jim Carrey) were superstars at the time or at any time in their career, making the bulk of those that missed more in-line with where Oyelowo is in his career rather than Aniston.  Many of them, in fact, largely gave up on their careers in film and went on to much more successful careers in television, including Rachel Chagall, Jessica Walter, and Treat Williams.  Others strayed away from dramatic acting as a vocation, moving over to comedy where they enjoyed success but where it is considerably harder to gain an Oscar nomination (Mia Farrow springs to mind).

But the question here is whether or not Aniston or Oyelowo have what it takes to get off this list and become an Oscar nominee, and while they had an incredibly bad string of luck headed to this point (being that it is unusually rare for them to have missed, statistically), they will need a solid amount of good luck to make the jump from just-miss back into Oscar's good graces.  That's because only 15 people have landed the Globe nomination, missed with Oscar, and then went on to gain an Oscar nomination for a later performance.  That's only 23%, which is not great for either of these actors.  It's worth noting that if Aniston or Oyelowo want to become Oscar nominees, they need to start cranking out the prestige fast.  60% of those nominees that made the jump from the Globes to the Oscars did it within five years, and all but three did it within ten.  The three standouts had second waves in their careers: Dean Stockwell making the leap to comedy 28 years later in Married to the Mob, Anthony Hopkins getting his scene-stealing work in The Silence of the Lambs thirteen years after Magic, and Kathleen Quinlan gaining a coattail nomination in Apollo 13 eighteen years after her schizophrenic turn as a young woman in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.  For Aniston in particular it may also pay off to go supporting-66% of the female Globe nominees got their first Oscar nomination in supporting.

A few more things before we finish this (very technical) article.  First, it should be noted that if Aniston or Oyelowo get nominated, that doesn't mean one-and-done.  Particularly for Oyelowo, many of the male nominees have gone on to win multiple nominations in their careers, including Anthony Hopkins (4 nods), Nick Nolte (3 nods), and Brad Pitt (5 nods and counting).  This also doesn't mean that they should give up on their dreams of actually holding an Oscar of their own-just under a third of the fifteen have won Oscars, and several of them (like Maggie Gyllenhaal and Michael Fassbender) are relatively young in their careers.

And lastly, Aniston and Oyelowo aren't the only ones trying their darndest to get off of the list of 49 actors who have a Globe nomination but not Oscar.  As we mentioned above, Jim Carrey, Tobey Maguire, Idris Elba, and Maria Bello are still working constantly and could still score.  Other names such as Evan Rachel Wood, Zhang Ziyi, Emily Blunt, James McAvoy, Scarlett Johansson, and Richard Gere all appear in movies quite frequently (it's worth noting that Gere and Johansson are the only two actors in history to twice be nominated for Globes in Drama and still not be Oscar nominees).  Blunt and Johansson, in particular, have made something of a career of being nominated for the Globes and not being cited with Oscar (both have four Globe nominations for film without an Oscar citation), and are arguably the two that seem most likely to jump off the list.

But in the meantime all we have to do is speculate-do you think Jennifer Aniston, David Oyelowo, or any of these contenders will make the jump from Golden Globe nominee to Oscar nominee?  If so, who, and which will go first?  Share your thoughts in the comments below!