Jamie Lee Curtis is Hollywood royalty. She is not only the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, but she has been in films since her feature debut in John Carpenter’s Halloween, which was released in 1978. Seeing as she has been serving up stellar performances for the last four decades, surely she has been nominated for some prestigious awards. How many Academy Awards has she managed to actually take home?
Jaime Lee Curtis was awarded her only Oscar during the 95th Academy Awards, taking home the statuette for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Deirdre Beaubeirdre in Everything Everywhere All at Once.
It is astonishing that she has only been nominated and won once in what is nearly half a century of great work. Just because she was not recognized by the Academy does not mean that she did not see recognition for her work in other areas. Curtis has been nominated for Golden Globes, BAFTA Awards, and an Emmy. In fact, she won a BAFTA for 1983’s Trading Places, the John Landis comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. She also managed to take home Golden Globes for her roles in both Anything But Love and True Lies.
Why hasn’t she been awarded Oscars before now? It might be because for most of her career, Curtis has been doing genre projects, from Halloween to Scream Queens, and from Trading Places to Freaky Friday. The Academy tends to overlook genre films, especially horror movies, so that’s undoubtedly why she doesn’t have a longer list of nominations.
This year, a genre movie received all the love at the Academy Awards, and she won for the sci-fi film, Everything Everywhere All at Once. She was not the only cast member to walk away with an Oscar as her co-star, Ke Huy Quan, also managed to win Best Supporting Actor while the film managed to garner a total of 11 nominations, the highest for any of the nominated films in 2023.