Is winning an Oscar a curse or a blessing?

LOS ANGELES - It's awards season in Hollywood, with all red carpets leading to the Oscars. But winning that prestigious award can sometimes lead to nothing more than bad roles and even oblivion.

"It's known as the curse of the Oscar, which is very real. The actor's ultimate dream can turn out to be the ultimate nightmare," said movie pundit Tom O'Neil, awards columnist for the Web site The Envelope (http://theenvelope.latimes.com/).

Winners like F. Murray Abraham, Brenda Fricker, Linda Hunt, Marlee Matlin and Louise Fletcher are hardly household names despite earning the film world's most coveted award.

Other better-known Oscar winners, like Gwyneth Paltrow and Richard Dreyfuss, have complained that winning the award brought them personal and career troubles.

"Winners from Joan Fontaine up to Gwyneth Paltrow and Richard Dreyfuss have all said it was a curse," said O'Neil, noting the Oscar made Paltrow almost too expensive to hire at the age of 26, while Dreyfuss spiraled downward for a while with a high-profile drug habit and a string of flops after his Oscar win for his role in "The Goodbye Girl" in 1977.

Paltrow won for her leading role in "Shakespeare in Love" and has said she was unequipped to cope with the pressure, leading her to make several bad choices.

"I think part of the downside about being so successful and winning the Oscar at the age of 26 is that I sort of became insouciant about the things that I chose. I thought 'Oh, I'll just try this, it'll be fun or I'll do that for the money'. Things like that now I would absolutely never do," Paltrow was quoted as saying by the Internet Move Database.