Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Oscar love curse

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This article describes a supposed superstition in which a woman who wins the Academy Award for Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress will have her boyfriend, fiancé, or husband cheat on her or divorce her soon after. I tend to be skeptical of articles about "curses", but this one does not appear to be worthy of listing in Wikipedia. The bulk of the article consists of unsourced lists of 40 Best Actress winners and 23 Best Supporting Actress winners who broke up with their husbands, partners, or boyfriends, followed by unsourced lists of 18 Best Actress winners and 26 Best Supporting Actress winners who "broke" the curse by remaining with their then-husbands until one member of the couple died or until the present day.

The first question this article provokes is "Compared to what?" About half of all marriages in the U.S. end in divorce, and some of the relationships that are listed as breaking up were not even marriages. For that matter, among the divorces listed as occurrences of the curse are Elizabeth Taylor's first divorce from Richard Burton (7 years after she won the Oscar) and Jane Fonda's divorce from Tom Hayden (11 years after she won the Oscar), so apparently the curse can supposedly take effect years later.

The article has 5 sources listed. Two of them are broken links. One is an [https://nypost.com/2010/03/18/oscar-love-curse/ article] from the New York Post listing actresses who were victims of the supposed curse during the previous decade. [http://voices.washingtonpost.com/celebritology/2010/03/the_oscar_love_curse_is_sandra.html Another article cited] expresses skepticism about the curse, saying, "not every example being cited as evidence of the curse is valid. Hilary Swank stayed with Chad Lowe after her first Oscar win ("Boys Don't Cry," 1999); it was only after her second ("Million Dollar Baby," 2004) that the marriage dissolved .... And pointing to Charlize Theron's break-up with longtime beau Stuart Townsend -- a relationship that didn't end until more than five years after she snagged her Academy Award for "Monster" -- is ludicrous." Yes, this Wikipedia article does cite Swank and Theron as victims of the Oscar love curse.

And one source is a scholarly article [https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/orsc.2014.0951] which empirically studied the curse by comparing the divorce histories of male and female Oscar winners, non-winning Oscar nominees, and actors who had lead roles in major box-office or Oscar-nominated films but were never nominated for an Oscar themselves. This article quotes the study as saying, "Oscar nominations/wins have positive professional consequences for male and female actors but more enduring negative personal consequences for male actors, thus emphasizing an important conundrum for male actors: Oscar nominations/wins can help a career but can also ruin a marriage." That's an actual quote but it obscures the finding most relevant to this Wikipedia article: "We found that Oscar nominations/wins increase the divorce rate of male actors but, if anything, decrease the divorce rate of female actors." In other words, the best source for this article says that the thing the article describes isn't real. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 04:17, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

:Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Film-related deletion discussions. Metropolitan90 (talk) 04:22, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

• Delete WP:PROFRINGE nonsense with serious BLP issues. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 05:43, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

:Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 05:46, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

:Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Awards-related deletion discussions. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 05:46, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

• Delete as WP:OR. If it wasn't such an obvious crock of shite, I'd have blanked the entire 'occurrences' and 'exceptions' as soon as I saw it, as lacking citations, and accordingly a violation of WP:BLP policy: "contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced should be removed immediately". Claiming that this 'curse' exists and affects named living individuals is contentious. Stupid, but also contentious, since it is utterly wrong-headed. AndyTheGrump (talk) 06:00, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
• I am not as forgiving as you for obvious crocks of shite, I guess. I don't know whether an article on this pop-culture gossipy claim should have a WP article or not, but we definitely don't need to turn it into an unsourced clearinghouse for Oscar winners' love lives. jps (talk) 12:06, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
• I see that particular problem has been sorted out (for now at least - I've no doubt someone will start adding WP:OR 'examples' once again, given the opportunity), but in doing so, we are now left with two short paragraphs. One of which suggests that if Wikipedia should have an article on Oscar curses, we've picked the wrong one. In any case, creating an article about 'superstitions' which seem to exist more in tabloids looking for excuses to print gossip than in the minds of the general public is a dubious exercise anyway. AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:29, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

• Delete. Just awful. And the media sources are utter crap -- The New York Post? A Buzzfeed listicle? -- with even the ostensibly reliable ones looking bad: I mean, the 'Washington Post'' source is a column called "Celebritology 2.0 ". --Calton | Talk 09:15, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
• Having an article on "the Oscar curse" is at least defensible -- bollocks, but widely discussed bollocks -- but this spin on that had to be scraped together from a few garbage sources. --Calton | Talk 05:46, 19 June 2021 (UTC)
• Comment I'm not interested in celebrity gossip journalism, but it definitely exists. While the sources used would be absurd for an article on most subjects, for an article on pop culture, these may be usable. Still, it would be nice to find some secondary sources which analyze the "curse" claim at a register that was a bit higher than supermarket tabloid. We have one source which kinda does that, but I'm not seeing many others. Signal to noise is a problem as most sources which talk about this are exactly at the supermarket tabloid level. jps (talk) 12:09, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

