Sex with Timaree

The Academy Awards are this weekend. In honor of the occasion (wherein not even a single person of color was nominated in any of the major categories, just fyi) I’d like to re-run this piece from last year. Hopefully the winner of Best Actress in 2011 can avoid the fate of so many of her predecessors and find happiness in both her personal and professional lives.

And in case you were wondering: the relationship statuses of the nominees from this year are:

• Annette Bening: once divorced, currently married to actor Warren Beatty since 1992, they have 4 kids
• Nicole Kidman: once divorced, currently married to country singer Keith Urban, with whom she has two daughters.
• Jennifer Lawrence: 20 years old, unmarried, not currently linked to anyone famous.
• Natalie Portman: engaged to be married to the father of her unborn child, a dancer with whom she worked on Black Swan, the film for which she is nominated
• Michelle Williams: has been involved with a number of industry people, most recently director Spike Jonze; the father of her daughter is her former fiance and deceased Academy Award winner, Heath Ledger.

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I didn’t watch more than an hour of that self-congratulatory masturbationthon that is the Oscars. But what I did see was that in the front row of the Academy Fucking Awards was reality tv motor cycle guy, Jesse James. You might as well have predicted it be Flavor Flav for the likelihood of that seating arrangement. Yet, there he was, seated next to his beautiful wife, Sandra Bullock, as she waited to get handed the biggest award of her career.

Little did we know, at that time, that she probably already knew that he’d been cheating on her for nearly a year with a tattoo-covered model. The model, who might be an awful person, despite what her friends say, sold the sordid details of the affair for $30,000 payday.

The fall out of James’ infidelity is a probable messy third divorce for him and a stomach-churning custody battle for the kids from a previous marriage in addition to whatever professional awfulness befalls their careers.

The other result: further confirmation of the Best Actress Relationship Curse. You see, in the last ten years, nearly all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Actress have split with their boyfriend or husband within a year or so. And when you take out the women who are senior citizens (Helen Mirren, 2007, who doesn’t “believe in marriage,”  and whose husband didn’t want to kiss her when she won; Jessica Lange, 1995; Kathy Bates, 1991; Jessica Tandy, 1990) or lesbians (Jodie Foster, 1992, 1989) , the trend is painfully visible in the decade before.

8 of the last 12 winners have suffered the curse. In nearly every case the winning actress celebrated her victory shortly before experiencing the dissolution of her relationship with a male partner whose career was not doing quite as well as hers. And to add to the intrigue, most of the splits were caused because the guy was cheating with an even less famous other woman.

Take a look:

So perhaps the effect of success is too much. The nature of the job, the long hours away from each other, the constantly being surrounded with hot celebs, the overwhelming media scrutiny of every move, etc, all were too much for something as sweet and pure as love. So, why, then is the same effect not seen in the winners of Best Actor?

The only divorce that occurred anywhere near the big win for these men in the last 10 years was for Sean Penn, whose spouse was also a successful actress, Robin Wright. This article claims things are just as bad for the male winners, but the argument is a real stretch and includes in their count that when Russel Crowe won, he was splitting up Meg Ryan’s marriage to Dennis Quaid.

A study a few years ago found that Golden Globe winners suffer a slightly higher divorce rate than the rest of the country. But their odds are 1.9 to 1 of divorce versus the average 1.3 to 1. But even if you believe the myth that 50% of marriages end in divorce (which isn’t true, btw), the breakup rate among Best Actress winners is too outrageous to be chalked up to coincidence.

So what are we to take from this? Is this just the emasculating effect of successful women on their less successful men? Maybe it’s our prurient interest into celebs’ personal lives is to blame for their destruction. Think about how having your personal business out on Facebook has impacted your relationships, now multiply that by eleventybilliontymillion. Not fun.

But I’d like to point out another pattern that distinguishes the male and female winners of the Oscar’s top honors. The women listed here, without exception, dated men in the entertainment industry. Successful male actors, while they are also prone to dating costars, are more likely to date real women with jobs outside of acting.

Couples (and even friends) do better when they excel in slightly different spheres and aren’t competing directly with each other. Perhaps the only failing of these talented women was that they didn’t look outside the Hollywood incest-fest for partners. While I extend my earnest condolences to Sandra, I extend my advice to everyone else: be good at something separate from your partner and you’ll be better off.

Questions? Comments? Violent reactions? Email sexwithtimaree@gmail.com