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What If Nicole Kidman Won the Best Actress Oscar in 2002?


https://www.vulture.com/2020/01/what-if-nicole-kidman-won-the-best-actress-oscar-in-2002.html

The 2002 race for Best Actress started out as Sissy Spacek’s to lose. The 1980 Best Actress winner for Coal Miner’s Daughter had been earning acclaim since January of 2001 for the Sundance Film Festival hit In the Bedroom. Backed by a Miramax Oscar campaign that had landed the film seven nominations, including Best Picture, Spacek’s case looked strong. Doubly so after a win at the Golden Globes.

But building momentum as a late-breaking contender was Halle Berry for a little seen movie that sneaked into theaters at the very end of the year, Monster’s Ball. Playing a grieving single mother, Berry’s performance was full of big moments and high-intensity scenes, and it seemed like voters were noticing; she upset Spacek at the SAG Awards. She was also gathering heat for the potential history-making aspect of her win: She’d be the first black Best Actress victor ever (with Denzel Washington poised to win Best Actor, and the only previous black Best Actor winner, Sidney Poitier, set to receive an honorary Oscar, too).

Of course, with two neck-and-neck contenders splitting the traditionally stodgy voting body, conditions are always ripe for an insurgent third party. Enter Nicole Kidman, whose performance in the Best Picture–nominated Moulin Rouge was winning raves even from skeptics. Having emerged from her high-profile divorce from Tom Cruise, she was offering up some of the best acting in her career. In fact, she was campaigning for two lead roles this year: Moulin Rouge and the terrifically creepy The Others. For the bulk of her relationship with Cruise, Kidman was seen very much as a girlfriend or wife first and an actress second. Her critical breakthrough came with 1995’s To Die For (she won a Golden Globe, but received no Oscar nomination), and there was more than gossip behind the idea that Eyes Wide Shut could nab her that first Oscar nod.

But Stanley Kubrick’s death — and a media frenzy around Cruise and Kidman’s nudity and sex scenes — overshadowed any ensuing Academy talk. Come 2002, after avoiding splitting her own votes in the nomination phase, Kidman seemingly settled into a comfortable third-place position in the Best Actress race with Moulin Rouge. But she was certainly popular enough to capitalize on a split-vote scenario between Spacek and Berry. What if the breeze blew just slightly different in Hollywood that season?

Our last foray into fantasy-casting alternative timelines for the Academy Awards got us thinking. Here’s what you might expect from the mirror universe where Kidman won the Oscar in 2002: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/ewe622/what_if_nicole_kidman_won_the_best_actress_oscar/

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WELL..SHE SUCKS,SO...

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