Opinion | The greatest delight this 2023 Oscar season? Jamie Lee Curtis’s Best Supporting Actress nod — just don’t call her nepo baby

From Activia to Oscar!

Showing a sturdy self-deprecation, and the matter-of-fact-ness that she is known for, Jamie Lee Curtis responded to her Academy Award nomination last month by telling the Associated Press: “I’m 64 years old. I’ve been an actor since I was 19. I made horror films and sold yogurt that makes you s–. I never thought I would hear my name …”

And yet … here we are. Possibly the greatest delight of a long awards season coming to a close this weekend, Curtis — famous from conception because of her megastar parents — has been working the circuit like few others. “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” indeed. Saucy and sardonic and solicitous and hearkening back to the golden age of cinema via her very presence, all things considered.

Her Best Supporting Actress nom — which has prognosticators envisioning a victory — itself tells the story, after all: she is in the same category that her mother, Janet Leigh, competed in, 52 wild years ago.

1961. The first year that ABC broadcast the Oscars, as it happens, and when the idea of a televised “red carpet” (now a rite of passage) was born, and when Leigh arrived at the ceremony on the arm of her husband, matinee idol Tony Curtis, in a truly beautiful, lavender gown made by legendary costume designer Edith Head. Oscar history! Sigh.

Leigh was being recognized for her turn as Marion Crane in the infamous Alfred Hitchcock thriller “Psycho,” but, no, she did not win, losing to Shirley Jones for her part in the film “Elmer Gantry.” But, while the latter is lost in the mists of time, Leigh became part of movie history — that shower scene in “Psycho” is iconography itself, part of a visual language understood through the decades.

In the hands of someone else, this dynastic back story might have been inconvenient, clumsily handled — in this, a year, when the term “nepo baby” has become a trope — but it is a testament to how charming Jamie Lee is that she has actually made this work for her on the campaign trail.

Take a straight-shooter élan, combine that with an authenticity that registers high on the Richter scale — moving through life sans hair dye, Botox, plastic surgery or any of the guard rails of female celebrityhood — plus a nod to nostalgia (one that still works with older academy voters), and it has been something to behold. A very effective campaign, given that all Oscar campaigns (like political campaigns) are as much about the candidate as they are about the “story” they are telling.

“I am the old mule, I’m the donkey,” is how she put it an interview with Vanity Fair’s “Little Gold Men” podcast, for example. Going on to describe how she feels about her nomination, the star of the “Halloween” franchise (a role she has played on and off since 1978!) and other such films as “True Lies” and “A Fish Called Wanda,” said that it was “like discovering a secret room in the house you have lived in for a long time … that you never knew was there or, if you did, you had papered over or plastered over, and just forgotten about it.”

As much as she had gamely taken on the role of ambassador for her movie and promoting its leading lady, Michelle Yeoh — “Everything Everywhere All At Once” is the most nominated project this year — her own strategy leading up to the Oscar noms had seemingly been to shield herself. “I chose not to read lists … I did not want to know.”

“I have tried hard not get my heart heartbroken by the industry. And I have felt like an outsider. And I have done outsider work … in genres (horror and comedy) not recognized by the more mainstream show-off industry accolades.”

Asked by the interviewer, journalist David Canfield, what it feels like now being in that “secret room” she described earlier, she pointed to her parents.

“It felt like they knew that that would happen, even if I did not. I have followed in my parents’ footsteps. In my mother’s case, literally followed. And yet their fame and success was always so big — their stardom at the time, so ginormous — I never thought I would reach that level. It was not even possible.”

At this point, you could literally hear her tearing up on the podcast and it was hard not to be moved.

All part of an emotion she has repeatedly tapped into, most recently at the SAG Awards the other week, where in accepting an award she deftly acknowledged her privilege, but then turned it on its head when she double-downed from the stage: “I’m wearing the wedding ring that my father gave my mother. My father was from Hungary and my mother was from Denmark, and they had nothing. And they became these monstrous stars in this industry they love so much. I know you look at me and think nepo baby, and I totally get it! But the truth of the matter is I’m 64 years old and this is just amazing!”

While on the hustings in recent months, Curtis has also sweetly talked about her long-time husband, legendary humorist Christopher Guest, whose films include the Oscar competition satire “For Your Consideration.” All very meta-meta now — and probably catnip, too, to academy voters.

Also, part of her message: her sobriety. She has been in recovery for 24 years, she says, and she has repeatedly brought up a phrase that she clings to that she learned from that journey. “Be where your feet are.”

Handy advice in sobriety and in life. Not to mention, during awards season.

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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