Perhaps the biggest shock of Sunday night’s Academy Awards was Mikey Madison’s Best Actress win for Anora, beating out Demi Moore, whom many expected to take home the award for her performance in The Substance.
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At 25, Mikey has cemented her spot in the history books as one of the youngest Best Actress winners ever. But, despite her age, Mikey is not the first person born in the 1990s to win the Oscar for Best Actress. In fact, that title was claimed by none other than Jennifer Lawrence more than a decade ago.
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If you need a reminder, Jennifer scored her first Oscar nomination for Winter’s Bone in 2011, and two years later, at 22 years old, she won Best Actress for her performance in Silver Linings Playbook, memorably tripping up the stairs on her way to collect the award. Off the back of the first Hunger Games movie in 2012, J.Law was already a global superstar — and her Oscar win took her career to a different stratosphere as she navigated her 20s in the public eye.
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Between 2013 and 2018, Jennifer released 11 films, starring in the majority. With the blockbusters came major press tours, and with the press tours came intense scrutiny. And before long, she was so popular and visible that audiences began to turn on her — her once-beloved bubbly personality had become “too much” for people to bear. As a result, J.Law stepped back from the public eye around 2019 and, since then, has only starred in three films.
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Fast-forward to today, and Mikey joins Jennifer as the only two people born in the ‘90s to have won Best Actress. Now, a viral X post about this wild statistic has prompted people to reexamine just how young Jennifer was when she was dominating Hollywood throughout the 2010s.
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“Crazy how big Jennifer was running laps around everybody… And still is,” read one post with nearly 100,000 likes. “She was too young to be mothering and yet there she was.” Someone else replied: “it was really so crazy. by 25, jen had 4 oscar noms and 1 best actress win under her belt.”
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Notably, others said that Jennifer actually doesn’t get “enough credit” for the work she was doing and all the scrutiny she was facing at such a young age. “Can’t wait to watch a documentary about Jennifer Lawrence in a couple of decades bc she had the most insane start to her career,” someone else remarked, calling her a “ridiculously talented woman.”
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“jennifer lawrence winning best actress at 22 and then going mega viral at the awards during the peak of the hunger games hype … yeah we’ll never see an era like that again,” another person hypothesized. “one of complete cultural domination. the world was hers.”
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As someone currently navigating the midst of their 20s, it blows my mind that Jennifer was younger than me at the peak of her fame in the 2010s. As far as we know, she’s currently pregnant with her second child with her husband, Cooke Maroney, and it sounds like she’s got a lot of exciting projects in the works — including a new film with Robert Pattinson out later this year.
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Truly one of the greatest to ever do it!