:As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia should aspire to having more than "supermarket tabloid trash", especially "ginned-up supermarket tabloid trash scraped up from bad sources". --Calton | Talk 05:46, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

::Yeah. But it looks like this particular round of tabloid trash has been noticed by a few sources that are elevated about that level. YMMV. We have an article on Bat Boy (character) too. :/jps (talk) 21:23, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

• Comment: I've heard of the best actress curse, but what I've heard is that after they win it their career will tank. This is the first I've heard of this. I'm going to try to improve this, but since there are apparently different versions of the "curse" (if I can show coverage for the version I've heard) it would be better to have a more generic title to cover various different ones. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 12:38, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

:*[https://www.google.com/books/edition/Intuitive_Biostatistics/ZLDWAgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22Oscar+curse%22&pg=PA497&printsec=frontcover Here] is mention of the version I've heard of, in a book published through Oxford University Press. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 12:42, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

::*For what it's worth, the [https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/orsc.2014.0951 cited scholarly article] commented on this issue: "Our results provide no evidence of negative professional consequences for male or female actors: Oscar winners appear, on average, in more films than Oscar nominees, who, in turn, appear in more films than nonnominees. The professional Oscar curse is, in other words, only a Hollywood myth." --Metropolitan90 (talk) 14:46, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

::*Here is an article in Vogue that could potentially argue that the Oscar curse is more noteworthy than the Oscar love curse. [https://www.vogue.com/article/oscars-2016-oscar-curse-women-hollywood]. jps (talk) 15:07, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

::*This source is a bit more high-minded than a few of the others that were used: [https://www.livemint.com/Consumer/GufQjpKZri9cfjtMWEIjIJ/Oscar-curse-is-a-myth-study.html]. jps (talk) 15:08, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

::*Count me in with those who have only ever heard of the "Oscar curse" as the belief that winning one is bad for the winner's career. XOR'easter (talk) 17:18, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

• Weak DeleteKeep. I am not sure "being utter bollcoks" is a valid delete reason, and with some better sourcing and a rewrite this would be a keep.Slatersteven (talk) 15:53, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
• The recent changies make me change to keep, it may be bollocks but it seems to be notable bollocks.Slatersteven (talk) 18:40, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
• The people above saying "WTF is an Oscar LOVE curse?" seem to argue against that.

:::*Maybe, I disagree.Slatersteven (talk) 10:04, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

• Comment I did a quick cleanup job. Some of the problems raised above might be resolved now, at least. XOR'easter (talk) 17:40, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
• Keep recent changes make this something that pass GNG and it is no longer a list of breakups. Donaldd23 (talk) 21:55, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
• Delete: per nom. I don't see any reason why this Oscar's trivial "superstition" should have a stand alone article. It could be added as a chapter to Academy Award for Best Actress at best...but even then. Kolma8 (talk) 09:39, 19 June 2021 (UTC)
• Keep or merge to some other Academy-Award-related page (not necessarily Best Actress, since the concept has been invoked more broadly). I'm not sure there's enough for a stand-alone page, but enough has been written that we can write about it. XOR'easter (talk) 19:02, 19 June 2021 (UTC)
• Keep or merge to something like Theatrical superstitions or redirect to Oscar curse. The content probably belongs somewhere. I'm guessing there may be enough for there to be a standalone article. jps (talk) 03:45, 21 June 2021 (UTC)
• Delete Does not look notable given the sources. Maybe a redirect, but if this is relevant to be included in an encyclopedia at all, it should be no more than a brief mention. – wallyfromdilbert (talk) 21:29, 23 June 2021 (UTC)
• Keep As utter bullocks that passes GNG. Jackattack1597 (talk) 11:47, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

• Keep: Well this is some hokey malarkey, but the article in it's current form seems to pass WP:GNG as it has several secondary sources, one being Vogue magazine. It might be nonsense, but it seems to be (sadly) relevant nonsense. I also agree that if it's not kept, then the content merged in with other hollywood article(s). --Tautomers_{(T C)}
• Keep Significant coverage in multiple reliable sources. Mlb96 (talk) 04:32, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

• Merge The concept itself, regardless of the fluff, has some RS backing it as of the time of this post. Nonsense does not always warrant deletion. We have articles on crazy conspiracy theories because people believe them, they influence the real world a bit, and reliable sources report on them. That being said, we do not create loads of articles on individual small conspiracy theories, but we may merge them into other articles, even if the merged passage is only one sentence long (e.g. "Another common superstition holds that a female winner's romantic partner will be unfaithful."). Theatrical superstitions is the natural article to merge with. Wikinights (talk) 09:13, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

{{clear}}

:The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.