Daily Times

The most coveted awards on this planet, Oscars come and go but one thing that refuses to die down is a strange curse attached to the Academy Awards – the Oscar love curse, yes you read that right!

It is a superstition which is talked about every year. According to the Oscar love curse, the woman who wins the Academy Award for Best Actress has her boyfriend or husband cheat on her or divorce her soon after.

According to the legend, the curse also applies to the woman who wins the Best Supporting Actress. So much has been spoken and written about the curse that two professors of University of Michigan’s Ross Business School – Michael Jensen and Heeyon Kim undertook a research paper on the same. Called ‘The Real Oscar Curse: The Negative Consequences of Positive Status Shifts. Organisation Science’, the paper found that “Oscar nominations/wins have positive professional consequences for male and female actors but more enduring negative personal consequences for female actors, thus emphasising an important conundrum for female actors: Oscar nominations/wins can help a career but can also ruin a marriage.”

Oscar winning actresses might be ruling the roost, when compared to their Hollywood colleagues, but odds suggest that most of these beauties have to regret their Oscar wins because of the ill-fated curse.

According to an earlier report published in The Herald Sun, the female winners of the coveted trophy are 63 percent likelier to have a shorter marriage than those who do not win.

As per the report, out of the 266 married women who have been nominated for the Oscar since 1936, 159 of them got divorced.

While Emma Stone can rejoice at the fact that she’s still unmarried, here’s a look at some popular Academy Award winners who sadly got divorced after their big victories.

Angelina Jolie won the Best Supporting Actress award for ‘Girl, Interrupted’ in 2000 and not only did she split up with her then husband Billy Bob Thornton, but she also filed for divorce with her long-time partner Brad Pitt.

Hilary Swank, who won the coveted trophy twice, once in 2000 for ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ and then in 2005 ‘Million Dollar Baby’, broke up with husband Chad Lowe before her second victory.

Reese Witherspoon too got divorced from Jake Gyllenhaal after winning an award for Walk the Line in 2005. ‘The Reader’ actress Kate Winslet got divorced after winning her Oscar in 2008.

Sandra Bullock split from her husband Jesse James in 2010, a year after winning her Oscar for ‘The Blind Side’.