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There are plenty of successful actors in Hollywood who started out as stand-up comedians. And there are plenty of middling actors who have been unjustly awarded the Oscar. But there are only two middling yet successful actors who started as stand-up comedians and have been unjustly awarded the Oscar: Robin Williams and Whoopi Goldberg.
The descent of Robin Williams into the swamp of sentimental mediocrity has been extensively catalogued; start a conversation with any of the four people who saw Jakob the Liar and they'll be happy to tell you how much, and in what ways, Robin Williams sucks ass. Certainly, Robin Williams's failures have been a lot more spectacular -- What Dreams May Come, anyone? -- but it is just such spectacular failures that guarantee Williams's continued existence in the public consciousness, for...worse. What Fametracker wants to know is how Whoopi Goldberg keeps getting work.
Fametracker agrees that Goldberg did a fine job in The Color Purple, which is generally identified as her first film, and for which she was nominated for an Oscar. In fact, a trip to the IMDb reveals that Goldberg's actual first film was actually something called Doctor Duck's Super Secret All-Purpose Sauce. Which film is more representative of Goldberg's career given that what followed includes not one but two iterations of Sister Act? House Party 2? Eddie? Loaded Weapon I? Theodore Rex? Made in America? Soapdish?
Granted, Goldberg has tumbled ass-backwards into several respectable films, such as Sarahfina! and The Long Walk Home. Unfortunately, she's apparently under the misapprehension that landing one good role means that she should play it as many times as possible. Worse yet, the Hollywood powers-that-be seem all to happy to oblige her. Goldberg has played a housekeeper or maids three times, a police officer three times, a nurse twice. Goldberg even appeared in the same movie twice: once when it was called Boys on the Side, and again the next year when it was called Moonlight and Valentino.
Some Oscar winners elect to stock their CVs with critically lauded roles that showcase the talents rewarded by the Academy. Whoopi Goldberg decided to go another way. She has appeared in TV movie events from Cinderella to the recent Leprechauns. She's lent her voice to seven projects ranging in quality from The Lion King to Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Most damning of all, in no fewer than thirteen of the sixty-five items on her CV, she is credited as...Herself. Do the math. No matter how you figure, it all adds up to "Personality."
Instead of fighting this assessment, Goldberg embraced it and brought the game show Hollywood Squares back to TV, making herself centre square, and since that time has stuck strictly to Personality roles. The IMDb lists an upcoming role slated for 2000: in a movie called Monkeybones, Goldberg will play Death. Fametracker hopes that this role will indeed mark the death, finally, of her film career. Surely it's someone else's turn to play a cop, nurse, or 50s-era domestic, and surely to God we've had enough of nuns leading Jennifer Love Hewitt in song. Like Hewitt, Whoopi Goldberg is amply contained on the small screen, and that is where both of them should remain.
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