At one point during awards season, Jessica Chastain and Jennifer Lawrence were running neck and neck for Best Actress. It was being described as a two horse race, with Chastain winning the critics awards and Lawrence winning the public’s awards. When they both won one award each at the Golden Globe, voters were getting ready to face a tough decision between the two.
Jessica Chastain for a magazine shoot
However, just as quickly as it came, the buzz for Chastain disappeared – and instead, the buzz for Lawrence increased. So what happened? Oscar politics, scheming, the power of Harvey Weinstein, or all of the above. One interesting item to take away is that Vanity Fair ended up publishing an article on Chastain that wasn’t the most favorable – while the writer didn’t say anything bad about her, he did call her a blank canvas and an actress that wasn’t made out to be a movie star. Then, just as soon as this article was uploaded, it was taken down.
While Chastain’s team [her publicist, agent, and Sony, the distributor behind Zero Dark Thirty], denied having to do anything with the take-down, Vanity Fair admitted to removing the article, saying, “We took it down because it ran counter to what a number of people at the magazine believed.”
Jessica Chastain at the Cannes Film Festival
In the end, the public consensus seems to be that studio execs and publicists were involved, but that the piece was also not a reflection of popular opinion at the time. Most people in Hollywood love Jessica Chastain and believe that she will be in the industry for a very long time, and it seems as though this opinion piece ran counterintuitive to those beliefs.
Jessica Chastain winning a Golden Globe for Best Actress
