10 Actors Whose Careers TANKED After Winning Oscars

On paper, winning an Academy Award should be the pinnacle of any actor's career. 

As the highest industry honour given out for acting, it's intended to be a summation of everything an actor has done up to that point, and proof that basically all their peers approve of their work.

And perhaps more importantly, an Oscar should be a major boost for an actor's livelihood, given that it boosts the marketing buzz of any future project they appear in, given that "Academy Award winner" can be included in marketing materials featuring their name.

And yet, there are a curious number of instances where Oscar-winning actors' careers have hit the skids shortly thereafter, enough that some have dubbed the phenomenon the so-called "Oscar curse."

With that in mind, these 10 performers all won Oscars for widely acclaimed performances, only for their post-award careers to be massively underwhelming, if not outright disastrous.

Some found themselves encircled by sheer mediocrity for years, while others got caught in the spiral of Razzie nominations and terrible straight-to-video movies, almost enough to let you forget they ever won an Oscar.

The lesson here? Just because an actor wins an Oscar, it doesn't necessarily chart a safe path forward for the rest of their career...

Let's kick things off with perhaps the single most infamous example of a feted actor whose career hit the toilet bowl soon thereafter. 

After making memorable appearances in both Boyz in the Hood and A Few Good Men, Cuba Gooding, Jr. completed his ascent to Hollywood superstardom when he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his unforgettable performance as Rod Tidwell in 1996's Jerry Maguire.

Thanks to Gooding, "Show me the money!" instantly became a global catchphrase, and though he appeared in As Good as It Gets the next year, afterwards quality offers swiftly stopped coming in.

Gooding went an entire decade without appearing in a critically acclaimed film, with panned duds like A Murder of Crows, Chill Factor, Pearl Harbor, Snow Dogs, and Shadowboxer clogging up his filmography.

Worthy projects have been shockingly few and far between ever since the Oscar win, with Gooding only receiving serious awards attention for his performance as O.J. Simpson in the TV series American Crime Story.

The back-end of Gooding's output has been defined largely by straight-to-video action films you've likely never heard of, and the fact that 30 women have accused him of unwanted sexual touching in recent years has likely done nothing to aid his prospects.