Jennifer Lopez was outstanding in Hustlers, so much so that a lot of critics thought she might even take home an Oscar for her delightful portrayal of Robin Hood-esque stripper Ramona. In fact, Lopez wasn’t even nominated, which was far more a failing on the part of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences than a critique of Lopez’s performance. Still, Lopez thinks she let everyone down! J. Lo, no!
She told Oprah re: getting snubbed, according to People:
“I was a little sad because there was a lot of buildup to it,” the superstar, 50, told Oprah Winfrey at the media mogul’s 2020 Vision: Your Life In Focus Tour on Saturday.
“I got so many good notices – more than ever in my career,” she said. “And I’m reading all the articles and I’m going, ‘Oh my God, could this happen?’ And then it didn’t and it was like, ‘Ouch.’ It was a bit of a letdown.”
She added:
“Most of my team has been with me for years,” she said. “I think they had a lot of hopes on that. They wanted it too, and I felt like I let everybody down a little bit.”
Hustlers was a great film, and Lopez, who is a pretty good actor despite making some questionable choices, was great in it. Indeed, she was even nominated for a Golden Globe, even though she lost to Laura Dern in Marriage Story (Dern also took home the Oscar), so it would make sense that she’d get an Oscar nod, too.
And yet, the Academy has trouble taking certain films seriously, i.e., ones written and/or directed by women, as was the case with Hustlers, and/or films that suggest women lead as complicated and nuanced inner and outer lives as men. On the outside, Hustlers is a heist movie about strippers, even though Hustlers is, in many ways, as much a censure on class divide as Oscar winner Parasite. Parasite deserved the Oscar, of course, but Lopez also deserved a nomination. She didn’t let anybody down, but as per usual, the Academy did.