If anyone sums up the bizarre nature of the post-Oscar curse, it's Roberto Benigni, who - for all intents and purposes - seems to have disappeared from screens entirely, presumably as an apology for all the awfulness his delivered in the wake of Academy Awards glory. Which is another way of saying that Roberto Benigni's decline from greatness is one of the most painful examples of this very odd phenomenon. Benigni won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his turn in Best Foreign Film-winning flick Life Is Beautiful, of course, in which he played a loving father who decides to lie to his son about the holocaust in order to shelter him from the horrors. It was a good performance, though there are many who would argue against Benigni's win (but that's a discussion for another time). In the wake of said win, then, the world expected great things. Instead, the actor embarked on a number of super ill-judged and entirely crazed projects, the first of which were titled Asterix & Obelix Take On Caesar and Pinocchio respectively, both of which appear to have been rendered from the dreams of a madman. More flops followed, and - for the most part - Benigni has been forgotten, relegated to life as an entry on lists of this nature. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
