SINGAPORE - Actress and star of stripper movie Hustlers, Jennifer Lopez, admitted she was disappointed when the Academy Awards left her out of the nominations list this year.
"I was sad, I was a little sad because there was a lot of build up to it," she told media mogul Oprah Winfrey at the Los Angeles stop of the latter's 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus tour on Saturday (Feb 29).
Lopez told Winfrey: "I got so many good notices - more than ever in my career - and there was a lot of, like, 'She's going to get nominated for an Oscar. It's going to happen. If she doesn't, you're crazy.'"
"And I'm reading all the articles, and I'm like, 'Oh my God, could this happen?' And then it didn't, and I was like, 'Ouch.' It was a little bit of a letdown."
Lopez, 50, had won critical acclaim from critics and audiences for her performance as the scheming veteran stripper Ramona in Hustlers. While she did not win ultimately, she had nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress, as well as the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role.
Overall, she has had mixed success in films, following her breakthrough role as Latin recording artist Selena in the 1997 film of the same name, which earned her a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actress - Motion Picture Comedy or Musical. Besides hits like Out Of Sight (1998) and The Wedding Planner (2001), her major flops included the widely-panned Gigli (2003) and Jersey Girl (2004).
Lopez was not the only favourite snubbed at this year's Academy Awards - 36-year-old Little Women director Greta Gerwig was shut out of an all-male Best Director category, while Lulu Wang's drama about her grandmother's cancer diagnosis The Farewell did not garner a single nomination.
Lopez said she felt like she let her team down. "Most of my team has been with me for years, 20, 25 years - and I think they had a lot of hopes on that and they wanted it too, so I felt like I let everyone down a little bit," she said.
"But you didn't!", said Winfrey, 66, mirroring the sentiment of the crowd at the talk.
Still, the multi-hyphenate actress, singer and dancer was also quick to re-frame the snub and focus on the positives, given the career highlights she has had in the past year - including having the biggest opening of a movie in her career with Hustlers, walking the runway in Milan for Italian fashion house Versace in September last year, and headlining the Super Bowl with Colombian pop star Shakira in February.
She added: "You realise you want people's validation, you want people to say you did a good job...and I just realised, no you don't need that. You do this because you love it."
