That's right, the leading actress of 2014 who seems near certain to finally win her trophy has a very BAIT-y project in Freeheld, about a woman dying of cancer who is trying to get her girlfriend access to her pension benefits. In a year where the Supreme Court may well overturn gay marriage bans nationwide, Freeheld feels like a film for the zeitgeist, and dying from cancer certainly helps on the campaign trail (just ask Laura Dern...or really, there's an example of this every year). With Moore positioned to return to Best Actress, perhaps even taking another trophy (we're getting ahead of ourselves, but it's a fun game), I thought it would be worth investigating how much precedence there is for such a feat, and whose company she would join.
As you might guess, it's exceedingly rare to follow-up an Oscar win with a nomination the following year. In reality, something like 65% of all acting Oscar nominees are just going to get the one nomination. We frequently hear about the Meryl Streeps or Jack Nicholsons who collect Oscar nominations like Pokemon, but the reality is that most people will just get that one day in the sun, and this is true from the oddball nominations all the way to the future superstars (so be warned Felicity Jones and Benedict Cumberbatch, and make sure to enjoy the evening). So adding in that element of most people never get nominated again, it's incredibly difficult to get a nomination immediately after winning, and only 29 people have actually done it.
Adding in more issues for Moore would be that only ten of those 29 have done it in the past forty years. The majority of the winners who went on to be nominated happened back in the era of the studio system, where actors like Bing Crosby, Greer Garson, Ingrid Bergman, and Gary Cooper were such enormous stars that it was kind of impossible not to see them on a big screen every year, and the studios were more apt to put them in the "big pictures" every single year, giving them greater access to multiple nominations. Today, unless you're Meryl Streep or Daniel Day-Lewis, you don't have that guarantee that Oscar will notice your film immediately, and with the intense amount of hype that surrounds the Oscars (and the weird backlash and anathema that happens after a win), it usually takes a few years for your star to recover (hence why many actors will take a prolonged break after their win like Kate Winslet).
However, it's not impossible, and Moore does have a couple of things going for her in terms of gaining a nomination for Freeheld (again, assuming that the likes of Rosamund Pike and Marion Cotillard don't surprise and take her expected trophy). For starters, she's attempting to do this in a lead category, which nearly all of the actors who won back-to-back nominations achieved the feat for. Only four actors won a back-to-back win/nomination combo in supporting categories (Walter Brennan, Jason Robards, Estelle Parsons, and Lee Grant), and only one actor in history has pulled it off from a lead-to-supporting (that'd be Jennifer Lawrence, she of the many Oscar trivias). All of the rest were in lead categories. It also helps that she's female. For whatever reason, it's harder for men to pull off this feat than women (17 of the 29 actors to do it are women).
And objectively, her role will probably help. The actors that won and then were nominated again pulled off the second citation for, by-and-large, the bait-ier role. Ranging from playing real-life people (Russell Crowe, Greer Garson, Katharine Hepburn, Jason Robards) to playing people suffering from a disease/disability (Russell Crowe, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Lee Grant) to people starring in the Best Picture winner (Clark Gable, Julie Andrews, Tom Hanks, and again, Russell Crowe), most of these actors weren't what you'd call "fifth place" nominations-they were clearly fighting against an already uphill battle to pull this off, so they didn't just skate in on their nomination. In fact, many of them (Crowe, Andrews, Streep, Lawrence, Marlon Brando, Jeff Bridges) almost certainly would have won the trophy had they not just won it.
And that brings me to my last point-can Moore pull off two-in-a-row? Looking at the numbers, it seems pretty doubtful. Only four actors in the history of the Oscars have ever won back-to-back trophies (Spencer Tracy, Luise Rainer, Jason Robards, and Tom Hanks), making it exceedingly difficult for Moore. Two of these wins happened before the awards were televised, and the latter two had extreme circumstances behind them: Jason Robards won because his competitors were an actor in a smaller role in the same film, a professional dancer who was making his film debut in a bit of stunt casting, an unknown actor doing unspeakable things with a horse, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, while Hanks was headlining an epic blockbuster that was winning Best Picture and where he played the title character. You just can't lose in those situations. Moore seems less likely to be that lucky, as Freeheld would not only have to be undeniable for a win, but everyone else would have to be ignored as well, which is a pretty tough challenge.
Still, though, there's definitely precedence for her to win a nomination after taking home the trophy for Still Alice on the 22nd, so don't count her out for a sixth nomination just yet.
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